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Mansion in the Sky

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Many film classes still begin with Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece that warned us of the dream of techno-utopia — where the few above lived in comfort while the many below kept the engines running. The industrial complex’s effort to sell us the promise of salvation through technology is not new. Nearly a century later, we’re still building Metropolis — only now the cathedrals of power are made of glass and data instead of steel and steam. At the VivaTech Conference in Paris on May 23, 2024, Elon Musk said: “AI will be able to do everything. In a benign scenario, probably none of us will have a job, but we’ll have universal high income. There’ll be no shortage of goods or services. In other words, everyone will be wealthy.” The line ricocheted across the planet: CNBC, The Guardian , Reuters , Fortune , The New York Post , Hindustan Times , even Al Jazeera. Every outlet ran it within hours, as if he had announced the Second Coming. Like Delta Dawn, we can’t stop wearing the...
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2045: A Space Fallacy

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At Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Bezos said, “In the next couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space… I don’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now.” Of course. Let’s sell people paradise dream-share condos,  offer them a glossy brochure for the sky, and while they’re looking up, let the ground burn quietly beneath their feet. This new propaganda reminds me of a bumper sticker I used to see a lot in the early 2000s: Earth First , We’ll Strip Mine the Other Planets Later. I don’t know what was on Bezos’s mind when he said what he said, but the numbers are staggeringly against him, even for a sci-fi-crazed nut like me. The arithmetic is brutal. A million human bodies weigh about seventy thousand tons. Lifting them into orbit would take thousands of rockets and millions of tons of fuel, about ten days of all the jet fuel the United States burns. And once they’re up there, you’d need millions more tons of food, air, and water ...
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Monoclonal human beings? No, we are not

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  I want to start with a family I know well. Coastal elites would probably call them redneck. They drive big trucks , they hunt, go to rodeos , they vote Republican every single time. MAGA conservative . The kind of people we’re told are anti-immigrant, anti-other, anti-change...... We hear that story on repeat. But here’s what’s also true. One member of this family told me about a young Indian immigrant who worked at their local gas station. They spoke about him with real warmth — about their small daily exchanges, how the man was doing, whether he seemed lonely. The kindness was not for show. They even invited him to their family Thanksgiving. Yet the attendant’s boss, the owner of the store, also Indian, had warned him not to talk with Americans because “they’re mean.” That little triangle of mistrust and tenderness says everything. Every side is both right and wrong, kind and suspicious, generous and guarded. The need to box other people is everywhere. We all do it — conser...
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Nirvana Sells

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  We reach for nirvana because life keeps breaking our heargt. Falling out of love is hard. Divorce is hard. Parents dying is hard. Getting fired is hard. Being betrayed by friends is hard. Being cheated out of your ancestral home by your brother is hard. Poverty is hard. Disease is hard. Getting old is hard. And above all, dying is hard. The sense of powerlessness at how life shows up is hard. And so we start looking for a doorway out — or at least for somewhere softer to stand. Over millennia, many cultures have created their own place of non-suffering and bliss. In Buddhism , there is Nirvana. In Hinduism , Moksha . In Christianity , Heaven . In Islam , Jannah , so on and so forth.  Different names, same promise: an end to suffering, no pain or death, a glorious afterlife where no battle is lost. In other words, every religion acknowledges the challenge of existence, the suffering of the daily grind, the weight of hope and expectation, the collapse into failure and despo...
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Bigger Guns?

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  About six years ago, in a Southern herbalist class, I was talking with a police officer. We were on the subject of violence, escalation. I asked her, if there are Uzis on the street, is the answer really to get a bigger gun? She said yes. Just like that. Serious. She could not see another way. And if even the police see it this way, then who is doing the systemic thinking ? That’s the crock. No one is. Everyone is stuck in self-protection. Or profit — sell the guns, sell the protection, sell the ideas, more regulation or less, doesn’t matter. There is always money in fear . And peace — well, peace just disappears in that economy. Schools now are a multimillion-dollar protection industry. Lockdown drills, bulletproof doors, security contracts. Churches too. Pastors boasting that their congregations have armed men ready during worship. The idea of “bigger guns” is not fringe anymore. It’s normal. And then Charlie Kirk died. I posted something to a small group of young people...
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Afterlife: Do We Need It?

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  Yes, we do — as much as we need this life, severely, passionately, undeniably. We cannot do without this life, and so we cannot let go of it. The hope of an afterlife is nothing more than holding on to the life we already love so much. We are human, after all. I always said I was not afraid of death, only of dying. Whether I lived or died felt like no big deal — the lightness of being and not being. But it was not so light. One night I watched a documentary called How to Die in Oregon . The first person we meet is Roger, who had chosen to take the lethal medication under the state’s Death with Dignity law . Surrounded by family, he thanks them, thanks even the wisdom of Oregon voters , and then drinks. His face is calm, almost serene. There was such a peaceful countenance about him, such ease in how he accepted reality, that it left an impression on me. A few nights later, I dreamt I was in his place, on the same sofa, with the same glass of orange juice in my hand. The powd...
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The Dippin-Dot Snowflakes

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Snowflakes melt and vanish, but we don’t. We are the dippin-dots . We don’t melt. We linger. We bend, but we don’t break. There was a time when “save the owl” was common sense. In 1990, the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened, and logging in huge stretches of the Pacific Northwest simply stopped. Not paused for debate. Stopped. Crews packed up. Contracts froze. The forest stayed standing because a law said the owl mattered. Now, in this season of wanting to dismantle the EPA , letting tailings from open mines run straight into creeks, fiddling like Nero while we jog back toward a future where the Cuyahoga burns again, it earns a smirk. The kind that says, that’s cute, but we’re talking about real things here. Somewhere along the way, the language of care became the language of weakness. It didn’t happen overnight. It crept in over years, while power hungry leaders aligned with big money interests, selling the story that saving an owl or a whale was against business, agai...
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