#98 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTS
WORLD SHOULD FOLLOW THE FEW THAT CONTINUE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
A
t this point in life, those tender hopefuls have a long way to go yet to obtain the height of achievement.
The alpha parents may have given up on their own achievement prize only to begin grooming their children early on with study bees and random quizzes snuck into ordinary conversations around meals and snacks.
At least the Nobel Prize Committee is transparent – you have to be alive to win but you have to be almost dead as the prize is given out as a kind of lifetime achievement award. United States Senator Dianne Feinstein no longer qualifies, even lying in state at San Francisco City Hall during Nobel Prize week is not enough.
Feinstein had been an outstanding citizen for a democracy, her having dedicated her life to public service since being appointed to a prison oversite committee in 1967. Feinstein moved into the San Francisco’s mayor’s office from 1978 to 1988, during which time she oversaw the rebuild of the famous cable car system.
Eventually Feinstein became the first woman United States Senator from California a position of importance and influence she continued to hold until her death on September 29, 2023, which was not an easy task there being only 2 senators elected form California and only 100 United States Senators elected from all 50 states. Senators are elected for a six year term, but the time is limited by having to stand for election on a 2 year rotation.
Feinstein was not just a public figure. The lady from California represented and set the example for women throughout the nation and all over the world who sought equality in life and freedom from the various gender barriers socially engineered by their male counterparts.
In the case of the Peace Prize, being imprisoned increases eligibility. Politics is not quite imprisonment, so Feinstein was not eligible for yet another reason. Martin Luther King Jr had been taken from his organized street marches and imprisoned several times before winning the prize. Nelson Mandela ran the black revolution from a prison cell for 27 years. Barack Obama was restricted to White House activities for 8 years.
The worst for a prize winner would be to be just alive enough to have been eligible for the prize but too old and too near death to have time to enjoy spending the $1 million Swedish Kronas, although many winners don’t need the money for other reasons, such as accumulated wealth and imprisonment.
This year’s peace prize winner has been confined to an Iranian prison in Tehran several times for encouraging equality and freedom for women. Narges Mohammadi has been one of several women in Iran to have led the fight against gender oppression enforced by the regime’s morality police, having engaged in and perhaps incited the mass street protests that erupted approximately this time last year.
Narges Mohammadi will not have an opportunity to spend her prize money for quite a bit of time, and may even become disqualified from receiving the prize money if she is not able to attend personally in Oslo, anytime soon. Personal receipt of the prize money is just one of those rules.
To be honest, though, other prestigious awards don’t come with prize money, such as the Oscars. So who cares?
This year, as in previous years, a lot of important people continue to never have won the Nobel Prize. The winners of the prize are particularly sparse since only one candidate per category per year wins, and only rarely sometimes there have been clusters of winners per category being awarded, going back to 1901. Narges Mohammadi is the 137th Nobel Peace Laureate.
When the final prize is announced on the following Monday everyone is already in back to school mode for families with children in preschool to college and university students and those ancient stone like professors with brush like eyebrows, and hair that looks like a dead cat, having waited all week during yet another year a bit too long again for that much talked about phone call from Oslo only to discover a robo caller trying to sell real estate.
That first week thereafter can be both fun and a bit traumatizing. The summer is over, and those carefree days are limited to the weekends when a lot needs to get done before Monday and back to school on Monday, each week. Because of the eligibility categories, many front runners are already in the later winter of their lives, so far into the end that no metaphors about Indian summers and late bloomers can call them back from the gloom befallen them this week until late September next year when all the rumors about prize nominees start all over again.
For everyone else, the first two weeks of September can be a bit difficult adjusting to back to work and not a lot of free time now until Thanksgiving and Christmas.
YOU WOULD BE IN THE DULDRUMS WHETHER THE WEATHER IS WINTERLIKE OR STILL SUMMER, CURSING ONE OR THE OTHER NEVERTHELESS
I think you would be in the doldrums whether the weather is winterlike or still summer, cursing one or the other nevertheless, perhaps one for the approaching bitterness of the long winter ahead or the other for those taunting last moments of a summer not to return anytime soon.
I still remember getting dropped off at kindergarten, not a memory of every day, but just one or two memories, and of walking down the hill from our home to elementary school for seven years. Again, not a memory for every day for 7 years but a few memories walking down not a steep hill but a hill nonetheless that when it rained the rain followed you downhill to school and ran against you all over your shoes and pant hems walking back up the hill against the rain on the way home.
I remember wanting to go to school when I was not old enough yet, because the house seemed empty with my older brothers at school.
I didn’t really understand where they had gone every day, until I went there myself on the first day of Grade 1. I was, like many candidates, kind of flattered by just finally being talked about that week as potentially having a bright future.
One day on the way to school, I found a big ring of keys near a property that was a hold-out in the subdivision, commanding about two acres and an older farm house with fruit trees on the border of a new subdivision with quarter acre lots and brand new almost cookie cutter houses, you know more or less a two story rectangular box with a back yard and then various add-ons that made each house look a bit unique, like a sundeck on the side or a bay window for the living room, a large aframe in the front entrance instead of just over the front door.
I remember consistently losing at marbles during recess until I won so big once the school banned marbles from the property after the kids had been warned that playing marbles and creating winners and loser had become too controversial for elementary school. I had practiced on the weekends at home until being able to surprise my classmates in competition with my newly learned skills.
I tried to get home with my winnings, but the pockets of my jacket gave out in the school courtyard, and everyone gleefully ran after my small fortune and took what they could until I had just a handful left to show my brothers.
Marbles turned to sports at recess and lunch such as football as I got older. I am not sure how we squeezed in a game of Red Rover with the time limits of the morning breaks.
I eventually got really serious with school in both academics and sports nearing the end of Grade 7, and starting Grade 8 in a hurry to do well, partly because I was again among the youngest at the school for the first time since Grade 1.
Here I had learned to repurpose skills from elementary school before the world knew there was a need to repurpose. Those days the world was living in the infinite expanse with untold abundance as opposed to today where the sky literally seems to be falling in a limited universe.
A lot of the civilized world has been retooled a few times too many, when really people should preserve what good has been created and repurpose as much as possible instead of making money off developments with short life spans and then making money all over again from demolitions and deconstructions thereafter.
The world in the years following creation began to fit the landscape with just about everything that was needed, apart from humans needing to wait for the dinosaurs to disappear and the surface to become a friendlier place.
In those early years before civilization created air and water pollution, nature provided for everything. If something did go wrong, eventually the natural lifecycles of the ecosystems would change forever into something more survivable or recycle and rejuvenate, perhaps taking a bit longer than people were able to wait for, let’s say one hundred years out of one million earth cycles still to go, when the life expectancy was about 32.
The rapid acceleration of population growth is one of many culprits gone unchecked in the world we now know, that problem and then also greed for profit and then wealth accumulation since the way things are done are done to meet existing demands of this growing population or to just make as much profit from an endeavor as narcistic greed can muster.
COMPLEX ISSUE SEEMS TOO DELICATE TO ADDRESS BUT IF 8 BILLION WERE 4 BILLION WOULD THERE NOT BE HALF AS MUCH POLLUTION
This complex issue seems too delicate to address but if 8 billion people on the planet was actually 4 billion would not there be less need for producing polluting emissions by half. There’s no question mark at the end of the sentence because I already know the answers, it’s just that no one wants to listen to them. Common sense solutions are too often discounted as bizarre because you cannot make enough money off the endeavor to warrant production. If the solution was that simple, who would pay for it.
You know, I can’t seem to remember when the world was at 4 billion.
Simplicity may be the greatest of tricksters – that no one takes simplicity seriously but then simplicity doesn’t care what critics say and has more effectiveness than any complication dreamed up.
To be fare, Elon Musk is pragmatic and simplifies problems to create solutions. One, if the price of gasoline is going up to the point that people cannot afford gasoline anymore, then design an electric car. Two, if there are too many cars on the road slowing progress to important destination, then build an underground hyperloop to bypass the mess someone else created with the internal combustion engine. Three, if you already saved the surface of the earth with electric engineering, and also designed life underground, then create SpaceX to go to space further and more efficiently than anyone else. And fourth, if you’ve done all that, then take over a social media platform to talk about the grandness of those life events as they unfold in realtime.
Musk has 11 children from three spouses. And no one seems ready to begrudge him that familiness, because he could give away 250 billion dollars of his fortune and still have enough resources to take care of all 11 children and their heirs for eternity. And if you think about this situation long enough, 3.66 children per spouse almost seems reasonable.
Musk of course is not the only culprit. But the entrepreneur’s personality makes a lot more sense because he is likely practicing public speaking on X by grandstanding at home in front of his children.
You can just imagine Elon telling grand stories about how he took on the mythical industrial dragon of the assembly plant. Tesla for example went from producing 1 drivable Tesla out of one hundred manufactured per day to 5,263 drivables per day, and altogether 479,000 for the second quarter of 2023.
My numbers may be off a bit, but who is really counting, anyway.
The children therefore, the Musk children I mean, as a result of the electric car business, will inherit enough carbon credits to survive the tough new climate taxes of the new climate world to pay for a place on the ark’s lifeboats.
Now if you’re getting into discussing who is having children on an income per capita basis, compared to Musk, I’m not sure, without using a calculator, that households making less than $250,000 per year qualify anyore.
But that is how the world is trending, a general class structure is being put in place with those not being able to afford children becoming more and more members of the service industry providing assistance to those people who can afford children.
With the severe weather events of climate change, our heirs will not likely survive anyway, not because the population overcrowding issues, but because the sky is falling and only the ultrarich billionaires will have the resources to build stylized arks.
The fatal flaw in globalization and the mistake in not overcoming the general awkwardness in discussing over-population issues is that by opening up the world and allowing for the billions and billions of people to flow across national borders, and by relying on the market economies to fix all issues that may arise out of globalization, eventually the entire world drowns in the storm of climate issues.
The simple answer is to better engineer communities where people already are and thereby to do more within the limits of what is already there. This approach does not mean keeping poor people poor but fixing dysfunctional communities rather than allowing governments to simply evacuate people from broken streets.
Societies overshoot their capacity to sustain the population, creating collateral issues such as war and corruption that eventually lead to emergency migration issues having to be absorbed by nearby communities.
China, with 1.34 billion people, cannot feed an increasingly industrialized population, despite such a great land mass. Instead of self-containing community needs, China farms in Africa, imports from the United States and ships in cattle from Australia.
The world according to the United Nations experienced a 30% growth from 1990 to 2010. If places like the Greater Seattle Region grew by even 20%, with the current unmanageability of the population being evident in the commute from Olympia through Tacoma to Puget Sound, there is no saying what that looks like.
This challenge of containment may be as great as reversing climate change.
The world’s cities still have a bit of a way to go, eventhough one or two cities are already being repaired by people such as Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo who fixes one street at a time, by restricting motor vehicle access and then planting a tree here and a tree there where a parking spot may have once been, while also simultaneously building a sustainable social fabric.