New Horizons by Max Roy

      Thinking About Liberation There’s nothing like a war of aggression to get us thinking about how great it makes us feel if we think we are free. That question makes me wonder whether feeling free is the same as actually being free, I wonder if Russians feel they are free when we believe they are living under a despotic regime with a government that lies to them about realities and physically suppresses opposition. What about countries that live under regimes that we know are despotic. What about revolutionary movements that seek to install their own form of despotism? Do we have to choose between them? Then I think about us, and how even democratic governments sometimes lie to the people who believe they live in a free country. Then I think about the U.S. and how so many of the states in America have gerrymandered districts to diminish the value of some people’s votes. How many states are passing legislation to make voting more difficult for some people. A...

              What have You Done For Us Lately? You may have noticed that there are more of us older folk surviving to an advanced age. Better care and medical advances are improving the chances of surviving the challenges we are likely to face with advancing age. Many have overcome earlier threats we have faced in our lives that have winnowed the ranks of our contemporaries. But age is taking its toll. We are losing some of them every day, witness the obituaries we get to read. When we read some of these obituaries we are astounded at the accomplishments that we did not know of. To most of us they were just old guys and gals that we had encountered in our community. What they did, what they were, however, has withered away to insignificance over the years. Their importance to us flowed only from what they meant to us in our day to day lives. It may have been so even for most of those who were very close to them. That seems to be the way ...

            What Do We Really Want? Where did that question come from? We’re going along happily enough, doing the humdrum routine that has its comforts. Then this nagging question comes along. And it does come along because there’s something nagging in our insides, something we haven’t totally digested. We don’t always do what we really want to because, one way or another, we believe, maybe, we know, the price will be too expensive, more than we are ready to have ourselves pay. There are so many kinds of costs, not only those involving money.   It may be self-esteem. Aren’t we all a fraid of looking like a fool in front of people we respect? Or we are in a committed relationship and yet we really feel like doing something that will put that relationship, and all the resources you have invested in it, in jeopardy?     So you just shrug your shoulders metaphorically and go on doing what you are doing. But you don’t forget...

           What About Lying? Some people have a thing about the truth. They believe we should always be honest, tell people the brutal truth about what you believe even if hurts people’s feelings, damages relationships, closes doors to collaboration that would be ultimately beneficial to all parties. The truth has to be that it’s complicated. I don’t like to lie and I dislike liars. At the same time I don’t like to be unkind in the face of ignorance. I think that one should be willing to admit when one does not know something rather than offer assurances regarding matters that one is not qualified on which to offer an opinion. It is much more honest to say that one is not qualified to offer an opinion rather than offering empty assurances just to make people feel a little better about a situation which is fraught with negative possibilities. I am excluding situations of outright efforts to deceive and people who lie like they breathe. W...

  BOOK #^ JUNE/22           Infinitesimal! It’s hard to believe, much less admit it, that human creatures are so insignificant in this world in our universe. The enormity of where fate has placed us in this universe is not comprehended by the vast majority of we humans. Personally, I am totally consumed with the grievances I bear in this world we inhabit. They may, in fact, be picayune when considered against the challenges we humans face in trying to live together on this planet. I may hold them fiercely to my breast, but they are so irrelevant in the larger picture of a society destroying the very atmosphere in which we, as humans, must maintain to survive. It’s hard for me to surrender the cudgels I have been carrying, but the reality of our situation must give us pause. We live in a solar system where there are (currently proposed) some 12 planets, including Pluto, Charon, and 2003UB713, not officially named. There are an estimate...

                       Color Blind Color blindness is condition of the eyes and brain well known in human medicine whereby individuals have not, or have lost the capacity to perceive the colors of the spectrum. Sometimes the condition is limited to an inability to perceive just some colors. In human affairs there is a well-known condition that many people have been known for in that they do differentiate in the way they treat other people based on the color of their skin. This is a condition well known regarding some members of human race, although there are others, who consider themselves members of the so-called white race. It was a feature of life at one time in South Africa when the government was held tightly by Whites, excluding the Black majority. It was a feature of life in the United States for centuries, even after the slavery of Black people was abolished, as it was in...