"The Indomitable Human
Spirit Embodied in the Joy of Wonder"
from "In Defense of Rural
America"
By Ron
Ewart, President
National Association of Rural
Landowners (www.narlo.org)
and
nationally recognized author and speaker on freedom and property rights
issues for over 10 years
© Copyright Sunday, November
29, 2015 - All Rights Reserved
The following article
was published on Newswithviews, November 25, 2015
This article is also
available on our website at:
Note: With all the doom and gloom that
dominates our world that we see through a distorted window every day in what is
called "The News", we decided to depart from that doom and gloom and illuminate
the good within us, in keeping with the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully,
it will resonate with the good in all of us. If this doesn't fit your
mood, next week we will return to the raging land battle between the West and
the East ..... in America!
At night, as the soft padded paws of the great
predator stop in a jungle clearing and the eyes of the giant feline look up into
the night sky to witness a streak of light passing before the stars, does the
big cat "wonder" as to what the light streak might mean, or from whence it came,
or what caused it to emit light, or what is it made of, or why is it there at
that precise moment? Does he ponder as to whether the streak of light was in
front of the other points of light, in between the points of light or behind the
points of light? Does he guess as to how far away the streak might be or how
fast it is going? Does he have a concept of time, speed, distance, or light?
Maybe. Probably not.
However, does a little boy or girl witnessing
the same event, ask those questions? Some do and it's that "some" that has
vaulted the hunter gathers of thousands of years ago to a point in time where
the answers to the questions of who, what, where,
when, why and how have allowed man to press ever onward and
outward on a preordained destiny that will lead him, albeit haltingly, to the
stars and to the infinitely small depths of matter and energy.
Probably wrapped up in the DNA molecule, locked
in each cell of contemporary humans, is a gene, not yet isolated, containing
chemical protein that may be radically different than the genes in the DNA
molecules in all living things on Earth. No matter that it may have taken
millions of years for that one gene to appear along the evolutionary stream. No
matter that its appearance may have been a total random act of nature, a freak,
a mutation, or that somehow it was divinely ordained. But that gene, or a
combination of genes, created a path for man that has led him, in 5,000 years,
to the brink of jumping off this once infinitely large planet, into the Solar
System and on into the galaxy and then to the Universe. How exciting to be at
the bottom of the staircase of that climb and "wonder" what we might
find.
All animal and plant life on Earth have one
overriding prime directive that takes precedence over all others;
self-preservation by survival and procreation. Almost 100 percent of the effort
to survive by any non-human living thing is expended towards preservation and
procreation. That prime directive is programmed into the chemistry of all living
things.
Man is also endowed with this programming, nor
would he have survived this long with out it. However, mixed in with all of the
other pre-programmed directives is the one emotion that is the catalyst for the
drive that has taken him to the point where he is no longer the slave to his
environment but has become a net changer-controller of the environment. Some say
this may be his undoing, but our instinct says not.
Whatever the gene or gene combination that
crystallizes the emotion of "wonder" to well up inside certain humans may one
day be isolated. Its isolation may be a milestone, in the short term, but the
effect of the gene is much more important than the cause or specific location in
the DNA molecule. For it is the effect of "wonder" that will have empowered man
to accomplish that very isolation.
It is the effect of "wonder" that allows the
young, (especially the young) the less fortunate, the intellectual, the
rich, or even the poor and almost all members of the human race, at some time,
to look at, hear, feel, or touch some particular event, or a thing, or a
happening and be amazed, be awed, be ferociously curious, be astonished, be
surprised, shocked, or bewildered. The triggered emotion resulting from that
"wonder" drives man in a totally different way than his warm and cold blooded
Earth mates. Anyone without this sense of "wonder" is not fully
alive.
The causes of wonder are, without a doubt,
infinite. However, the result of selective "wonder" has uncovered the laws of
thermodynamics, the law of gravity, quantum theory, the theory of relativity,
the four distinct forces in nature, archeology, biology, zoology, paleontology
and all of the other "ologies". Selective "wonder" has lead us to an
understanding of our bodies and the inner workings of our brains that has
resulted in modern medicine and the behavioral sciences. It has truly helped us
find our "point of reference" in the Universe, as we know it today.
As the human population grew and selective
"wonder" evolved, and writing and printing allowed the selective "wonder" to be
dispersed to an ever-increasing audience, information about our life, the planet
Earth, the Sun, the Solar System, the Cosmos and the microscopic world increased
at an exponential rate. Each new discovery was built on the last, the speed of
discovery always accelerating.
"Wonder" and the path to selective "wonder" are
predominantly spontaneous in humans. The act or emotion of "wonder" may also
exist in animals but their ability to communicate that wonder in a language we
humans understand is severely limited, if it exists at all.
But each one of us, sometime in our life, no
matter what our situation might be, has experienced spontaneous "wonder".
Whether as a child, teenager, young or mature adult, the ability and emotion of
"wonder" resides in all of us. The emotion may be fleeting or long lasting. It
may reside in a childhood memory or it may lead some of us into the path of
selective "wonder". In the final analysis, it is that same innocent "wonder"
that will be our inevitable salvation. Some may argue otherwise but they are
surely wrong.
No one has truly experienced a full life if they
have not seen, in the soft, shining face of a young boy or girl, the awe of an
event that the child has not seen before. Or had to answer the flood of
questions that the "wonder" of the event releases.
That precious "wonder" flourishes in a free
society of individual rights. It dies when squelched and squeezed into oblivion
by an all-powerful, abusive, tyrannical government, or radical ideology. It is
our firm hope and prayer that we as individuals and as a society will foster
that "wonder" in all ages, but especially our children. They and their "wonder"
and their energy are truly our last great hope.
But without individual freedom the smile on
their innocent faces turns to frowns, despondency and the loss of hope and their
bodies shrivel up and become emaciated, when they are subjected to the Hell that
is slavery, war, poverty, famine, or worse. We saw those frowns on the faces of
the Syrian refugees fleeing their homeland. Sure there is evil in the world, as
we saw in Paris a week ago, but the goodness in man triumphs over that evil,
time and time again.
Ever since man first burned himself with fire
and realized he could use it to his advantage, or transported some object by
rolling a log and converted that idea to the wheel, he has been forever driven
towards more knowledge, more understanding and a wider, larger, broader world in
which he can explore. To do that he simply must go faster and he must develop
the machines to achieve the ever-increasing speeds he will need to reach his
goals.
We are going to the stars one day and nothing
anybody can do will get in our way. The strength, power, creativity and spirit
of the incomparable individual will carry us there. Yes, the world is a mess and
America is less free than it was, but those people that possess the Joy of
Wonder in their minds will rise above it all and lead us to man’s destiny on his
path to the stars.
Some day in the not to distant future, we are
going to develop power sources that will literally boggle the mind. Our
prediction is that each home, each office, each business or building will have
its own centralized power unit. And in that unit will have the source of energy
to purify our drinking water, destroy our raw sewage and gray water, heat and
cool our homes and offices and provide the electrical power for our lights and
appliances.
Think of it! Those in your twenties, watch how
our planet will shrink in your lifetime. In ten to twenty years there will be
airplanes or space ships that will leave the United States, rise into the
stratosphere or higher, glide at three to five times the speed of sound and land
in Russia or China in a couple of hours. At 3,000 MPH we can go halfway around
the world in 4 hours, when a little over 150 years ago, we were limited to one
or two horsepower and it took over a month to cross the continent.
Yes, we have come far. Nevertheless we, as
individuals, have a significant obligation to ourselves and to our children to
defend our freedom at any cost and to learn everything we can about
everything we can know in our lifetime that we can document and prove beyond a
reasonable doubt, and then pass as much of that information on to our offspring.
We have an imperative to do no less. And Common Core State Standards is not the
answer.
What we need to do, more than anything else, is
to educate our people in all of the true knowledge we have discovered over the
last 5,000 years without propaganda and hidden socialist agendas. And we need to
foster unabashed individualism if freedom is to survive. Knowledge is the great
equalizer among men. If all individuals possess the same knowledge, it is much
more difficult, if not impossible, to "Lord" over the other, thus muting the
necessity of war.
The problem in this country and every other
country for that matter and all the people on this Earth is not poverty. It is
not the disparity between poverty and wealth. It is not pestilence or flood,
famine, hurricanes, earthquakes, war, or any of these things. What it is, is the
absence of freedom and pandemic ignorance. It is also the efforts by a few
national and international elites to break the backs and spirit of the
individual. The power of a freethinking individual is a
dictator’s worst nightmare.
What we need is a way to get more people
motivated to seek that truth and their own "point of reference" and the solid
basis of why their particular "point of reference" is relative to them. And we
must resist with all of our might, government and special interest
group's relentless perversion of the truth. Propaganda and lies are the "tools"
they use to control us.
We need to eradicate mysticism and propaganda
and replace them with the truth and universal, provable realities.
And then we must teach our children to question even the
provable realities and always leave room for a different perspective, a
different view, or new information.
The Joy of Wonder will die in all of us if we,
collectively, with aggressive determination, do not trample the evil that has
beset us, appearing in the form of a powerful domestic enemy (The Obama types
and Progressives) and a pure evil foreign enemy, (ISIS and radical
Islam). Only the people of America have the power to do this.
The stark reality is that if we destroy our
God-given, natural freedom that allows our unique individuality to blossom, we
will descend into the Hell of the collective and it will take a bloody
revolution to restore freedom and liberty so that the individual, once again,
with all his strength, power, beauty, compassion, spirit, generosity and the joy
of wonder, will lead man on the never-ending, exciting journey to explore our
Universe. The Universe is waiting, if we don’t stumble and get in our own
way.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving we hope each of you
will reflect on and be grateful for the freedom we do have, the love of family
and the great power of the human spirit embodied in the "Joy of
Wonder."
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NOTE:
The foregoing article represents the opinion of the author and is not
necessarily shared by the owners, representatives, employees, or agents of the
publisher.
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Ron Ewart, a nationally
known author and speaker on freedom and property rights issues and author of
this weekly column, "In Defense of Rural America", is the president of
the National Association of Rural Landowners (NARLO) (http://www.narlo.org) an advocate
and consultant for urban and rural landowners and a non-profit corporation
headquartered in Washington State. He can be reached for comment
at: info@narlo.org.
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