Your mother is a cannibal.

Mother Nature, that is. Whether expressed as energy or matter, nature’s ever-shifting forms become each other. If you slow energy down, as in debris from a Big Bang, you get matter. Speed matter up, as in decay after death, you get energy. Science long-ago discovered that matter and energy are indestructible but interchangeable. I sometimes think of Creation as a pool of light energy in perfect equilibrium until some motive, will or purpose (God by any name) stirs it with a metaphorical finger, slowing it down until light takes on an identity of matter. In local terms on nano-dot Earth, evolutionists trace life as the sun’s energy giving rise to plants which give rise to grazing animals which give rise to predators. I just see it as evolutions eating evolutions over billions of years. Thus, I tend to think long term about the survival of our planet.

I mean very long term beyond the interests of any vain species like us. The planet doesn’t need humans to survive, and we can’t really do much beyond messing up our own brief tenure. We’ve been here for 0% of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year-old history (.004% to be exact). A sort of horseshoe crab (trilobite) dominated the planet 400 times our whole existence. So, when we gnash our teeth about saving the planet, we’re really just talking about making it a kind of museum for our cameo moment center-stage. No objections from me about survival, mind you…but we’re kind of chauvinistic about it, egocentric, sentimental, nostalgic. We tend to be like a young person coming back from college and getting hysterical because our bedroom with all its debris isn’t exactly as we left it. Planet Earth will still be here for about 5 billion more years, whether we get to choose the wallpaper or not and populated by whatever evolutions win the competition. Again, I have nothing against personal survival, with or without the furniture and supporting cast with which I’m familiar. I just want to frame the bigger picture accurately before offering some perspective about this troubling era we live in.

Physical evolution may take its own sweet time, but the evolving balance between thinking and feeling turns on a dime, it seems. A single generation can change the equation between the rational and the emotional, if they are raised in a world starkly different from that of their parents. Toffler’s book FUTURE SHOCK predicted something like that in 1970. The pace of change, reliance on media, technological control and manipulation of information, all have made a regression to emotional dominance almost inevitable. With genetic programming and AI just around the corner, we may be exiting the Cartesian world of free, independent thinking and adaptive humans.

In my view, we have been weakening ourselves as a species for generations. You can argue about when it started, but for me the alarms went off in the 60s. That’s when the children of the bomb became the children of pacification. It was overdue, really. We were staring into the face of nuclear annihilation post WWII – an arms race and a competitive world where an ethos of stress and fear stirred a reaction among the young. “Make love, not war,” was their mantra. It quickly bloomed on campuses as a message of flower power and non-competitiveness. Rejecting the rat race, not being up-tight, Woodstock, drugs, unisex – anything that overthrew stress was in – “if it feels good, do it!” But every revolution has excesses, and “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out” became one extreme of the bell curve, a visceral hate of hippies the other. It was the beginning of a divide that still produces knee-jerk reactions today.

In my novels, I lumped both the extremes into caricatures. There were the old school junkyard dogs who pushed national defense and subscribed to Horatio Alger values from the Gilded Age such as personal responsibility and hard work (enshrined in novels like Strive and Succeed, Shifting for Himself and Strong and Steady); and there were the let’s-all-hold-hands-at-the-equator people who sang Kumbaya and flocked to communes. Satire aside, I believed then and still believe that the success of our adaptable species requires both forces (junkyard dogs and Kumbaya hand-holders) to be in some kind of balance. When neither gets their wish list granted, we get some of the benefits of both and less of the downside of either -- not a gilded but a Golden Age. Why are both necessary? Because you can’t survive and thrive in a stagnant world that doesn’t reward excellence or hone your capacity to compete, adapt, or meet unforeseen threats and rogue forces; while, on the other hand, if you don’t temper competitive skills, growth and preparedness with compassion, nurturing and empathy, you are just a machine without a soul. The virgin and the dynamo, Henry Adams called it in 1900 – the interface of humanism and technology.   

All that said, simplistic labeling that sometimes brands conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats as rational vs emotional is grossly unfair. Both sides of the equation – competitive responsibility and spiritual humanism – are found in either political ideology. It’s the degree, the proportion, the emphasis and the order in each party that differs. Thinking and feeling are not orphans to be claimed by one political parent…or a village. They do, however, tend to follow pure gender archetypes. The divide by gender is remarkably constant over decades. Roughly 55% of women vote Democrat while 55% of men vote Republican; 45% of women vote Republican while 45% of men vote Democrat. Do each of us have a 55-45 split between our reason and our emotions in how we approach everything? Yin and Yang? Inner woman, inner man? Adam and Eve? Brains informing feelings vs feelings informing brains?

For me, those early alarms that went off in the 60s have seen the collateral damage I feared fulfilled. It was a decade that saw some good things in clarifying values that were already codified in law and the Constitution. Music, movies, theater, Norman Lear TV, books – entertainment is almost by definition emotion-driven and it brought our attitudes closer to our ideals. But the cultural revolution was already metastasizing into an activist news media and celebrity journalism. Opposing that has been my mantra in the decades ever since as networks became progressively more emotionally toxic and biased. That swerve Left has been a slippery slope ever since: political correctness, revisionist history, advanced socialism, Marxism, communism, demonizing traditional values and language, censor/cancel/cleanse, equity and CRT trojan horses in education to name a few Leftist initiatives. Collectively the goal is the end of the American experiment, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of a Golden Age of an incentive-based free market economy that believes in the abilities and character of each individual and in rewarding effort. In place of freedom and incentive, womb to tomb paternalistic government offers “free” guarantees billed to the future. The statue and stature of the Renaissance individual has been torn down and replaced by heroes for whom the rule of law is too high a bar, it seems. Ironies abound: killing the golden goose; making real victims out of faux victims; women, who fought so long for freedom from being “kept” by males, now enabling an Uber-patriarch government to run their lives and fortunes. And the greatest irony of all: we were the first keystone species to be aware of our role in the survival of others species, but we’ve grown not just indifferent but hostile to the evolutionary assets that preserve our own.

Methinks Mother Nature is eating yet another evolution…

A dozen photos below of Mom Nature doing her thing between meals out on the water (that’s not a cloud above my head in #5…my brain is smokin’).

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan