Kicking Butt

My basketball team lost last night. I was so bummed.

But I am thinking, why are they my team. I don’t play on it. I don’t even go see them. I just watch them on TV. But they play twenty miles from my house. That makes them mine? Hey, these guys don’t even live here. One guy is from Texas and the two with the long names, from Europe. But I get excited for them. And bummed when they lose.

That happens at work too. We have a project-team. I don’t like two of the guys but we eat pizza when we hit a milestone. And we kick butt over the other teams.

Teams seem like a trick to make us work hard or cheer or buy more beer. But it sure works. It’s wired in, like loving your mom and punching your brother. Your brain loves teams.

Teams must have started a long, long time ago, back when we kicked butt everywhere. We must have because our ancestors made it and the kickees didn’t. We had one big mama who had a big, big papa. We were brothers. We had lots of relations who walked like us, talked like us and took other peoples’ stuff. That’s really living. Sort of like high school.

Team stuff is everywhere. Waving flags and cheering. I did it on July Fourth. For my big team—the U S of A. It’s my nation-team. I pledge allegiance to one nation and we kick butt.

Nations do more than play games, they tell team stories. They try hard to remember their big mama. The Germans had a great story for Mr. Hitler and still sing it every year; the English have their Normans; the Slavs their Boleslaw; the French their Marianne Liberty leading the revolution with her droopy dress-top. Every bunch of folks with a special nose twist or chin size or hair color called themselves a nation. And get this--every nation had its own race only one hundred years ago. Now there are only a couple races and scientists know everything is just a mish-mash, anyway.

We don’t all look alike here in the U S of A. We are not a race, even an old-time race like the Russians and Swedes think they are. Nope, we are a mish-mash. But we are a nation because those French revolutionaries changed what nation meant. They kicked out relations who were goof-off aristocrats and did not include those guys in their Nation. O.K. they never invited else in (except that Corsican guy), but got the idea going that Nations are not blood; they are not race; they are just folks who think alike and kick butt of people who think different.

I am thinking that this kicking butt stuff is not really that good. Now we try not to kick butt and we just can’t help it. I think it is because of our built-in team spirit. I know the principal made you go to team spirit day in the 9^th grade, but it’s time to cool it. Especially, now because every nation-team has bombs and big planes and the big league guys have A-bombs too. They roast butt.

Stopping butt-kicking is hard because it’s wired in. We need to snip some wires.

I have a plan, but first I want to tell you a story. I used to live in Baltimore and listened to the Colts on my new three-transistor radio. (It was a while back.) Then I left Baltimore and left Alan the Horse Amechi and Lenny Sputnik Moore. I left my team. I went to San Francisco and became a hippie and even made money off my new team, the 49ers, when I rented out my driveway for parking during games. But I never felt like it was my team. And Baltimore wasn’t either, anymore. I didn’t care who kicked butt.

We need to be like I was and move away from our team every once and a while.

I have a plan to make that happen: Every year there is a lottery. The winners get $50K and a free pass to a randomly chosen country. Just they can’t come back. Not ever. Or at least for ten years. And there are lots of winners. Five percent of the country wins every year. And in a decade or two, they have a name for the losers: Homebodies—and it’s not such a nice name either. So homebodies try to figure out how to stack the odds and be a winner too.

The winners can take their family. They get a job that’s now empty in their new nation because someone there won too and had to leave. Everywhere people win and move. Maybe we give them a year off to learn the language, try the food and go to the beach.

But everybody gets confused. Which team are they on? Who knows? Which butt to kick? It’s hard to figure out.

But that’s OK with me.

Big Families

Raising kids is hard. Like having a couple extra full time jobs—if you do it right.

In the old days, parents had help. I remember that a couple doors down in either direction lived my grandma, three aunts, two uncles, someone called Tio Frank who drank a bit and no one knew for sure how he was related but he came to dinner a lot and taught me fishing, and a bunch of cousins of assorted ages with their various dogs and cats. We kids ran back and forth like wild monkeys and went to the wrong house to eat when they had spaghetti. But high-tailed it home when Mom yelled or we got feeling sick

Now, does any kid have enough cousins and uncles? No. That’s because it takes brothers and sisters to make cousins and there are not many of them any more. One spoiled child is all most people get. And a lot of work.

O.K. kids are a joy, too. It’s true. I’ve got to remind you of that because I have a plan for everyone to have lots of kids.

It’s those genetic engineers who can help again. They learned how to chop up DNA and replace lots of chunks. I heard the other day that they put DNA from a firefly into a pig and now he lights up when he grunts. If they can to that, then they can make more uncles and aunts.

The secret is to have more than two bio-parents. I suspect we still want primary parents—those who give more than 50% of the DNA, but why not get 5% here, 10% there, and have a whole collection of people making a baby. I don’t mean the sex in bed babymaking. I mean test-tube sex, and maybe a baby shower party or two.

Low percenters can’t really be called parents, just the 50%ers-plus get that name. I call the others are pair-aunts and pair-uncles. Because they give to that pair of DNA strands.

I hope this helps. Adults just don’t seem to care much about kids unless they have lots of similar DNA chunks (we used to call them blood relations or maybe just people-like-us). But kids need a bunch of love and work from lots of people.

Finally, when they say you have your pair-uncle’s eyes, you know they’re right, because he put in chromosome IV which makes your eyes brown and smiley, just like his.

Getting Synched

The world is out of sync. I mean it. When I call India they are a half day off. It’s that way everywhere.

I can’t fly for more than an hour without getting offered supper when I want lunch. And long-distance conference calls. I am lucky if half the people show up. They call in an hour early. They call in an hour late. They call the next morning. Let’s get synched up, world.

Some people want primitive synching--they tell me to use GMT. First of all, I have to explain to everyone what GMT is and half the people still cant figure out what I mean. And then they have to do math—most people can’t subtract 11 or 9 or whatever number from their time to get GMT time. And then I have to explain that, yes, England did try to rule the world and made themselves the center and that’s why the G means Greenwich. And I know they are just a little dib-dab these days, but . . .

What a pain.

If you think about it, this mess is all because our eyes are small and piggy and not so good in the dark. We used to hunt during the day and hide out at night. Who hides out at night anymore! We have full-spectrum lighting. It’s time to break free from the sun ruling our lives.

A lot of people say, well, just make everybody have my time. Russia did this. If it was 8AM in Moscow then it was 8 AM in Vladivostok where the sun had just gone down. Doing it this way just means whoever is in charge keeps their suntime and takes some sun away from everyone else. Sort of like England tried with their GMT. We need a better way.

The key is dropping sun-centeredness. We don’t have chlorophyll like plants. We are warm blooded. We have evolved way beyond our early sun-needs. And why do we want the sun to come up just before we wake up, anyway? Put a timer on your lights. We (most of us, that is) quit worshiping the sun a couple thousand years ago. So let go!

Now the solution--if every day has 25 hours (hours that are just the same length as they are now), then the sun would come up one hour earlier every day. Everyone gets the same about of sun-days as they do night-days and the big mix of in-between-days. We can look forward to night-days and watch the sun rise when we get off work at 6PM. Everyday would be different.

But when it is 8AM in Blatsville, Indiana, it is 8AM everywhere. And people are just getting up everywhere at 8AM and you can call up someone in China and start talking about breakfast and they can tell you about their cornflakes and you can tell them about yours. Life will be peachy—and all synched up. Just, in some places it’s sunny at 8AM and in others it’s dark—but it’s 8AM in the morning everywhere.

A couple of changes need to be made. First of all, everybody gets an extra hour off every day. That makes this an easy sell. You can use it for your rotten commute or catch up on sleep or whatever. Then there is a 13 o’clock PM-the new midnight. Some people might be superstitious but that just makes the night more adventurous. And there are only 350 25-hour days a year. That’s OK with me. I lose count about May anyway. And, finally, there are fewer days in the month, but that means payday comes around quicker.

OK, there are some down sides—we will all need new curtains. Big thick ones. To sleep thru the night when the sun is shining overhead.

And maybe a big, bright light over the garage so the kids can play outside during the dark, dark days.

Looking Good

Those genetic engineers are really working hard, fighting disease, killing insects and making money. But do they deal with what people worry about most? Not much, I say. I am talking about Looking Good.

Why do I say Looking Good is the number one concern? Three arguments:

1. The only real growth industry in America is a “Looking Good” business. Can you go a block in any city without seeing the “Nails and Waxing” sign? If a Starbucks or a Microsoft of Manicures had started up 20 years back, another Bill Gates would be giving away all his money because he had way too much.
2. We put up with the whinyest, do-nothing-good stars just because they have nice hair, a nice shape, no hair in the wrong place and nice nails.
3. We not only put up with, but watch, as bouncy young things flaunt their Looking Good in ads for everything from bandaids to botulism.

Case closed. Looking Good is number one.

Why don’t our genetic engineers tackle this problem? Lots of money is just around the corner. Is it really a hard problem to make people look good? Here’s a little help to get you engineers started.

First, think about why people don’t look good. Looking Good doesn’t start with the parts, the nails, the lips and the legs; it starts with smooth lines. Think about racing cars and jet airplanes. They look good.

People are not designed that way. Planes hold their shape with stiff, smartly-designed skins. Skin for us humans is just a bag to hold a bunch of soggy, mushy parts. Worse yet, the parts are stuck to stick-figure bones that poke out in pointy elbows and knees. How can this design ever look good without serious food deprivation, muscle management, or even surgery?

What about using fat to smooth it all out into nice aerodynamic lines? It works for whales. No way for us humans. Our fat bunches up in strange places—It turns to low-slung, bulges on our bellies and hips.

Worst of all, skin sags with time. Thank God for clothes.

Are we alone in the animal world with this problem? Think about sleek jaguars, tigers and fast looking pussy cats. They have smooooth lines. They are Looking Good!

But just dunk one in a bucket of water (if you are brave). They look just as bumpy and baggy as us humans do. But they have FUR to cover them up.

Yes, you engineers out there--Fur smoothes out boney, bulgy, bumpy lines and makes those cats sleek. We humans could be sleek too. So just get to work and give us Fur.

That’s not all. Think of the savings on clothes. Who needs clothes when you have a deep, dark sable back and a mink-underbelly. Or a fuzzy sheep-wool chest and alpaca legs. You’re warm too. Way too many advantages to pass up.

O.K., Some of you might miss skin, but how much of it shows anyway. Even when we are naked, the lights are usually out. But with Fur lots of new Looking Good possibilities are available: stripes, spots, pintos, braids, bangs, and real pony-tails. A whole new growth industry in brushes and dyes is waiting for those Nail shops on every corner.

And best of all, everyone looks good.

Offsets

I started thinking about offsets yesterday. Why are they just for carbon? In case you don’t know, offsets are when you pay to plant a couple trees everytime you fly or drive to make up for messing up the air.

We could have water offsets—you drink a gallon or two and a clean bottle of water gets shipped to the very poor, who up to now only had river water to drink. Maybe a better offset is a deep well for every couple hundred long, hot showers.

Then there could be cow offsets. Cows waste corn (actually cows don’t waste—they clean their plates—but growing cows takes a lot of corn, so cows are wasting world agricultural production). If you eat couple cowburgers—then you pay for a bag of corn to go to the hungry. Or maybe a plow. You get the idea.

I could go on and on, but the idea of offsets is to have wasteful folks make up for their using too much stuff. Maybe these folks will slow down a little in their wasting, but even if they don’t, the world gets a little fairer.

Offsets can make a lot of business for poor places. After all, it’s no secret that the people who don’t have much stuff to waste are usually the poor ones. They could get paid for digging the wells and growing the corn. Paid with offset-bucks.

Some friends have suggested the population offset. I don’t agree with this one. (They call it the “pop-off”). Some relative (usually pretty distant) must be offed when you add to your family. That really would add to family tensions. And if you had to off someone outside the family then that leads to wars and similar badstuff. We off enough people around the world already.

But what really set me thinking about offsets—was getting up on the wrong side of the bed. I yelled at the kids and kicked the dog first thing this morning.

A cup of coffee later I realized what I had done. I could have appologized, but that’s too easy (that’s what the kids say and the dog still growls). But if I could explain that I bought a grump-offset to along with the apology then, I think, things would be better.

(I used to give presents with my apologies about yelling, but the kids have too much stuff already and the dog is too fat from the dogbiscuits,—I hope you see the problem with making things better with more stuff to the already stuffed. It just leads to the spoiled-baby syndrome) .

What would a grump-offset be? There are people who are always angry, sulky, testy, and generally ill-tempered that I could pay, sort of like planting trees, but planting smiles on their faces. They could be kinder, friendlier after being the recipient a reasonalby-priced grump-offset. Maybe 25 of their smiles would cost me a buck.

Since the poor tend to have more to be angry about, there could be a whole new line of work for the laid-off, the unemployed, and generally poor.

Of course this could leave the rich more ill-tempered than ever. But it’s worth a try.

Little Green Men (and Women)

I have been thinking about genetic engineering. A lot of those engineers just work on one problem—All our foods are weeds. At least to their weed-killer sprays. So the engineers are taking the weediness out of our beans and corn and other veggies. That sounds like a good idea. Don’t kill our food along with the dandylions and crabgrass.

Some people call these engineered plants-- Frank’n beans. Named after an early scientist who also rearranged parts of one species. We should remember that this guy Frankenstein was a big success in his science; he just failed in human resource management. He hired poor help. It was the help who stuffed in the bad parts (stolen from the criminally insane).

I hear the engineers today are pretty successful with their weed work. But I have news for them. They are working on the wrong side of the problem: working on supply and we need to work on demand. You can only grow so much and then that’s it. But you can always shrink demand. That’s a green solution.

Some people tell me that there are too many people and we need to cut some out. But that leads to the “who gets to stay” question and then wars and concentration camps and other bad things. So forget the whole idea of cutting out anyone! Everyone gets to stay and make all the babies they want.

The solution to really shrink demand is to let the engineers make people smaller.

What is with bigness anyway? I bumped my head again this morning; I don’t fit in airplanes; and I have to shop in expensive big and tall stores (I am both). Bigger is not better. Remember that.

I have watched my wife many years now. She is only 10 percent shorter. But she eats about half of what I do. If we made everybody ten percent shorter every generation, then we halve the demand every 30 years. Voilà.

There are other good side effects. Like taking up less space. Every car is a limo. Every airplane seat is first-class. Every Macdonald burger really is a meal. And your little house is really your castle, or maybe, with a few modifications, an apartment block.

And you are always bigger than your kids. Every parent knows that this is a good idea. They get bigger than you when they are teenagers and this leads to all kinds of problems. Enough said there.

There are some things to work out. Like pets. We could just only have Chihuahuas, but they are nasty, little creatures. We need a new, foot-long dog, maybe an irish setter or a golden retriever. And those genetic engineers could make them vegetarians while they are at it.

The only question is: how small can you make people until they start getting stupid? We know that amoebas are dumb, but little cats are pretty smart. And I know lots of really smart short people so I am not worried for four or five generations.

The big problem is PR. We need to change the image of the small. The new message is: they are cuddly, they don’t cost much, and they are really green.

Sunny Days

You know I worry about using up the stuff on the earth.

Count up the things we use and compare that to the new things made every day. Not the stuff people make—they just take half-baked things and finish them off. It’s sunshine that starts off most everything. We cook, weave, mold, refine, extrude, burn, or bake the half-done sun-stuff like wheat dough, plastic, fiber, and oil. Remember that. We just do the last step. All things that bend easy or squish a little or smell a lot probably started off with sunshine.

Lots of the half-baked stuff is underground--that’s oil and coal. But a lot is on top. Some even ready to use--like chickens, trees, horses, and potatoes. But we finish off most of this stuff for tires, tofu, bandaids, plastic Barbies, bug spray, wigs, deck chairs, and even polyester jumpsuits. We just love making stuff.

That’s not bad. I make lot of stuff. You do too, I bet. We just never checked our sunshine account before. Now the bad news—There’s a sunshine deficit! Just like the dollar.

Before, we had a surplus. The sun is really big and it takes a lot of people to use it up. Well now there are lots of people and poof—the extra is gone.

We don’t want to use up everything and fight over the crumbs. We need a way to keep track track of what comes in and what goes out. Sunshine accounts. Everybody gets an one. Everybody gets a debit card, too. Every month there is a deposit, just like Social Security for old folks. The sun puts it in and you take it out.

You’ll know when you overspend. You get the bill at the end of the month. Even worse, they turn you down in the store. Overdrawn again. Too many things, not enough sun.

Some tricky questions come up right away. How much sunshine goes into your account. I say divide up the country: everyone gets a couple hundred acres and we measure the sunshine on it. That’s what you get. I feel sorry for the Swedes and some other folks who don’t have much sun, but we can give away some from Arizona to them.

And those poor countries on the Equator, boy, do they have sunshine. Their accounts will overflow. They can sell off their sunshine for non-sun stuff like cement and steel. I see big skyscrapers on the Amazon.

I hope this works. It’s a whole lot better than being hungry in a big, cold house full of plastic toys. A lot better.