When I was young a new store was built in our city and some old trees were taken down. It was about 1953 and I counted the rings of one of the trees - over 126. It was there back at least since 1827. But the Charter Oak was aged several hundred years when, in 1662 the Connecticut Charter was hidden in it's hollow trunk. In 1856 the tree fell in a storm. When the new state capitol was finished in 1878 - resulting in ending the two capitol period of Connecticut - a carved piece of the trunk was made into a chair which today is where the president of the state senate sits when in session. A hundred years after opening of the new capitol, I was elected to that senate. I once presided.

Where I live down on the coast, the trees continue to grow and age. Even next to my home (about fifteen feet away) a tree stands with a diameter of over three feet and at least eighty feet tall. We have no redwoods or truly ancient trees, but trees dominate the land.

While Connecticut outlasted the Chater Oak, will we, will our nation, outlast today's tall trees?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2018 03:30PM by rhgc.

Very nicely written; I enjoyed reading your OP.

On the issue of 'will our country survive', I like to take the stance that we just might have the malleability to do so. I think it's safe to say that today's America is not much at all like the America of 1788, when our Constitution was ratified.

We're a work in progress: dragged, pushed, prodded by the special interests with the wherewithal to promote their agendas. I like it when they at least have the savvy to bargain with the opposition so that everybody gets something.


This slightly contrasts with Mexico, where every six years a new set of thieves and vultures is elected; everyone waits patiently for their turn at the trough.

Actually, our system evolves over time, not always in a positive direction. When I wrote my thesis at MIT, I was able to not only identify problems within our political system but to predict the continuing directions. We can change it. We can make it better or we can make it worse. But neither is inevitable. Unless one recognizes what changes should be made, our great democratic experiment will fail, as will the political systems of other countries. Of even greater consequence are the effects on the social system.

I agree. As I mentioned, the only ones who can change our progress, for good or ill, are special interests and from what I can see, 'the man in the street' has no special interests, at least not one with only his interests at heart.

Can you say "India/Pakistan-partition"?

Our system is corrupted by the special interests. But it CAN be saved by those who will stand like my relative (yes, I am related) Teddy Roosevelt, and those of my family who fought in the wars, and those who were scientists and engineers, printers and patriots, teachers and mothers, we will find our way out of the abyss.

Amen to this, RHGC.

Agree wholeheartedly. If it can be saved. It is people like this who will save it. People who care enough to fight for what our ancestors did. And those who have the integrity to stand for the common good of the republic.

As David Hasselhoff’s Michael Knight put it, “One man can make a difference.”

R U sure that wasn't his talking car?

There is a common South African saying/admonishment: "Get Wise!!!"

It is meant to provoke those who are naïve or reluctant into facing the realities of South African life as they exist, because if those people don't face those realities (whatever, exactly, those particular realities may consist of), the person so admonished can be in genuine, and sometimes lethal, danger.

If I mentally move my consciousness through time, into our common future of, say, the year 2078, I think that Americans of that period will look back upon these years we are living through now as our, American, era of "Getting Wise."

I think they will see this period of history--which is, to us, "now"--as the time when we were provoked to confront the existing, dangerous, and potentially lethal realities which had been, mostly unknown to us, simmering just underneath most people's level of awareness--and I think the academic and popular studies of that future era will be largely about how we learned, analyzed, corrected, repaired, and strengthened the weak spots that most of us didn't even know existed until sometime after [estimate] 2010.

I deeply believe in this country, and in what this newly-born country took on as its then unprecedented national mission 250 years ago, and I deeply believe in the people that Americans, because of our national mythos, believe themselves, and their country, to be.

I think we are going to make it through.

[When I was almost murdered by a random mob after I accidentally found myself trapped by traffic in a township outside of Pretoria, that experience changed my life forever--and in countless different ways. I observed (actually: I observed quite dispassionately, because I was SO unable to do a single thing to save my own life at that moment) the power that one single person (the sangoma who made the conscious decision to save my life) could have to instantly sway a restless, and quickly becoming murderous, mob from following their angry collective emotions. Today, in my own mind because I lived this, I see each American as, potentially, that sangoma--only multiplied by 326 million (the population of the USA was 325.7 million in 2017). We are, each of us, potentially that individual man who saved my life--and I think and feel we are going to come through.]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2018 06:19PM by Tevai.

You continue to amaze, Tevai. Best.

I am so pessimistic about our future, I get too sad about it. But views like this one Tevai, do give me a little hope.

Some symbols, and by extension, nations, spring anew:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wye_Oak

The people learned to vote themselves money and benefits...

Am I the only one who thinks things are better than ever?

And getting better?

I'm thinking about the general trend, the long-term chart . . . I can't think of a better time to be alive, to be ten years old today and the life ahead . . . would be a dream . . . .

I want to count the rings in Dallin H Oaks when he falls.

Can I be the one to cut him open?

Leonard Cohen said it best--the state of where we are today--when he wrote . . . "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap."

Selfish procurement of worldy goods with no thought of others, no thought of the earth, the whales, the elephants, no thought of building a future. That will bring us down. Still be here. But wallowing in our own cheap made in China crap from Walmart as the clever make suckers of us all.

The Trojan horse is already inside the gates.

And the song goes,

"Steer your way through the ruins
Of the altar and the mall
Steer your way through the fables
Of creation and the fall
Steer your way past the palaces
That rise above the rot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought"

It'll be the same in the CK... Everything will be outsourced to the lower kingdoms, as all the ghawds do is screw and burp the baby spirits

So I'll be in outer darkness making green aprons, sacrament trays, and underwear with odd holes to send onto the righteous behind the veil for pennies on the Celestial dollar?

This does not sound good.

Hey, you're the one who opted out of becoming a ghawd! As did I... Well, sort of...

I gave up on becoming a ghawd when masturbating turned out to be so much more fun than being 'good'. Masturbation never let me down!