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Did Michael Jackson move us toward peace?
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Michael Jackson and art -- infinity in an inch
Jackson's 'midnight hour' no thriller
“…we are the world. Make it a better place.”
Mankind evolved from primordial mud and animals killing and making war to survive and became victors in the survival-of-the-fittest game.
Morality evolved as well. From the days of microorganisms. It was not just invented by civilized humans and it certainly does not come exclusively from religious teaching. It comes from the trial and error of creatures who learned that cooperation sometimes worked more effectively, that compassion and sharing were better in the long run.
Our morality tells us, above all, that we should not kill others. But we make all kinds of exceptions. In America, those include self-defense, going to war, and punishment for capital crime. In other countries, under other belief systems, murder can be excused if your sister looked provocatively at a man across the street, your wife’s parents don’t ante up more dowry money, you criticized the ruling power, etc.
In reality, we use a vast array of excuses to kill each other. It’s the animal in the brain. The protective fight that evolved before the prefrontal cortex –the reasoning part of the brain.
The easiest way for a Hitler-type to grab power is to manufacture an enemy and convince followers they must fight that enemy. He, of course, will lead them in that fight. We’ve had wars since the beginning of human history.
What does this have to do with Michael Jackson?
In recent history, some humans came up with an interesting notion – peace. It sounds like a good idea. Mothers and fathers weep over their young warrior’s blood alike, no matter what political side of the war they happened to find themselves. As my scientist husband, Howard Bloom, has often said, the dream of peace only seems new. Cooperation has always been part of the structure of the cosmos. A proton is a cooperative threesome of quarks. An atom is a cooperative band of protons, neutrons and electrons. A galaxy is a cooperative empire spread out over vast distances of space. And although galaxies “clobber and gobble” another, galaxies also gather by the thousands in vast cooperative super communities known as galaxy clusters. Bacteria need each other to survive, as do ants, bees, wolves, chimpanzees, and humans. But we gather in groups and battle other groups. The battles mode is as old as galaxies. Our efforts toward peace are only as old as a blink of an eye in the cosmic sense. Is it hopeless?
In some cultures, the more you kill the more heroic, and therefore beloved, you are. In some cultures there are no peace movements. Civilization often seems a luxury of only a small part of the world.
I was getting to what all this has to do with Michael Jackson.
Consider the 19 Thriller lyrics that include the line “You’re fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight.”
Although written by Rod Temperton, Michael’s performance harnesses the animal in the brain for pleasure and play, not for killing, maiming, and torture.
It can be the same with the violence in video games that bring so much fretfulness to mothers from here to South Korea. We cannot suppress the animal instincts that came down in our DNA through the millennia. We HAVE them. We will have them for a long time to come. Maybe we will find a way to eliminate them. But we need time. Time we won’t have if we don’t find peaceful outlets for it because our weapons of mass destruction are going retail.
Al-Qaeda and other fanatics want us (the pro-science, western civilization types) wiped off the face of the earth and may not care if they go with us. We are catching their keystone cops-like bombing attempts int his country – so far. But they must have a learning curve. The Taliban presses in on the government of Iraq. The Taliban, by sheer numbers may overtake it. What would the Taliban do with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and its Agosta-B stealth submarines, which can carry nuclear missiles? The universe’s tool of creativity is mass destruction…..
My personal belief is that we should store records of the accumulated learning of mankind on another planetary body – just in case. There is much to be done and little time to accomplish it, perhaps, if we are to avert that “in case’ scenario.
Odd as it may seem, a very eccentric man with musical talent and tortured lifestyle, the man with the compulsion to change his face and skin color, who had to endure a lot of trouble for his bizarre personality, was showing us the way for the past 25 years at least.
In PYT (Pretty Young Thing) he sang: “…we are the world. Make it a better place.”
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See a great Michael Jackson slide show here
More coverage on the death of Michael Jackson
http://www.examiner.com/category-michael_jackson.html
More coverage on the death of Farrah Fawcett
http://www.examiner.com/category-farrah_fawcett.html
