Questions Not Being Asked

In one corner of the meadow, a flower bud, tightly clenched in reclusive posture for the past many weeks, is finally unfurling its beautiful face to the world. And what a beauty it is to behold. It’s a treat not for the sight alone, but all olfactory organs nearby are assailed by its pleasant aroma. And that’s not all it has to offer. Ensconced deep within its being is a package of sweet, energizing nectar. This flower offers the complete triple package for the eyes, the nostrils, and the palate. All this offering is an enticement for all kinds of insects to visit. “I’m available to be pollinated,” the flower says. “And while you’re at it, I will reward you with my triple package.” During the course of this day, before the sun goes to sleep again, this attractive package will have lured all kinds of insect visitors to come by. Butterflies, bees, flies, wasps, moths, and many kinds of flying insects all line up for their turn to visit. Some visits are uneventful, resulting only in the visitor partaking of the triple package and saying goodbye. A free lunch, you might say. But other visits are hugely significant, since the visitors bring the potent present of pollen, mostly from other sources, to pollinate the flower. The result is the formation of a seed. A seed that will mature and later germinate to produce the next generation. A human mind in contemplative solitude is like the flower in the meadow. It sings out, “I’m available to be pollinated.” Many thoughts and ideas flutter around, visit for brief moments, and are again on their way. In that sense, many of the visits are fleeting and unproductive, especially if their essence has not been captured. However, some of the visits are profound enough to be captured, nurtured, and made productive. They grow into the seeds that give rise to other thoughts and imaginings. This book is essentially a chronicle of some of the thoughts that came to my mind over a period of a quarter century, from about 1989 to 2014… …The search for a solution to the civil union debate leads me to make a proposal which I call the Privileges Separation Proposal (PSP for short). I propose that society agrees to de-link the civil privilege from the sexual privilege in all circumstances, including heterosexual marriage. Irrespective of who shares their sexual privilege, each adult would be free and entitled to choose any one adult in the society with whom to share his/her civil privilege. Furthermore, only the civil privilege would attract state recognition/documentation; while the sexual privilege would remain completely private, outside the purview of the state. Let me now elaborate on this proposal… …A measure of how much you value a relationship is how many of your rights and comforts you are willing to “sacrifice” for the good of the relationship. I have a right not to take my child to his beloved soccer practice, not to attend my brother’s wedding, etc. But each assertion of such rights makes a statement of how much or how little I value the relationship. For the good of the relationship and of society, I need to look in the compendium of rights that I have in my bag, and then carefully select which ones should rise to the level of being exercised. At any given time and for various reasons, most of my rights are latent and unexercised. Just resting in the bag. When I decline to exercise certain rights, I do so out of robust respect for the rights of others and the feelings of others. Put differently, we are speaking of 3R’s that go amicably together: Rights, Responsibilities, and Respect. The latter two are there to moderate the exercise of rights… …Very closely related to diversity is the concept of change. Change is akin to biological mutation, the engine that drives evolution forward. Even though most biological mutations are deleterious, nature still indulges in producing myriads of them. The benefits of the few good ones make it all worthwhile. So it is with change. Most changes, especially those not brought on deliberately, may turn out to be harmful. But the resilience of the system lies in its diversity which ultimately enables it to adapt. In biological systems, mutations give rise to diversity which is so critical for evolutionary progress through competitive selection. Similarly, it is change that produces diversity in political and social systems. What mutation is to biological systems, change is to political/social systems. Political/social evolutionary progress depends on competition which depends on diversity which depends on change. Said differently, change produces diversity which permits the competition that will result in evolutionary progress. It is change that sets the entire train in motion. Without it, the train is stuck at the station…. AFFLUENZA Affluenza says to buy and buy And pile purchases to the sky. The way that we plan it Much degrades our planet Doing us grave harm by and by… …What do you call a philosophy that recognizes that all persons have their humanity as the one common and equalizing denominator? I give it the name: Egalitarian Humanism. …For any person, when you remove all the trappings and pretentiousness; remove all the titles and “bestowments”; remove all the riches and adornments; remove all the penury and poverty; remove all the infirmities and inadequacies; what do you have left? The irremovable and inalienable core that you have left is the human being – deserving of a certain quantum of dignity at the minimum, but equally susceptible to foibles. Just as the most exalted person is subject to human frailty, so it is that the lowliest person is deserving of human dignity. … Our humanity is like the midpoint of a pendulum which, though it can swing to either side, will always tend to return to the middle… Remember that before anything else, besides everything, on top of everything, and if nothing else, YOU ARE HUMAN…. …The progressive speciation of mass media is another phenomenon that insidiously promotes the polarization of society. Liberals get all their news and opinion from liberal media; conservatives get all theirs from conservative media; religious people get all their information from religious stations, and so on; with very little overlap in what the various groups watch and hear...The specialized media outlets are fully conscious of the kind of patronage they attract. Many of the outlets deliberately pander to their skewed clientele, providing them with news and opinion that are deliberately slanted in their direction. They create an echo-chamber into which they wall in their clients. With time, the phenomenon keeps feeding on itself and driving the clients to ever increasing narrowness in their views. Eventually, minor slants in what each group watches/hears have the cumulative centrifugal effect of creating major divergences of opinion and world view. The isolated pockets of listeners/viewers invariably drift in different directions in terms of their attitudes, beliefs, and judgments. Just as different species in biology arise due to isolation, so divergent poles of opinion develop due to failure to have enough common ground of shared viewing and listening. As each opinion or world view feeds on itself and hardens, the divergence and polarization of society continue to accelerate. The consequences for communal cohesion and world peace are huge….