Autumn Wind


My grandfather taught me two great things:

  1. A real man grows a beard out every year in the Fall/Winter”
  2. Never argue with an idiot because they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

You can’t argue with a fool who believes the literal “End of the World” which will look ridiculously like the whole Fire Breathing People Eating Jesus portrayed in the final novel of the Left Behind series of books.  They’ll defeat your logic with their imagination every time and you will be left frustrated and demoralized at the depths of ignorance that the human psyche can still mobilize a base of operations from.

And it’s impossible to prove a negative with reason and the scientific method (which are the only rituals of practice the intelligent amongst us should still be indulging in); but morality factors into this also.  Consider Kant’s work in The Metaphysics of Morals where he asks the question why human beings will spontaneously risk their lives to save the lives of others–without even thinking about it.

Kant’s answer, simplified, was that a metaphysical realization takes place when we see that little child about to get hit by a moving vehicle–the realization that on the ultimate level of being, we are all of the same source energy and we are all one.  This realization supersedes all temporal experience, reason, emotion and the entire mechanism of thought which produces the collectivized image of ourselves (which upon examination is actually a loosely held together ball of seemingly distinct memories with attached emotional responses).

As any other intellectual masturbator will tell you; there are few things more satisfying that getting lost in the evolution of a great series of connected thoughts on a topic.  There are few better “mental pumping sessions” than this ground shaking little bit of philosophy from Kant.  But I learned this past few weeks that it’s not just abstract.  I saw this happen on a large scale in my community when the wind storms blew through and knocked out a majority of the state’s electrical power on Sunday September 14th, 2008.

I was driving home from Cleveland in a hunk a hunka Cadillac which was still getting pushed all over the road like a geek on a bad day. For a brief span of hours, it was the year 1901 in central Ohio again.  Kids weren’t sitting with dilated pupils in front of liquid crystal displays with 1,080 lines of high definition resolution.  They were huddled up on couches with books and flashlights (probably not available in 1901). Neighbors were helping each other (and continue to this day) take cover and recover from the storm.  Neighbors were talking to each other because talk is all we had left to take control of in the aftermath of those warm and dangerous winds.

Ohians are good people–I can’t speak for you people in other states.  When it comes down to it, we Buckeyes (and I’m not just talking about the football team here) will make it work with what we got.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Bob Jagendorf

  • “If you plant ice, you’re gonna harvest wind” is a Grateful Dead line from “Franklin’s Tower.”

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