Our Evolutionary Past

What Matters Most….......Commentary by Jim High

When we think about our evolutionary past we must remember three things. First, the past in this instance is millions and billions of years.  The universe is 13.8 billion years old.  At least scientist figure that is its age based on observations of the motion of the galaxies and the age of individual stars within those galaxies.  But, none of that really matters to us here on planet Earth since our solar system didn’t form until about 4 billion years ago.  Very shortly after that our planet had single cell life in its oceans.  So life has been around in some form almost from the start after our planet cooled a bit, and that early life started out in the oceans.  I think that is why sitting quietly on the beach and looking at the ocean feels just like going home.

Of course, those early oceans were not as they are today, in fact even the continents were not where they are today, as they are constantly in motion on the surface of Earth, and they still are.  The Himalaya Mountains and Mount Everest, the tallest in the world, were formed as the Indian sub-continent continues to push into Asia.  And in the limestone bluffs right here in Lee County we find fossils of ocean life because this area was once the bottom of the sea.

The second thing we must remember is that evolution is a process that is still going on. It goes on all the time and has from the very beginning.  For example, evolution shows us that humans are not just kin to the great apes of Africa, but also to the cabbages in your garden.  All life on planet Earth is connected in the long string of evolutionary development.  The process is not visible to us because it takes so much time to happen.  The human animal is some 4 to 6 million years old and we continue to evolve.   We are certainly nothing like humans were a million years ago.  I do wonder what humans will evolve into in another million years.  We are sure to be a better more advanced form of us.  So over time our bodies will learn to not have cancer.  Again the phrase over time is maybe tens of thousands of years.

But it is the third thing about our evolutionary past that is most important.  For while we must always understand that we in one short lifetime can never see evolution happen, we can see cultural evolution happen, and that is what affects us most as individuals after all. And it is this cultural evolution that we do have some control over. 

I asked a discussion group one time what humans would look like in 1,000 years.  They didn’t even know what I was asking until I added, what would be the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes; would we have more or less hair, to say nothing of our body size.  Maybe being obese will be the normal thing in 1,000 years, maybe in only 100 years the way things are going.  Then I reminded them that our current president was half black and half white.  Then they understood what I was asking.  It is this cultural evolution over which we have some control and that we can see happening.  When I was a child I couldn’t go to the movies or play card games on Sunday.  And I remember the big fight in Tupelo over the Sunday Blue Laws that kept businesses closed on Sundays.  Cultural evolution changed all that and a lot of other things.  Right now we see a change happening very fast in the definition of marriage, just as cultural evolution changed inter-racial marriage, and even marriage between different religions.

So What Matters Most……..What is the purpose of our individual lives, as opposed to life in general?  We are meant to enjoy life.  Every minute, every day, all of life is meant to be enjoyed. We forget that sometimes, but it is the most important thing about our individual lives.  Because of our evolutionary past we are all members of the one great body of life.  And this means that within us all is mutual love for each other, which is the best enjoyment of all.

© 2013 #7  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467

 

 

Guns

What Matters Most…………Commentary by Jim High

The 2^nd amendment has been around for a long time, so what’s different today? As a kid I went to movies full of killing and violence. What’s different today that makes folks go out and shoot people in mass killings, to say nothing of the 10,000+ handgun killings each year.

Well for one thing when I went to the double feature every Saturday afternoon and saw cowboys riding around killing cattle rustlers, I came out of the theatre back into 1940’s and 50’s Tupelo where no one rode horses or wore a six shooter on their hip. Today when you go to the movies and see terrible violence, you come out back into real life that looks just like the movie.

Another huge difference is television. We see murder and killing and craziness every night on TV no matter where it might occur in the whole country. Seriously watch the local TV news every night; it’s like the nightly crime report. I get so tired of watching people walking between court and jail. Do we really need to know about every idiot who got into a shoot out with some drug dealer? Why is that news? Maybe I should ask why are other people interested, because I’m certainly not.

We having a huge gun debate in this country right now based on the mass shootings of the past year. Most of the debate centers around the 2^ndamendment adopted on December 15, 1791. So what does it actually say? “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That’s it. Seems simple, but we have made it something very complicated. For example what does “well regulated”mean? What is the intended use of the word “militia”? And what is the definition of “arms”?

1791 was a long time ago. Today we don’t have a need for a public militia, and the definition of arms is not the single shot pistols and muskets of those long ago days. Today we have a National Guard in every state and a federal standing army, plus a navy, air force, marines and the coast guard. But regardless of the obvious extreme difference in 1791 and 2013, the 2^ndamendment has come to mean that as a citizen each of us has a right to own a gun, or guns. But what kind and how many?

Certain types of arms are outlawed already and for good reason. I just used a word that no one seems to want to talk about – Reason. Is it reasonable for a private citizen to own a gun developed for the military that can shoot 30, 50, 100 bullets before reloading? Is it reasonable for a private citizen to own 10, 20, 50 guns of all types? I wonder if people in 1791 thought the 2^nd amendment gave them the right to own a cannon.

Another huge problem seems to be the fear of gun registration. Who fears automobile registration? Or is scared and thinks it wrong for the government to require registration of their boat? Then there is the issue of background checks. But the sale of guns at gun shows and over the Internet and between private individuals requires nothing now but the cash. Who thinks this is reasonable? If you are sane, law abiding and not planning to kill anyone, you should not worry about any background checks or even anyone, including the government, knowing that you own a gun and what kind it is. I own two hand guns myself. I keep one in my apartment and one at my home at Pickwick Lake.

What Matters Most………..is that we have a serious gun problem in this country. Admitting that must be a first step in getting to a solution. And we must get to a solution. How many more mass shootings will it take to wake us up to reasonable changes? The next mass shooting could be anywhere, even here in Lee County. Do you want that? I don’t, not for here, not for anywhere. And I must add that the NRA’s solution to our nation’s gun problem being just more guns is total lunacy.

© 2013 #8 Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467

 

Truth, Facts and Faith

What Matters Most………Commentary by Jim High

My topic came to me as I read the thousands of posts on Facebook these days.  I find the time I spend on Facebook interesting, if not instructional.  But if you approach Facebook for what it is, the world’s largest conversation, then you can’t help but join in with your opinion on what is being said.  But here’s the rub, whose opinions are valid, whose are true, what is the truth and what are the actual facts of the matter being commented on.

You see in our present time we seem to have lost the ability to tell the difference between opinion, truth, facts, belief and faith.  In the old days long before television and 24-hour news channels and ownership of media outlets by big corporations, we got all our news mostly from the local newspaper.  I remember my Grandfather listening to the news on the radio in the evenings.   But it was mainly in the newspapers where people got their news.  We got three of them delivered to our house back then, Tupelo’s Daily Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Memphis’s afternoon newspaper the Press-Scimitar.  If you wanted to “see” the news, the movie theater had the Movietone Newsreels along with cartoons before the movie.  Today some of our TV News appears like a cartoon, so confused have truth and facts become.

I’ve heard people say, “Well it’s true for me” or “My truth.”  There is no such thing as your truth.  If something is true it is true for everyone and in every case.  Truth is defined as the true or actual state of the matter or of existence, that which conforms with fact or reality, and a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, or principal.  A fact is defined as something that actually exists, something known to exist or to have happened, a truth known by actual experience or observation.  So while there is great overlap between the words truth and facts, neither word is subject to your private interpretation.  Both truth and facts are the same for everyone, even those on the opposite sides of a disagreement.  Opinions are not truth and neither are opinions factual, no matter how loud or often you say them.

How did we come to think otherwise?  Well when big corporations own a lot of newspapers all over the country the news becomes the same everywhere and very quickly it can become what the big corporation wants it to be.  It is even worse for television news.  We now have whole channels for conservative news and liberal news.  And they are not “Fair and Balance” no matter how many times they say it.

Then we have the situation where news today seems to always be presented as an argument between two opinions, not the facts or truth of the matter being reported.  Add in the Internet and Facebook, organizations pushing their agendas with advertising, and it can get difficult to know what the truth of the matter is and what the facts actually are.  Most people these days seem willing to just give up and go with the report that fits their opinion, but please remember that no one’s opinion is truth or a fact, unless it is supported by verifiable truth and actual facts.

Two quotes I saw recently are worth commenting on at this point.  In all the coverage about the new Pope, I heard a church official in Rome talking about the “truth of faith.”  What on earth did he mean?  There is no truth of faith.  Faith means you believe something without any truth or facts.

And the other quote was, “Doing the right thing is easy – knowing the right thing to do is difficult.”  But, if you always seek the truth and get the facts, you will know the right thing to do.

What Matters Most…….This quote from theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Karuss says it best.  “If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge.  A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not visa versa, whether or not we like the implications.”  

© 2013 #6  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467

 

 

Progress

What Matters Most…..…Commentary by Jim High

Today I want to talk about progress because this past week I was a recipient of a lot of  it in a big way.  Sunday, September 9, I started experiencing mild chest pains, not unlike I had experience several times before, pains that always went away.  Sunday afternoon and evening they didn’t. 

But first let me get back to my topic.  Any study of history is really a study of the progress of mankind.  I don’t think you can find in any sweep of history a time when the world and humanity have not experienced progress and find themselves always better off in the future than they were in the past, maybe not in every specific individual case, but certainly in general over the whole of society.

My family’s history with death proves this point.  Until I was eight years my Great Grandmother and both my Grandfather and Grandmother lived with us on Jefferson Street.   My Great Grandmother died at home, I don’t remember her being sick, at near 100 it was A-G-E, as my Mother use to say.  Her funeral by the way was in the living room of our home, with my brother, sister and I bustled off to someone one else’s house for the day.  That was in 1948.

Two years later my Grandfather contracted pneumonia, was taken to the hospital where he died rather quickly at age 70.  There were no miracle drugs to kill that infection and bacteria in 1950.  Again his funeral was in the family living room with us kids shuffled off to someone else’s home for the day.

Only 13 years later my Dad died of cancer in 1963, at age 53, after a year-long battle with this dread disease.  During his illness, which involved only radiation treatment because no other cancer treatment had been discovered, he had to be moved from the hospital to Dr. Stacy’s office downtown to get this cutting edge medical treatment.  The hospital didn’t have it.  He was bedridden for the whole year of his illness, so we set up the dining room at home as his hospital room.  We even widened a door and built a ramp so we could roll his hospital bed out into his greenhouse in the backyard to see his orchid collection.  When he died, I was 22 and in charge of his funeral, which I decided to hold in Pegues’ new Funeral Chapel.  It was a much better experience I’m sure than the old living room funerals of the past.  I considered it progress.

My Grandmother died peacefully at home in her room at 96, again of A-G-E.  Fast forward to my Mother’s death from a massive heart attack and stroke at age 85 in her bedroom on Jefferson Street, the ambulance came and took her to the hospital where 24 hours later she died peacefully.  That 24 hours cost just over $8,000 in the year 2,000.  My Dad’s year long illness had cost only about $7,000.  Is this progress?  I’m not sure. Maybe we shouldn’t measure death in dollars.  Only one certainty exists in life, however, and it’s that we all die.

Back to last Sunday.  Yes, I was having a heart attack and by 1:15 a.m. I decided to drive myself to the hospital to see about those chest pains.  About eight ER folks worked franticly to get my 214/130 blood pressure down, and do all the other stuff to stabilize me, including the EKG which confirmed the heart attack.  Then it was up to the Cath Lab so the heart specialist could look at my heart.  One 90% blocked artery.  He inserted a little metal stent to open it and hold it open.  And just like that I’m back to normal.  I was in ICU recovering by 3:30 a.m.  Was moved to a private room Monday afternoon and discharged Tuesday afternoon.

What Matters Most………I was told that I could resume my normal activities in 48 hours, which I have.  Now that is true progress, at least in our medical services.  I haven’t gotten the bill for those services yet.  So I’m afraid there’s a lot more progress in that area also.

© 2012 #19  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467

 

 

What Matters Most

 Quotes

We all love quotes because they sum up in a few well chosen words and idea or concept that makes sense.   Sometimes you might even catch yourself saying something, or hear someone else say something that makes you stop and say, “I better write that down.” 

In fact, posting my thoughts on Facebook and elsewhere causes me to say this so much that I do stop and write down those short little phrases and comments that seem to sum up my thoughts.  My list of quotes is growing, maybe if I get famous other people will quoting me.  But until then I’ll just keep reading the quotes of others.

And that’s just what I do every morning.  I always have from eight to ten different books that I read from each morning during the time between 5 a.m. and about 8:30 when I need to begin my work day.  And I always have a book of quotes in the stack.  In fact, right now I have two.

One is the Calendar of Wisdom compiled by Leo Tolstoy.  Each day of the year he has quotes from others and his own thoughts listed.  The day’s quotes usually follow a theme for the day, although he does not announce the theme.  Tolstoy considered this the most important book that he wrote, and he wrote it late in his life. 

I’m reading it through for the third year in a row.  Yes, it’s that good.  I make notes in the margin if I agree with the quote, and sometimes just cross it out if I don’t agree. Some really well known people have had their quotes crossed off by me.  It is interesting to open the book each day and see what I was thinking about the same quote a year ago.

Recently I finished a huge book of quotes called Divine Sparks compiled by Karen Speerstra.  She spent a life time collecting quotes and cataloging them by topic.  Then she selected 500 words that represented the topics and published a book with multiple quotes on each topic from over 1,800 different people.  The book is nearly 600 pages and must have close to 5,000 quotes.  It took me 500 days to read it through the book reading all the quotes for each word.  She subtitled the book, “Collected Wisdom of the Heart” and it is a good course in wisdom.  I’ll probably start reading it again beginning in January of 2013.

My other current quote book is Change Your Life – A Little Book of Big Ideas compiled by Allen Klein.  His big idea quotes are centered on thoughts that follow the letters of the alphabet though he leaves out a few letters.  Speerstra did not however, her first word with quotes was “Abundance” and the last word with quotes was “Zoroastrianism.”

What Matters Most……..why the quotes themselves, of course.  Here is a brief sampling.

“Everything depends on the use to which it is put.”  --Reinhold Niebuhr

“What is moral is what you feel good after; what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”  --Ernest Hemingway

‘The price of anything is the amount of life you pay for it.”  --Henry David Thoreau

“All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  --Leo Tolstoy

“Personally, I have never liked folks who didn't speak plainly.  Communication is meant to be understood, not figured out.”  ---Jim High

© 2012 #16  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467

Fantasies or Reality

What Matters Most…….Commentary by Jim High 

Are you worried about the Mayan Calendar that is supposed to say the end of the world is going to be December 21, 2012?  Do you believe Big Foot lives in the woods of the Northwest?  What about flying saucers?  These are all fantasies. 

Let's take flying saucers as an example. You’ve seen lots of photos claiming to be objects that look like flying saucers. We read lots of reports of sightings in the sky, some even by pilots and others who are not idiots, but intelligent responsible people.  We humans have even done some limited space travel ourselves by going to the moon.  

But, there are three kinds of people when it comes to this fantasy.  First are people who say flying saucers are just not real, period.  Second are the people who are flying saucer nuts and believe it all, so much so that some think they have been abducted and taken somewhere.  And third are those who, like me, think there might be something to it, but we have no proof and the evidence does not point to any type of valid logical reasonable explanation of why other worlds would be flying around just looking at us without contacting us directly.  So for now we just say when the evidence shows they are real, we will agree that they are real. 

Which are you as it relates to flying saucers?  And more importantly, which are you about all those other fantasies that exist out there.  It’s always best to live in reality instead of fantasy.  It’s better to rely on facts and hard evidence, not fantasies or wishful thinking. 

“We know our life as it exists only here, in this world; therefore, if our life is to have any meaning, it should be here in this world.” ---Leo Tolstoy

“Do not wish for death just because your life is hard.  All the burdens on your shoulders will help you fulfill your destiny.  The only way to get rid of your burdens is to live your life in such a way that you fulfill your destiny.” ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is neither suffering nor pleasure, but the business which we have to do, and which we have to finish honestly, up to our life’s end.” ---Alexis De Tocqueville

What Matters Most………………Live in the reality that is before you and don’t let fantasy about anything get in the way of understanding the reality of your life.  Don’t give fantasies a second thought.

© 2012#10  Jim High can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467

Humans, Facebook and the Universe

What Matters Most…………………..Commentary by Jim High

The Internet is the most amazing phenomenon to come on the scene in my life time and Facebook is by far the most interesting result.  Google and Wikipedia are probably the most useful, but Facebook is now approaching one billion users worldwide.  Think about that for just a minute and you realize the power it has to connect people, get the word out about anything that’s going on, and to effect real change in our global society.  Never before in the history of humans have we had something as powerful as Facebook, and it’s only just getting started.

As of this week I have just over 900 friends on Facebook.  Some are what we call “FacebookFriends” - meaning we know them only on Facebook and nowhere else.  I have both friends and “Facebook Friends” in foreign countries, and we communicate and message one another from time to time.  People post all kinds of things on Facebook making it the world’s largest conversation.  Some of those conversations turn into debates, and folks seem to be more likely to say things on Facebook that they wouldn’tsay in a regular face to face conversation.

If you pay attention to the posts from others you can learn a lot.  Recently a “Facebook Friend” who likes to post photos from deep space taken by the Hubble telescope posted a color photo of Centaurus A, a galaxy that’s being wracked from within by a massive Black Hole.  On a galactic scale distances are almost irrelevant with galaxies being from 150,000 to 1 million light years across and so far away that it boggles our human perception.  Centaurus A is only 12 million light years away which is practically next door in our observable universe.

But looking at this photo on Facebook got me to thinking, so I posted this comment.  “And we humans think we know everything?  But scientists tell us that 96% of everything in the entire universe is unknown to us.  We can’t see it, but their math says it must be present although they have no idea what it is.  So we know, can see and measure only 4% of the known universe, the rest of it is called Dark Energy and Dark Matter, dark meaning unknown.  But the really big question is that self-conscious human life has evolved only over the last 3 to 6 million years out of the 4 billion years since the formation of planet earth.  And evolution never stops, so we humans are not the end result that most people think we are.  The question then becomes where is evolution taking us, or will the Life Force of the Universe just cast us aside and move on without us?”

Well as you might imagine that comment got the conversation started.  Some thought that we humans didn’t matter at all.  One  person compared our importance in the grand scheme of things to mushrooms that grow on the forest floor.  Someone said we’re just another dust bunny under the sofa that is the universe.  But some felt that we did matter, if only to our world and to our immediate surroundings, friends and loved ones.

To keep the conversation going, I asked, “Is mankind a distraction or an improvement in the process of evolution?”  And I answered my own question by saying that only we humans have the power to decide if we are a distraction or an improvement.  The real question is what will we decide?  Will we destroy our world with nuclear war, or ruin our environment by using up all its resources, or cause global warming that will make earth uninhabitable in another 500 years,or so?

Ancient man wondered what the lights in the night sky were.  Modern man knows what they are, how big other stars and galaxies are, and how far away, but today we wonder why they are there and what it all means.  And in our short lifetimes that average much less than 100 years, does it matter at all why the universe is out there?  I wonder.

What Matters Most……..is that I only know one thing for sure.  The universe does not seem to care about us here on the third rock from the Sun, but at the same time the Laws of the Universe are such that we all get the same treatment and have the same potential.  What we do with that treatment whether it’s good or bad, and with our potential as humans is entirely up to us.  That’s why our individual lives are so important.

© 2012 #6  JimHigh can be reached at P. O. Box 467, Tupelo, MS 38802-0467