THOUGHTS
                                by Duane Bristow

                                     CHANGE

        The young believe that the universe is constant and permanent.  
        With age comes the wisdom to realize that the only thing which 
        is unchanging is the fact of change itself.  This is mostly a 
        matter of the perspective imparted by the passage of time.  To a 
        ten year old one year is one tenth of his life and is a long 
        time.  To a seventy year old one year is one seventyth of his 
        life and is only 1/7 as long as the same year is to the ten year 
        old.  The older person has seen more change in the world, in 
        what appears to him a shorter time, than the young person can 
        conceive.  A knowledge of history is very important for all to 
        be aware of this effect. 

        The capacity of mankind to destroy himself and his environment 
        increases exponentially each year.  Although there are 
        intelligent and wise people in every society, the majority seem 
        to be shortsighted, greedy, and unintelligent.  For this reason 
        it seems inevitable that population and environmental 
        destruction will increase.  This will cause a decrease in goods 
        available and consequently in people's standard of living.  The 
        unequal distribution of wealth then causes envy, hate, racial 
        animosity, strife, war, etc.  People seem unable to be happy and 
        kind to each other under these conditions. 

        It is a fallacy to use the word, "destroy", as I did in the 
        above paragraph.  We are all ethnocentric enough to believe that 
        the best of all possible worlds is the one with which we are 
        familiar, if only a few small changes could be made.  We are all 
        egocentric enough to believe that we know exactly what small 
        changes are needed.  We also believe that a major change in the 
        world to one which is unfamiliar to us is the definition of 
        destruction of the world.  

        It is important to realize that a major change such as 
        destruction of the rain forests and the resulting major climatic 
        and cultural changes would not be a physical destruction of the 
        earth but only a destruction of the earth and culture as we now 
        know it.  In predicting the future many scenarios are possible, 
        all different from the world we now know.  We tend to feel that 
        different is worse.  However, from the perspective of our 
        grandchildren, theirs will be the familiar world and ours will be 
        the strange one.  Although they might envy us certain aspects of 
        our world, they probably would not be comfortable in it as a 
        whole.  Would we actually want to live in ancient Egypt or in 
        the Old West.  Would Wyatt Earp or King Tut be comfortable in 
        our world?  Would they not feel that their world had been 
        destroyed? 

        It must be realized that the world we now know will not exist in 
        the future.  There will be a different world, maybe better, 
        probably worse, certainly better in some respects and worse in 
        others.  That world will be created by the collective decisions 
        we make, just as our world was created by the actions of our 
        forefathers. 

        What if, in the worst case scenario, we manage to destroy 
        mankind and make homo sapiens an extinct species?  Then envision 
        the earth as either barren and uninhabited, or inhabited by 
        other species familiar to us now, or inhabited by strange mutant 
        species.  From our standpoint this is a bad ending.  However, in 
        the vast stretches of the cosmos, our species and our Earth were 
        insignificant from the beginning, only a blip in the universe.  
        Anyway, what did we expect?  Does any species last forever?  
        Even if it does not become extinct each species will eventually 
        evolve into another species and thereby cease to exist.  We know 
        it will happen.  We just don't want it to happen soon.  They say 
        all Christians want to go to heaven someday, but none want to go 
        now.

        It must also be realized that the fact that we and the world we 
        now know will not exist in the future does not in any way negate 
        the fact that we now exist and that our very existence has made 
        a blip, however small, in the very fabric of the universe.  Even 
        though the, so called, forces of evil may win in the end it is 
        important that a time exists in which we won.  Camelot is gone, 
        but it still exists in spirit in the fabric of the universe and 
        there it can never be erased. 

        There are two points to the above discussion.  The first is that 
        we should try to accept events by keeping them in perspective.  
        The second is that we should realize that to a large extent the 
        future is determined by the actions we take now and it is 
        important for each of us and particularly our leaders to make 
        decisions with that fact in mind.