Today: June 10 Start-of-Times Day

I proclaim June 10 to be Start-of-Time Day.

Instead of the periodicity of gaping foolishly at our End-of-Time obsession, I want to celebrate one of the greatest Moral Victories of Virtue ever achieved by humankind: the joint efforts of American and Russian peoples - and all the other peoples of the world - to resist the urge to destroy themselves and the Earth through nuclear war, to have come to agreement on reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons, to have let us live into another century.

Through science we achieved the potential to destroy everything upon the Earth... and we did not do it.

Now we must go further.
Through politics and ideology we have now also achieved the "globalized" potential to destroy the economic lives of every person upon the Earth... and we are meditating whether to push the "red button" of economic destruction.
The seasons change with regularity. Economies have cycles. The changes of season are like irony: a reversal; truly the change from the growth of summer to the cold death of winter is a reversal; it would be an irony were it not so perfectly regular and predictable.

We pretend our Economy is chaotic and random, that the periodic destruction is not predictable, that the loss of lives along the roadside cannot be stopped as we move onward and upward to whatever goal we imagine ourselves to have.
Pride going before a fall is a reversal that is perfectly predictable. Pride contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Avoid pride and avoid the fall; avoid the injurious and diminish the suffering. Notice how we had fallen in love with the notion that almost within our grasp was the ability to abolish the suffering of many, whether by science, by medicine, or by our economic dynamo? Notice how we have managed now to increase that suffering?
Our pretense that progress may come and be built on the foundations of great distress and profound economic destructions in perfect yet unpredictable cycles is just that: a pretense; the perfect cyclical harmony of boom and bust is predictable and it is ingrained within the present system. Our first step is to admit that it is, then we decide whether to aceept it as is, or to modify it.

The predictability of periodic destruction and impoverishment and suffering renders such a system... morally flawed.

Step down from our pedestal of hubris... before we are rudely pushed off.
The greatest and best men and women of the Cold War should be remembered today for denying their suspicions and the scripts of war they had learned and achieving a Moral Victory attained by few in history.
As we celebrate, remember that it is now our turn to Start the New Times.

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