I've been using this Jew on a mailing list to explore my ideas about Jews. He's probably not the best Jew I could use, but since he claims not to be a real Jew, he seems perfect. I don't know a lot about how Jews go around being their own best idea of being a Jew. There were not many Jews living in the areas of the coastal plains where I grew up, and I wasn't around those particular people enough to make any sort of meaningful observations.
I may have been around more Jews than I thought I was, but even if that's true, I didn't consciously know they were Jews to gawk at and figure out if they were doing anything different. Jews aren't notorious for announcing their tribal affiliations in the Deep South. No blame.
This morning I wrote a response to Benjamin that revealed something I not only feel about Jews, but about human beings in general.
"Do what Jews/Aborigines have done forever and a day. Go alone to some deserted spot with not enough food and water to get back without God's help, or do the world a favor, and die trying."
Anybody who hasn't deliberately put themselves at the mercy of God in some similar manner doesn't know whether there is a God or not. It's got nothing to do with race, color, or creed. Either divine intervention without witnesses happens or you die. Why continue to live if you don't know whether there is a God or no?
I watched part of a documentary on television last night. It seemed to center on how the world changed when television changed from black and white only broadcasts to broadcasting in color. There was a focus on group identification and how it worked before and after color broadcasts. In the bejinning there weren't many choices about programs, so everybody watched the same programs, and they had that in common as a group.
Later, by the time color television became dominant, there were a lot more stations and programs to choose from, so the generation of watchers of the same programming got split up into smaller, but more numerous groups as more options came into play. This was a well-made documentary, they made the distinctions between one era of TV watching and another fairly intriguing.
The next step was obvious. The smaller, but more numerous groups of watchers, were given many, many more viewing options through cable and satellite systems. This broke the viewer groups that watched the same programs into even smaller groups, but the population of watchers was growing at the same time, and so some of these numerous, but smaller groups were not so small anymore, and they spoke different languages, but they had less in common as a group, because the invention of the remote control made whores of them all. The divorce rate soared! Some people began watching two or three or more programs from various sources all at the same time.
It was on top of this media frenzy that the internet arrived. There's only one thing to conclude. Humans are becoming less and less group oriented, and it's fast getting to the point where not any one person feels really strong loyalties to any one group or the other. This is social anarchy by definition. Just what in the Hell could this predicament possibly mean in a world of 6 billion anarchists? Really! Did you watch the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
