----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Seay" <entheogens at yahoo.com>
Justification can be found for all things, and I am sure even if the Becker bros. would witness such a place, they would defend it somehow (probably with the worn out argument ("Who kills more people, North Korea or US imperialism?"). After all, their entire identites are plugged into the Workers World Party. Of course, we all share this problem of nursing, defending our pet ideas/theories...our cognitive dissonance. One would hope, though, that such butchery would wake us up and turn us around...but often it does not.
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An unopposable thumbs down for evolution
Euan Ferguson Sunday February 1, 2004 The Observer
Hating can be tiring. Hating can be hard, hard work. Having to wake up every morning and remember that you must spend your life loathing someone, or something, being constantly repulsed by one aspect of your or someone else's life, is surely so depressingly time-consuming that it could only properly be contemplated if you were either Alastair Campbell or Jimmy Savile's mirror.
So I think we should forgive Georgia, and the Georgians, whose state education officials have just announced, 79 years after the Scopes 'monkey trial', that the word 'evolution' is to be removed from the curriculum. It is, according to schools superintendent Kathy Cox, a 'buzz word that causes a lot of negative reaction' and they'd quite like to retain the right to teach, instead, that God made the world in seven days - pausing only, according to one unaccountably underquoted passage from Hutton, at one point near teatime on Tuesday to take some sound advice on planning and strategy from a younger Tony Blair.
Too hard to hate them, and it's hard, too, to loathe a group of people quite so innocent in the ways of the world, so sweetly premodernist, that they can't yet do irony and thus fail, delightfully, to appreciate the rich layers lying behind the fact that the people in this world who are most fervently opposed to the idea of evolution are so often the same ones who will most benefit from it when, one fine day, they grow opposable thumbs.
I appreciate, too, that it can be mighty hard to go to the zoo, watch some blue-nosed simian whacking off in a bucket of dung and then make the instant link to humankind, unless, of course, you're visiting Cromer, but I have to assume that Darwin was absolutely right, if only because he had such a damn good beard.
So he was right, and the Georgian goons who want us to burst a few buboes, flatten out the globes and lurch back to happy old pre-Enlightenment days are thuddingly wrong, and yet I don't hate them, not them as such. I hate an abstract, instead. I hate the inevitability of it all, and I hate what man passes on to man.
Think about Georgia, modern Georgia. It has planes. It has toasters. It manages to encompass the most triumphant successes of civilisation, freedom, taste and beauty in one perfect modern package, ie cheerleaders. And it has people, running its schools, who weren't even born in the April of 1925 - when John Scopes was unsuccessfully prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution - who now see this as a miscarriage of justice.
And this is the truly depressing bit: that some of us can come such a tiny way, after the greatest century of upheaval and progress this planet has known, and we can only blame the parents, and the very idea of family. How else do you explain a Glaswegian teenager, born around the time of John Major's accession and with no more real idea of Irish political history than he has of Peruvian nose-flute playing, kicking another near to death because of the colour of his shirt? How else do you rationalise white children in Oldham - just children, once babies, once ready to learn - growing up with such a hatred of anyone other-skinned that their town has become a byword for intolerance, mendacity and cant?
And, terrifyingly, I seem to have managed to argue myself quite around, and am beginning to doubt Darwin. The opponents of evolution need only stand up, and be counted, and let it be judged how much humanity has, truly, evolved. Maybe they have a point after all.