The Age of Enlightenment

By Dan Barber

One of our ancestors discovered that they could use a rock as a tool to crack open nuts and smush up fruit, vegetables and berries for the toothless old clan grandpa… the birth of the stone-age.  

Then someone got tired of just eating veggies, nuts and berries so they added meat to the diet. If anthropologists have it right, this act caused our ancestors brains to grow a bit larger... life once again got a little easier. A new method of food preparation probably happened when someone accidentally dropped the leg of Ground Sloth into the boiling hot springs outside the cave. By the time they found a stick big enough to scoop it out of the scalding water the meat was cooked, and it tasted better after soaking in the hot springs.  

It was then discovered that you could tie the rock tool to the big stick to give a little more power in cracking bigger nuts, and cooked sloth bones to retrieve the high protein marrow. The larger brain led our ancestors to invent even better tools with the sloth bone splinters, and according to the experts in evolution, our ancestors were now able to speak, and started thinking in the abstract… life again got a little easier.  

Then we started speeding along the evolutionary path through the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Middle Ages, Dark Ages etc.

Presently we are in the Silicon Age… I don’t know if life got any easier, but definitely more complicated.  In my humble opinion, life is ever evolving in many different ways in every second of every minute of every hour of every day. 

Some might define their existence by the quality of their life… they measure their meaningful being with skills developed to obtain money or material things. Others search out the spiritual or mystical meaning of their birth by meditating or attending church or participating in retreats in the desert for only $800 per person per day, where they can wallow in a mud puddle with other naked people… or they might even pay a motivator thousands of dollars to guide them to a better understanding of themselves… hopefully without dying in a sweat lodge in an Arizona desert.  I might even start my own motivating business if I could figure out a way to get people to pay me to chase them around the block with a stick to motivate them into doing something. I would have to get a golf cart or scooter because I'm too old to run anymore...Also, I would need a business license so I wouldn’t get arrested for assault.

Uncountable generations of people have hoped for something better than just life since our first ancestors climbed out of the mire of ignorance or the community mud puddle and started to think perhaps there was something better than just living.

Maybe what we have is the best there is… Didn’t God create the heavens and earth?  Maybe when we die we get to replay our earthly experiences over and over again in the realm that God created.  Look around you, what you see could be your heaven… or your hell.  We do have free will to live our lives as we wish -- good or bad. Maybe we should strive to live everyday as if it were the last… sooner or later it will be.  What will your inventory of life experience hold?

      

Those with inflated egos might believe that their life has to have a mystical meaning. They probably can’t or won’t grasp the thought that their parents just had sex, which resulted in conception.  Most of us, me included, just don’t want to dwell upon that disturbing scenario.

My advice…when your children, who believe they are the reason for the universe, grow up, and they try to blame their neurosis on you, just tell them “Your problems are due to a genetic disorder that you inherited from your birth parents”… then walk away.  That bit of information will probably keep them occupied for a while, and they might leave you alone, if that’s what you wish.

      

Even the government is increasingly trying to improve our quality of life or maybe even attempting to define life by telling us what we should or shouldn’t do… from who we should fall in love with (now resolved for the most part except for the legalization of polygamy... the next civil rights case) to what we should eat or drink (still being debated).  

If we were born sometime before 1950, the chances are, our mothers drank and smoked while pregnant with us… most of us turned out OK.  Some of us even went on to become productive citizens who put man on the moon, and discovered that mothers who smoke and drink during pregnancy are potentially harming their unborn children.

We improved society by inventing cable TV so the children of the future wouldn’t be deprived of unlimited cartoon channels like we were… we invented computers and video games so children also wouldn’t have to use their own imaginations for entertainment purposes.   We even created fruity breakfast cereal without even having to use one bit of fruit! We invented fast-food and quickie-lube places for our fast-paced lives and instant gratification.  We even remodeled the old movie palace with the seats covered in plush red velvet into the multi-plex theater complex today, where several shoe-boxed shaped black boxes offer several of Hollywood’s latest releases and endless sequels of past hits, instead of the regular double feature.

     

We cemented in the dangerous creeks running through our neighborhoods and turned them into storm drains to prevent flooding and to keep children from drowning in their favorite swimming hole… they were becoming way too polluted for fishing or swimming anyway.  In their places we built huge water parks with death defying slides with young lifeguards, earning the minimum wage, hanging around talking to other young men or women and waiting to save a child from drowning… all of this for only a nominal entrance fee.

      

After Vietnam we eliminated the draft so now there is no need for junior to move out of Mom and Dad’s comfortable home and seek a deferment from the draft by going to college… after all there are over 100 cable channels to choose from and a multitude of video games to play, and thanks to our lawmakers junior can even stay on his parents health insurance policy until he reaches 26-years of age. Jobs are also plentiful, if junior attended a four-year college. There are the water park life guard openings, lube technicians, or at one of the fast food places on darn near any corner of any city in the country, of course the minimum of a Bachelors degree would be required to compete for those entry level jobs.  Life’s not so bad, is it?

       

Many find life so enjoyable they want to extend it for as long as possible by only eating a healthy diet of uncooked fresh vegetables, fruit, berries and nuts smushed up by an electric food processor into a smoothie, "no meat please!" Also no teeth needed to enjoy this modern meal... in addition it can be consumed at a clothing optional restaurant somewhere in the Bay Area of California.

I'm hoping Heaven will be reruns of good times... I'll met ya'all at the old swimming hole under the Azua Avenue Bridge, or the California Oak Tree grove on Chaulk Hill.