Knowing Everything is for the Young

When I was young I had the certainty that only comes from illusion. Now I am old and I have the certainty that almost all knowledge is merely an illusion. Someone much smarter than I coined the above two sentences. Anyone with a modicum of self- awareness knows the truth of the statements. This morning I was reading a three column article written by a college student. This particular youngster had recently spent five hours in a city in Europe and was writing that the city did not meet her expectations. The city has a history of more than a thousand years and it is amusing that someone with less than twenty years on the planet, nevertheless felt qualified to author such a lengthy piece. Equally amusing is whom the local paper selects to publish. The same paper that supports a bicycle path from downtown to the airport so that commuters can pedal to their flights. Global warming could be slowed if only I would load my luggage on a ten speed? However, it does make as much sense as most of their editorials.

I lived in Alaska for a number of years. I spent several years in Anchorage and later lived out on the Aleutian Chain. I fished commercially for salmon and flew extensively throughout the state. Given all of that, I still cannot speak definitively about our "Last Frontier." It has been years since I have been there and while there I only saw a tiny portion of our largest state. While I was in the "Land of the Midnight Sun," many folks from the rest of America and the world would come up for a week's visit and then go home and write a book about Alaska and what was best for the state. It was infuriating to the local folks to be lectured to by people who had zero knowledge of their home.

Everyday I run into people just out of their teens who are absolutely certain that have all the answers. Recently I said to one of them, "You do realize that by the time your are sixty, almost every thing you know will be proven to be untrue?" I always get the same response, it is the same response I had to doddering old folks, they look at me with a mixed feeling of pity and incredulity. I mean, hey, if in the year 2070, Florida is under water from Orlando southwards and if Palatka is on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, then they will be proven right. However, I am fairly confident that this too shall pass, the world will not be consumed by carbon gases and there will always be another catastrophe just over the horizon.

Does anyone remember the book, "The Late Great Planet Earth?" The author, Hal Lindsey, predicted the world would end during the 1980's. His premise was based on his interpretation of the Bible. He believed the scriptures to say that one generation after the establishment of the state of Israel, (1948) the world would end in fire. (A generation in the Bible is forty years) Note to Mr. Lindsey, it is now late in the year 2009.

Another prophet of doom was the distinguished scientist Paul Erlich. In his best seller of impending doom, "The population Bomb" published in 1968 he boldly predicted world wide starvation and also said all petroleum stocks would be exhausted by the mid 1990's. All creditable geologists now acknowledge there is more oil still beneath the surface than has been found in the past one hundred years. Oh, do you know what Professor Erlich speciality was? Lepidoptera, that's right, butterfly's. Scared the hell out of everyone, lectured at colleges, went on talk shows. He was years ahead of Al Gore, no less well informed, but years ahead.

Don't misunderstand, I know there are going to be upheavals, maybe even on a planet- wide scale. The ice age was a reality but it happened without any of us humans. The dust bowl of the 1930's was absolutely reality but there were not enough vehicles to have been the cause. I have seen the Grand Canyon and heard the park ranger's lecture on what happens when water meets rock for a mere three hundred million years. I do not think even Methuselah lived quiet that long so humans were not culpable for that either. The dinosaurs came and went without human intervention. Yet still, our mother planet endures.

So what is my point? As usual there is not one. I am only smiling at what I perceive as our human arrogance and need for self importance. In the long run I think I haven't learned much as I have gotten older. Mostly I have unlearned a great deal of nonsense, most of it centering around how much I know. I think it is important to unlearn things and from time to time say "I don't have a clue." Maybe the title of this posting should have been "I don't have a clue." because you know what? I don't.