The One

  

 

I recently had the opportunity to post a birthday greeting on a message board for Jimmy Carter, who, at the time of this writing, is 96 years old.  I will always hold a special regard for Jimmy Carter, as he was the first U.S. President that I ever voted for, but more than this, his personal character and integrity did much to restore faith in an office that had been severely tarnished in the public eye after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace two years before Carter’s election.  That was in 1974, and for those of us Baby Boomers who had grown up in the turbulent 1960s and were approaching adulthood in the 1970s, that resignation just tangibly reinforced a general mood of cynicism about those who wielded power in this country.  We who voted for Jimmy Carter saw in him a sort of national savior who would restore our trust in government.  It saddens me to see him regarded now by many as a good man who was an ineffectual or unaccomplished president.  I think that his legacy is underappreciated.  America had been sinking into an economic malaise throughout the 1970s, culminating in both high unemployment and high inflation, but President Carter oversaw the implementation of measures that provided long-term solutions to these problems.  He embraced deregulation as a means of using market forces to reinvigorate stagnant industries, appointed Paul Volker – the man who implemented the stern economic measures necessary to combat inflation – as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and created the Department of Energy in order to directly address the energy crisis that was also raging at that time.  The end of his term was clouded by the taking of American hostages during the Iranian Revolution,  but although their release occurred after the inauguration of his successor, Ronald Reagan, the negotiations that led to this were done by the Carter Administration.  In any case, President Carter was a hero to many of us when he was elected, and for many of us – perhaps even more now than then – he remains a hero to this day.

As I reflect on Jimmy Carter’s life and career, I realize that there have been many times in the history of civilization when somebody appears at a critical moment to solve a crisis, or repair a long-festering problem that has grown to an unbearable magnitude.  For those of us in the 1970’s, Jimmy Carter was “the One” and, in more recent years, President Barack Obama was regarded by many – literally – as “the One”.  He was elected to office in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and played a critical role in ensuring that those who were best able to address the crisis could do so.  But, like Jimmy Carter, I think that he was saddled with unrealistically high expectations by his voters, who hoped that he would not only solve the country’s economic ills, but make great strides in healing more fundamental societal problems, like the nation’s racial divide.  Nevertheless, I think that he will be remembered as one of America’s better presidents, except among those who were and are unable to look past the fact that he is black.  Other American presidents come to mind who were perceived by many as national saviors when they assumed the office.  George Washington had already secured his reputation as the successful leader of the Revolutionary War, and the chairman of the Philadelphia Convention that led to the drafting of the Constitution, but as U.S. President he proved to Americans – and to the world – that a national leader could be elected and peacefully transfer power to a duly elected successor.  He was the original “One” for the United States.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt also comes to mind, having been elected during the Great Depression, and later faced with leading the nation in another world war.  (I exclude Abraham Lincoln from this list.  In retrospect, he was of course a national savior of the highest order, but at the time of his election, he was not considered as such, even among his supporters, and in fact his election was the precipitating cause of the Civil War.)

It we look back into the farthest reaches of the history of human civilization, we find that certain persons appear at critical moments to repair, or reform, or even create new institutions that will enable civilization to continue its forward progress.  Sargon the Great, the founder of the world’s earliest recorded empire, had humble beginnings as the son of a gardener, but after usurping the power of a regional king went on to unite the entire land of Mesopotamia around 2300 B.C., and his method of governance became a model for subsequent rulers over the next 2000 years.  Even earlier, to the east, Menes created the First Dynasty of what would become a long line of pharaonic rulers by uniting Upper and Lower Egypt, around 3000 B.C.  Of course, while remembered for creating and establishing the world’s earliest extensive civilizations, these men were conquerors, but to find one of history’s earliest examples of a liberator, we need only move forward in Egypt’s history to around 1200 B.C., when Biblical tradition tells us that Moses freed the Israelite slaves from Egyptian bondage, and laid the foundation for a new kingdom, with a unique and enduring monotheistic religion.  Moving further forward, to the 6^th Century B.C., we come to the great lawgivers of Classical Greece and Rome, beginning with Solon, who cancelled all of the debts that oppressed much of the people of Athens, and expanded rights of democratic participation beyond the more affluent classes of citizenry.  Although Athens succumbed to tyranny again during Solon’s lifetime, within a generation of his death another great lawgiver, Cleisthenes, oversaw the restoration of representative government and enacted further reforms, so that he is known to posterity as “the father of Athenian democracy”.  Like Moses, who had enjoyed a privileged upbringing in the royal household of Egypt, both Solon and Cleisthenes had aristocratic backgrounds, with power and prestige, but also like Moses, their sympathies had turned to the oppressed within their societies, and they had taken upon themselves a personal calling to relieve that oppression.  And before the end of that same century, in Rome, monarchy would give way to a republic, after the rape of a married woman, Lucretia, by the son of Rome’s king, would inspire a man named Brutus to lead a revolution overthrowing the despotic royal family.  (Lucretia had died from suicide after her rape, adding to the general outrage fomented by the crime perpetrated upon her.  Are we seeing an echo of Lucretia’s martyrdom in present-day Iran, where the senseless murder of a young woman there by a member of the clerical tyranny has led to a general uprising?  The outcome of that revolt is at the time of this writing uncertain.  Perhaps what is still needed there is a leader: their own Brutus – perhaps a female one.)

In the past century the world has seen outstanding examples of “the One”.  As a young man, Mohandas Gandhi had studied law at University College, London, earned a degree, and became a lawyer.  But after moving to South Africa, he soon learned that his degree, his profession, and the wearing of European-style suits would not prevent him from being treated with contempt and condescension by the whites who lived there.  While he had harbored sympathies for the oppressed and underprivileged even before his move to South Africa, these humiliating personal experiences would galvanize him into an activism that would culminate in the liberation of his Indian homeland from the British.  Decades later, in the United States, a young Martin Luther King would witness the same expressions of contempt, condescension, and discrimination that had inspired Gandhi’s activism, and he adopted Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance in the pursuit of his own quest for widespread social reform.  Both men died from an assassin’s bullet, but not before they had left an enduring legacy to the cause of social justice and equality.

But what circumstances invite the arrival of such persons?  Often it is a single galvanizing event, which highlights a growing malaise that has reached the limits of toleration.  In ancient Rome, it was the rape of Lucretia that exposed the ugly arrogance of the ruling monarchical elite, and incited Brutus to lead its overthrow.  In the mid-twentieth century, the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazism and its associated abuses had been going on for years, downplayed and ignored by European powers reluctant to enter into another general war, including Britain, until the invasion of Poland compelled a response.  Britain and France declared war on Germany, but of particular significance was that this, in turn, was the signal event that brought Winston Churchill back from the political “wilderness” into a pivotal role, first as Britain’s Lord of the Admiralty, but eventually as its Prime Minister and wartime leader.  Churchill had warned of the Nazi menace for years, and is now remembered in history as the hero who saved his country, and western civilization in general, from that menace ultimately prevailing.  In the United States in 1955, the abduction, torture, and lynching of a teenaged black boy, Emmett Till, by white racists, and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers by an all-white jury, raised national awareness of the egregious abuses perpetrated against blacks, particularly in the American South, and paved the way for a re-energized civil rights movement that would eventually have Martin Luther King as one of its most vocal and transformative leaders.

Churchill and Roosevelt

Often, it is not an outrage but a general breakdown in some fundamental institution that proves to be the galvanizing event calling for a transformative leader or hero.  Such was the case with the Great Depression of 1939 and Great Recession of 2007, which contributed to the elections of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama, respectively, to the American presidency.  The Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation similarly contributed to the successful election of President Jimmy Carter.  The rise of the great lawgiver Solon in ancient Greece occurred when he was granted special powers by his fellow Athenians in order to reform a dysfunctional government that had regularly succumbed to the competing ambitions of tyrants.  Sometimes a revolution that has already begun finds itself in search of a leader, and if a person of suitable talent and integrity answers that call, as George Washington did in the American Revolution, its chances of success greatly improve.  But at other times no such person emerges – or at least no such person of sufficient talent, vision, and integrity – and the revolution falters, and ultimately fails.  In recent history, this seems to have been the case with the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the 2010s, and the upheavals in Iran in 2017-2018.  There are of course worse outcomes for revolutions that fail to find a leader, and that is when a successful leader emerges who ultimately proves to be one lacking in character.

Such leaders put themselves forward, of course, as saviors and liberators, but, once in power, they become despots and conquerors.  The promises that they offer – to restore order, or prosperity, or former glory – represent a Faustian bargain in which more is lost than is gained, and in fact sometimes leads to general devastation.  This happened during the final decades of republican Rome, in the 1^st Century B.C., when a growing divide between rich and poor created civil disorder, exacerbated by a Senate which pursued interests increasingly divergent from the general populace.  Two competing military leaders – first Marius, and then Sulla – took control of the capital city, and exacted punishing measures against the allies of the other, including executions and the taking of their property.  By the time that Julius Caesar had risen to power, in the middle of that century, with a promise to restore order, the Roman republic was dead, with the Senate a merely token vestige of representative government.  And while Julius Caesar died at the hands of a rebel Roman politician (another Brutus, although unlike his namesake, an unsuccessful revolutionary), the Roman imperial government was eventually secured and permanently established under the rule of his successor, Augustus Caesar.  A drama not unlike this was repeated in the chaotic years of the French Revolution, when the mass executions which occurred during what came to be known as the Terror were followed by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.  And while he initially brought glory, power, and prestige to a renewed France, and fostered innovations in both science and jurisprudence, his personal thirst for power and general domination in Europe produced a succession of wars, ending in the humiliation of France, the decimation of its armies, and the exile of Napoleon himself.

Caesar and Bonaparte are two conspicuous examples of the dark side of “the One”.  Each promised to restore order to a people that had been thrown into a violent, destructive chaos by long-festering economic distresses and the failure of government to address them.  The promise of order, security, and safety under such circumstances is a particularly effective means for men such as these to rise to power.  Others of their kind have resorted to similar promises, generally involving the restoration of a former greatness to their people.  Initially, such leaders seem to make good on these promises, until their actions lead to a final, devastating end.  When Germany, in the wake of its defeat in World War I and the global economic depression that followed a decade later, was left humiliated, militarily weak, and bankrupt, Adolf Hitler promised to restore a former glory that would last for a millennium.  But like Napoleon, his ambition to conquer his European neighbors, including Russia, ultimately led to defeat and devastation.  And here, perhaps, is a clue to spotting the poison in the promises of leaders such as these, who offer a way to bring back a lost grandeur, because the means that they pursue often run directly counter to what genuinely made their people great.  Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Germany was renowned for producing some of the greatest musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers that the world had ever seen, but Hitler did not see its greatness there.  Instead, he found it in darker places, including Germany’s historical tendency to militarism, and its bigotry and prejudices, most notably antisemitism.  One could argue that Chairman Mao, and now Chairman Xi, pursued and are pursuing the same course with the Han Chinese, who have contributed to the world a rich and time-honored tradition of philosophical and spiritual thought in the East, and who have also been renowned for their entrepreneurial acumen.  (My roommate in college, who was Vietnamese, used to tell me stories of his childhood back there, and how if one or two Han Chinese families moved into a village, they would eventually own all of the shops and stores in that village.  It was a back-handed complement, to be sure, but a sincere one.)  The stifling, state-controlled economies of Mao and Xi have all but destroyed freedom of thought and discourse, and have dampened the entrepreneurial spirit that had once thrived in places like Hong Kong, and still does in Taiwan today.  In their avowed aims to make China and the Chinese great again, the programs and policies of these men have actually cut their greatness to the quick.  For those of us who believe that the foundation of America’s particular greatness has always been its diversity, the promises of Donald Trump to “make America great again” seem to be grounded in the same paradoxical pursuit of the opposite.  Rather than embracing diversity, he encouraged suspicion and even hatred of potential immigrants, and condoned racial divisiveness as well.

Sadly, these counterfeit versions of “the One” only seem to be generally recognized as such too late, after their darker designs have been carried out, with great sacrifice, and their promises have been exposed as illusions.  The cost ranges from a loss of liberty, to national shame and disgrace for violent, oppressive acts perpetrated on innocents, to defeat at the hands of external enemies, to widespread devastation and ruin.  It seems that it is a lesson we always fail to learn about these counterfeit saviors, who, like the Antichrist of the New Testament, come with promises of “peace and safety” but always at a soul-stealing price.  Their programs involve the identification of an enemy – internal, external, or both – that must be resisted, overcome, utterly defeated, destroyed.  And it becomes increasingly evident that the counterfeit savior is at least as intent on bringing glory and power to himself as he is on restoring the welfare of his people.  This presents a stark contrast to those nobler incarnations of “the One” who usually tend to their own missions stoically, and often in the face of harsh criticism and even dogged opposition.  Service for them is a personal sacrifice rather than a means of personal exaltation.  Of course, this does not mean that they are flawless human beings.  If one looks closely at any of their lives, almost inevitably there will be some policies or actions of theirs that are open to criticism, or reproach, and perhaps this extends into their personal lives as well.  Their particular brands of heroism might be less regarded as such over the passage of time, when reviews of their characters are subjected to more modern standards.  Even contemporary heroes, such as Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi, had little or no admiration for each other.  But particular crises call for particular heroes, with a set of talents and qualities best suited to address them, and we should be grateful that sainthood is not a general requirement, else their appearance would be even more rare.  The heroic leaders are simply committed to healing a fractured world, with whatever talents they might be able to muster, and in spite of the flaws and limitations that they share with the rest of us.

I know that the standard response to musings like these is that we should not hope for, or look for, a hero of any kind to guide us, or save us, or remedy the most toxic ills that plague our society.  There was a time when that  would have been my own pat response.  But over the course of my life, as I've surveyed the major events that happened during that time, and read about others in more distant times, I've come to the conclusion that at certain critical junctures, we need a good, enlightened leader, who will bring out the best in all of us.  I have a sense that we are at such a critical juncture now.  My hope is that in my country, as well as among the peoples of the world at large, the majority will be able to exercise discretion in finding, and supporting, a noble version of "the One", and reject the ignoble pretenders.

Alien Collaborator

 

Recently I found myself harboring an idea that is very unsettling, not just because of how strange it is, but also because in spite of its strangeness, it seems perfectly logical – a conclusion with solid premises.  The idea is that maybe the time has finally come to sell out the entire human race.

 

A lot of things led me to that idea.  First there’s the global perspective: our accumulation of plastic and other non-degradable wastes, along with record-breaking levels of greenhouse gas emissions and other toxic gases, along with our conversion of ever-growing tracts of land into concrete jungles and asphalt highways, is driving the world into another “mass extinction” event: the sixth in world history.  And what makes this one unique is that it will not be the result of some astrophysical or geological catastrophe; rather it will be directly attributable to human activity.  According to the United Nations’ 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, temperature-increasing greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980, one-third of marine fish stocks are already being harvested at unsustainable levels, and urban areas have doubled since 1992.  With regard to waste, plastic pollution has increased by a factor of 10 since 1980, and 300-400 million tons of heavy metals and other toxic substances are dumped by industrial facilities into the world’s waterways each year.  As a consequence, the report estimates that one million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction.

 

Statistics like these are bad enough, but what makes them worse is the reaction that I have seen among so many people, who take an “ostrich head in the sand” approach and simply call things like emissions-induced climate change myths.  They take comfort in refusing to believe unpleasant facts, and live accordingly.  Even worse, people who are aware of facts like these (which are generally available, and often reported in the media) and acknowledge their severity often do little if anything to support remedying the underlying causes.  These people “check all the right boxes” when it comes to liberal sentiments, lamenting unsustainable practices, and decrying other inhumane practices such as factory farming, but make no significant lifestyle changes to counteract them.  Perhaps they vote for political candidates who parrot their views and concerns and provide vague promises of addressing them, or in some cases even make contributions of money and/or time to organizations that are addressing these problems.  But otherwise, they blithely go on living and behaving as they always have, and apathetically hope that whatever terrible consequences are in store for the planet will happen at some comfortably distant future time – ideally after they are dead and gone. 

 

And then there’s the steady stream of crises and tragedies that show up in the daily news, providing constant confirmation that there will always be people ready to provide us with new horrors and acts of depravity to fill up the next news cycle.  I – like many others, I’m sure – had always harbored a hope that while we as a species are less than perfect, we were improving over time.  We could look back at the 20^th century – when supposedly civilized countries invaded others without provocation, and when demagogues and despots were actually voted into office in popular elections – and assure ourselves that such things are behind us in this, the 21^st century, leaving us only to worry about dictators in 3^rd world countries, or religious fanatic terrorists and regimes in the Middle East.  But events in recent years have gone a long way to dispelling that hope.

 

And finally there’s the personal level:  I regularly see human beings at their ugliest: selfish, gluttonous, impatient, discourteous, and this before I even read about the most recent summary of inane and tragic happenings in the daily news.  Just the other day, a driver passed my car, honking and shouting obscenities at me through his open window, because I had committed the unforgivable sin of making a left turn at a busy intersection that did not have a left turn arrow.  But here is where I have to face the ugly truth:  I have had the same reaction, when I was in that driver’s place, although in my case I generally confined my cursing at the left-turning driver to the inside of my car.  At worst, he only saw me mouthing obscenities at him.  Yes, I have often played the cad myself in social situations, but try to conveniently forget it when I am venting my anger at the misbehaving cads who I encounter. 

 

But my sin goes far beyond that.  In moments of personal clarity, I have to admit to myself that I am also one of those “box-checking liberals" who takes pride in believing high-minded things, while doing little if anything of substance to genuinely address what’s wrong with the world.  I lament greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, while continuing to own and drive a gasoline-powered car, I detest factory farming, while regularly eating foods that come out of those places, and I only recycle what is convenient for me, which amounts to probably only half of my weekly trash.  The despair that I feel as I realize that when talking about the irredeemable shortcomings of the human race, I have to say “we” instead of “they”, has led me to ponder a desperate solution:  If we as human beings are constitutionally unfit to be stewards of this planet, then perhaps something else should be.

 

In a previous blog entry, “Strange Invaders” (March 18, 2018), I remarked upon how it seems that more and more people in high places are acknowledging the possibility that there are intelligent alien species from other worlds who may actually be visiting the Earth.  (Just recently, the U.S. Congress held a public hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena”.)  I added, however, that if any such species make contact with us in an overt sort of way, even with benign intentions, the general result upon the human population could be disruptive, and even traumatic, as long-held cherished beliefs about our unique and perhaps exclusive existence as intelligent beings in the universe would have to be dispelled.  But I have begun to seriously wonder if such a traumatic contact would actually be the lesser of two evils – the greater evil being that we, the human race, just continue to do what we’re doing now: driving the planet into another mass extinction event, if not the entire destruction of the ecosystem. 

 

As I pondered this, I remembered one of those cheesy science fiction movies from the 1950s that featured invading space aliens.  This one was called It Conquered the World, and the invaders were from the planet Venus.  But what was unique about this movie was that the aliens were getting help, from a human collaborator, who was in secret contact with them through his ham radio set.  (The movie was remade in an even campier form about ten years later in the movie Zontar, the Thing from Venus.)  The collaborator conspired with the aliens because he believed that they were coming with benign intentions, only to eventually discover that he was deceived.  At the time these movies came out, it probably seemed that this otherwise intelligent man had made a recklessly foolish gamble.  But now I wonder:  Could that character have been onto something?  Given what we now know about how wretchedly self-destructive humanity actually is, might it actually be a noble thing to reach out to an extraterrestrial invader and put oneself in its service?

Calling Zontar

 

As in those science fiction movies, a human collaborator would be taking a gamble, of course.  The alien race’s intentions toward us might be less than benevolent.  But assuming that such a race would almost certainly have the capability to destroy all life on the planet if it wanted to, one would also have to assume that it could have easily done so already.  There must be something about the living ecosystem that it cares about, or that at least is valuable to it for pragmatic reasons, so really only humanity is at risk, as a toxic, overly prolific, planet-suffocating pest that must be cleared away or effectively controlled.  I see a range of potential actions that this alien race would take toward us, ranging from sinister to benign:

 

• Completely eradicate the human species, thereby allowing the rest of the ecosystem on planet Earth to restore and heal itself.
• Exterminate all but a remnant of the human race, which is kept small enough so as to pose no real risk to the rest of life on planet earth.  This remnant might also be regulated and controlled or – in the worst case – enslaved by the alien overlords.  Human history offers grisly precedents for such a policy, as when the Spanish Conquistadores made slaves of the native populations of Hispaniola and Cuba in their own homelands, forcing them to work in gold mines rather than their own farms, until more than half of the population died of disease, starvation, and overwork.
• Allow the human race to remain intact in their entirety, but closely controlled and supervised – and again, in the worst case, enslaved – by the alien conquerors.
• Exert only a “light hand” of control over the human population: in the most benign case providing positive guidance and instruction on how to be more responsible caretakers of the planet, and only intervening forcefully in the cases of war, despotism, or flagrant neglect.

 

The hope, of course, is that those of us who have chosen to sell out the human race by being the aliens’ spies and collaborators will be given some sort of reward in any of these scenarios.  In the most sinister case, for example, we might be the last to be exterminated, or even allowed to live out our natural lives after the lives of all of the others have been extinguished.  We might even be given the exciting privilege of witnessing the genetic alteration of some other species on the planet: as the aliens accelerate its evolution, so that it can take over the human beings’ role as stewards of the earth, succeeding where the humans have so abysmally failed.  In the relatively benign scenarios involving simply conquest and oversight (and possible enslavement), it is hoped that we turncoats would be given supervisory duties as proxies for the conquerors in managing the human inhabitants, along with perhaps other material privileges and rewards.

 

But what exactly, would we be expected to do before and during the conquest phase, as collaborators?  I assume that it would be pretty much the same thing that traitors and spies have done throughout human history:  providing potentially useful intelligence to the alien combatants whenever possible, while sowing confusion and disinformation domestically, and, when the battle and invasion commences, endeavoring to demoralize the defenders, and sabotaging their defenses.  We would essentially be part of a “fifth column”: the historical term used to describe a group of people trying to subvert a country from within, usually in favor of a foreign enemy or invader.  Most famously, pro-Nazi fifth column activities were evident in many countries in the years leading up to and during World War II.

 

Nazi Supporters in Britain

Assuming that I am not alone in my planned treason, or that my idea catches on, my fellow conspirators and I could even form a secret social network, where we could swap ideas on how specifically to spread misinformation, confuse and demoralize the human population, commit more effective acts of sabotage, and provide more direct assistance to the invaders.  For any who are contending with occasional feelings of remorse, or even self-loathing, for what we are doing, the rest of us can serve as a support group, lifting their spirits and reinvigorating their enthusiasm for our project.  Our social network could even include a dating app, since it is very possible that after the successful invasion and occupation, we will be the sole progenitors of any human remnant that is allowed to survive.

French Female Collaborators with Shaven Heads

 

Becoming a traitor, or one of a group of traitors, is always a risky business of course.  If the other side loses, or is eventually repelled after an attempted conquest or invasion, then there are always violent reprisals against those who have been exposed as secret collaborators, or who openly supported the enemy.  After the liberation of France from the Nazis in World War II for example, women who had cavorted with the German invaders had their heads publicly shaven.  And those men and women who did more than cavort with the occupiers, and actually colluded with them, were put on trial for treason, and thousands were executed.  But in a war against an extraterrestrial species that is technologically advanced enough to reach the Earth in the first place, it seems that any conflict with them would be extremely one-sided in favor of the aliens.  It is a common plot device in many science fiction books, movies, and television programs (e.g., War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Mars Attacks, Falling Skies) that after a long and seemingly hopeless struggle against extraterrestrial invaders, some 11^th-hour solution pops up that saves humanity in the end.  Realistically, however, I think it’s safe to say that any struggle against such invaders would be hopeless from beginning to end, and ultimately futile, leaving us traitors with little or nothing to worry about in the way of reprisals from our fellow human beings.  Our only concern would be that the conquerors who we conspired with stay true to their word and give us whatever we had been promised for betraying our species.

 

Having excited myself with the thought of being able to bail out of this train wreck called human civilization and even get some special bonuses for doing so, the only remaining question for me had become how to reach out to the prospective invaders.  I don’t think it will require anything as quaint as a ham radio set, hidden away in some shack, as in those science fiction movies.  If there really are extraterrestrials visiting the earth, then all of our communications are probably already being monitored and analyzed, so perhaps even just writing this blog will be enough to get me an invitation to become a traitor (if they're looking for one). 

 

But in the midst of my excitement, I had one of those nasty, jarring thoughts (an “epiphany”, you might call it) that often sucks the life and enthusiasm out of a pet project right when it is about to get off the ground:  If these aliens have some sort of a moral compass, as apparently they would have if they were interested in saving the earth’s ecosystem, would they really want to ally themselves with those rats who were willing to sell out their fellow humans at the drop of a hat – even if this meant condemning them to mass extermination – just for a few personal perquisites and advantages?  Or instead would the extraterrestrials want to make common cause with those human beings who resolutely have refused to throw in the towel, and continue to do whatever they can to reverse the trajectory we have been on toward general destruction?  I can’t say that I personally have much hope for saving the world around me, but should I at least make a more concerted attempt at becoming someone worthy of saving?  (As in the words of the 13^th-century Persian poet Rumi, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.  Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”) 

 

There is always the risk, of course, that if I hold off from my treasonous plan, I will someday watch the Great Invasion in progress anyway, and, while observing the invaders’ human collaborators enjoying their leadership roles or other rewards, bitterly remembering that I had thought of it first – of throwing my lot in early with the aliens, to win their favor.  It will be very painful to helplessly watch as others enjoy my rewards – the ones that should have come to me, if only I’d stuck to my plan of early betrayal.

 

Nevertheless – for the time being, anyway – I have decided to put that plan on hold.  I just can’t shake the nagging idea that – whether there are really aliens or not – it’s better in the long run to stick to the high road, even if that road doesn’t seem to be getting high enough . . . fast enough.