In our rush to judgement about the acts of others, we sometimes forget the children.
Where I spent most of my youth, the primary employer in our little town was a chemical manufacturing plant — the workers’ children were encouraged to be line workers, supervisors, engineers, scientists and/or managers for the plant. Some worked in HR, janitorial/maintenance services department, or marketing, too. Support companies provided auxiliary services and jobs.
Sure, we had a few fish kills in our town, increasing our catch-n-release program.
And at least one other factory belched out its share of microscopic malodorous miasma.
Rumours circulated about increased rates of cancer and mental disease due to our industrial base.
However, the employees had a high expectation that their children would follow the trail to the carpark and the factory gates, after secondary school/university, to make/design chemicals.
To an enlightened soul, it might seem to be a Sisyphean effort, children repeating their parents’ work.
With that, let us turn to other parental choices.
In a time of war, young men and women are sent to a secret location to develop a special weapon.
Young men and women, being young men and women, seek closer relationships.
Eventually, children are born.
Leading us here, to a graveside service, where, for one of the last times, the children born in Peenemünde during WWII gather to say goodbye to their parents or their parents’ friends.
Tonight, my wife and I sat down to eat dinner at Cafe Berlin, a local German restaurant open for over 20 years.
Toward the end of our meal, a man and woman sat at an adjoining table.
I recognised them from the graveside service because my college friend, David, had introduced me to the man, Klaus, and his wife, telling them about our college days.
Klaus, along with Dieter and others, are the children of Peenemünde, a group rarely discussed in history.
Klaus was going to follow his father and work for NASA but, rejected by another German scientist who thought hiring Klaus, a child of a fellow German NASA scientist, was showing favoritism, ended up in a career for Owens Corning, instead.
[On a side note, I write this from an Owens Cross Roads zip code — similar sounding name, n’est pas? But no useful correlation.]
I rejected working toward a chemical engineering career and moved away from my hometown; Klaus was rejected from working toward a NASA career, moving away from Huntsville and “all the Germans” with whom his life, from the very beginning, had been closely associated.
These are important discoveries for me as I plot our species’ history back 1000 years from now.
You see, we conjure up our own images when a word like Nazi is spoken but there never was a universal person who represented the word itself.
It was a symbol toward which a large number of people were directed, as all symbols, just like these letters and words, direct us toward certain thought patterns and sets of actions.
The German scientists, engineers, and secretaries who worked at Peenemünde were part of the nationalistic efforts led by a few who espoused Nazi ideals.
History has already spoken for what made people part of Nazi Germany so I will not dwell on the subject here.
We are swept up by historical movements, some of which we see as we participate and some we only see in hindsight.
In Huntsville, just like other parts of the world, military R&D is both a technological and economic leader.
Innovation in military R&D spinoffs and dual-use projects find their way into chemical plants and fiberglass insulation plants, just like the children of Oak Ridge and Peenemünde become employees of them.
Today, I stood at the crossroads of history in a cemetery and wanted to cry out that we live not only in one of the most free countries in the world but the most habitable world within reasonable travel distance, also.
If only you could see what I see 1000 years from now, you’d want to cry out, too, at the nearsighted vanity and selfishness that has substituted for cooperative competition lately.
Do you know what it’s like to remodel your genetic code to make yourself into a whole new species?
Have you seen Homo genius sapiens reproduce itself in sufficient quantity to outpace the reproduction rate of our species?
Do you have a completely reprogrammable organic subsystem that you can swap in and out of your body like a car engine or computer module?
Can you imagine two or three people walking up to each other and melding to become one new person for the sake of the whole rather than the reduced ability of the separate parts?
When the definition of life is so volatile, so interchangeable, we will not care to bother with symbols that held us back in historic measures.
The children of Peenemünde, the children of Oak Ridge, the children of places like Semipalatinsk — they are the true experiments, the offspring who inspired the events occurring right now in front of you, setting us on a path toward a milestone in 13730 days, which leads us closer to our lives, our reconstituted sets of states of energy, 1000 years from now.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again, aren’t I?
I knew I shouldn’t have written another blog entry but storylines like these have a life of their own, finding their way out of the deepest, most secure locations, especially one’s thought sets.
In public, I am a neophyte, a N00B, pretending to barely understand how a smartphone works.
In private, the hidden laboratory churns on, giving me new ideas to share with you here or in the barely-audible whispers we give to a select few on whom we experiment in broad daylight.
Admittedly, this Doctor Heckle/Mr. Jibe persona gets the best of me sometimes, but it is a price I’m willing to pay in my sacrifice to feed the storyline, which feeds upon me, an entity riding my back, weighing me down one moment, and lifting me weightless into the air the next.
Until next time, dear readers, whether it be here or an escapee from my smartphone…
Before we part, let us look ahead a little bit, see where some of my millionaire and billionaire friends have stopped wasting their money on plastic surgery, focusing on more important biological research, growing new versions of themselves, starting with body parts made from personalised stem cells, until they can no longer distinguish their “original” bodies from their newly [re]constituted ones.
Then, one day, their stem cell “children” see where they came from and create whole new lines, new species, that take the concept of sentience to a level never imagined — from interchangeable parts to interchangeable individuals to interchangeable species, and then…?
That’s all for now. My stem cell child is crying for attention. No reason to deny it a well-deserved nurturing moment before asking it to volunteer for an experiment we have yet to dream up together, being of one thought set but different levels of experience with the known universe.
treetrunkdings 