Isn’t it strange how the world has changed in so many ways with the increase in global population? Like the way young people now flock to mass groupings, like Spring Break, for instance, and act like wild idiots and get all violent. Like lab rats become overpopulated, and homosexuality and violence increase. I look at those mass gatherings and they look like rats to me. Same mental picture.
Wonderful things have happened and terrible things. Soon we’ll have moon bases, then the first Moon City, and Mars colonies. Technology is about to take a truly giant leap forward with the advent of AI. Wars are springing up and spreading in Europe and the Middle East. The good and the bad go on, with all new ways of doing them.
The world is covered in concrete and asphalt now, Woody Guthrie’s “Ticky Tacky Little Boxes” are in tens of thousands of neat suburban rows spread across the land where forests grew, deer, elk and buffalo ranged and indigenous people hunted. All in the space of a few measly hundred years. My great grandfather saw it, leading wagon trains across the plains to Montana. When I was young there were vast farmlands. Now we’re flying around in rocket ships and eating stuff from Mexico. No one spoke Spanish, now it’s our second language.
Most small towns in America are still pretty safe places to live. Crime is very low where the population is low because you can’t be as anonymous as people in big cities. In a small town you look at people and pay attention to who lives near you, in a big city you pretend you’re alone, you ignore those around you on the street, it’s a mental trick to give yourself more space than you actually have.
I could ramble on here, it’s the mood I’m in, so I’ll stop with this, that the changes in the world don’t show a guiding hand. If there’s a plan, any sort of coordination, I can’t see it. The growth of technology, of population, all the changes have been haphazard. Humanity follows a path of least resistance, events and circumstances create our future no matter how much we think we’re doing the creating. Of course, that’s also why watching it all happen is so fascinating to me. Like a wonderful kaleidoscope, with myriads of tiny little baubles shifting and glittering as it’s turned. Just when you think it’s old, it’s not, it’s all strange and new.