Contemplating Modern Existence (Polemic) by Edwin L. Young, PhD

Every day I think about time in terms of billions of years. I think about the origin and evolution

of the universe(s?). I try to imagine the slow movement of the tectonic plates and how this causes volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis and how continental drifts have shaped life and evolution of species around the globe. I wonder about the millions of bizarre species living deep under the ocean, most of which we have no knowledge, but I also wonder about the gradual destruction of oceanic creatures and the depletion of edible fish. I think about the destruction of the Eco-system and the rapid disappearance of species of plants and animals essential to it. 

I wonder about how paleontologists calculate the age of pre-historic plant and animal life and how they determine the progression of many thousands species as they move up cladistic or phylogenetic branches. I think about the eons of enormous layers or geological strata and how millions of organisms and species are entombed in layer after layer, many of them containing coal, oil, and gas from many millions of years back. I think about the infinitesimal changes in species due to mutations, changes in environments, and microwaves bombarding our planet from outer space. I think about the minute changes in species' DNA and how body parts and sense organs have gradually evolved over eons.

I think about human genders and how evolution primed them to be highly sexual which results in runaway reproduction and the massive and unsustainable explosion of the human population. I think about how the corporatization of populations has driven them into mentally, morally, and health disintegration in crowded urban settings. I think about the structure of our economic system and how it is devouring the earth's natural resources and poisoning 'our' air, earth, and water. I think about the huge multinational corporations and how they struggle to monopolize through mergers, acquisitions, and, thereby, simply driving competitors out of business. 

I think about the giant Agra-business and the patenting of unhealthy, mass-produced GMOs, while driving out the healthy, organic, small farmers. I think about how the Justice Department and the FCC, together, have allowed the sweeping horizontal and vertical consolidation of all forms of media so as to facilitate the multinational corporations that are determined to dominate all national governments.

I think about how many brilliant minds have been trained in universities and enlisted into the marketing, advertising, public relations, and media corporations, and even how the psychology, sociology, and communication departments in universities are virtual handmaidens to the of the corporate world with its profit-above-all dominated corrupted and corrupting conscience. 

I think about how easy it has been for the corporate-world, through their media, to propagandize and therefore control the masses with their large percentage of people with below average intelligence. I think about how the gargantuan media collaborates with the mammoth corporations to promote and use religions to keep undereducated, superstitious under-classes under their control. 

Furthermore, how easy it has been to brainwash the majority of the remaining moderate to high intelligent percentages of the population with corporate-molded educations and to have shaped them into virtual super-intelligent drones, worker bees, or human robots.

    

I think about how all of this has caused the majority of humans to spend their lives running as fast as they can on corporate treadmills so that they can consume products that are slowly becoming lethal to themselves and burdening the monetized health system or to engage in heinous acts of mass destruction of other populations through illegal military interventions or occupying them and exploiting their natural resources or their people as slaves or by imposing wages that only allow for a sub-slave existence.

    

I think about how all of this has been going on, in one form or another, throughout the rise and fall of so many civilizations or nations. I think about how our contemporary American nation's Democracy and its political parties with its inherently polarizing politics, working hand-in-glove with its capitalistic-free-enterprise economic system, actually are creating a culture of deception, manipulation, narcissism, egoism, and ethical bankruptcy. Together, they have been causing the obliteration of what used to be close-knit communities devoted to the common good.

    

I think about what the experts in disciplines like climatologists and futurists are warning about inevitable coming disasters, lest we make vast global cultural, political, and socio-economic changes.

    

I think about how this continuing trend in modern civilizations is like an unstoppable cultural-economic tsunami.