Umair always sings songs of doom and dismay. He’s following in the tradition of the Greek Sybil. Ages ago, when Greece was young and the world was new, they sought the wisdom of the Gods to solve their life’s problems, and to do that, they went to visit the women who provided wisdom by going into a trance and speaking the gibberish (err.. I mean, the wisdom) of the Gods. In the classic Greek myth, the Sybil sat upon a 3 legged stool that was poised over a crack in the ground, from which issued a hot gas from deep in the earth. It was probably a volcanic fissure, and the gas was most like highly toxic. The Sybil was fall into a faint, and utter semi-coherent words or sentences, and those were, in turn, interpreted by a wise old woman or a wise man. Many of those mystical utterings were words of doom.
The problem with listening to sybils is that they often don’t have understandable answers to the questions we pose. Of course, some of them are more “prescient” than others, and so a few might actually be able to provide messages that seem sensible, or even prescient. But there is no guarantee when seeking the wisdom of a Sybil.
Umair is a deep thinker, he certainly has plenty to say, and he shares his observations with us. Sometimes I can appreciate what he has to say. His commentary today on the horrible fate of our peoples because of the flaw in our nature, our tendency to revert to our most atavistic barbarian tendencies whenever we stop pursuing our higher aspirations.
I believe we revert to our most barbaric social state when we forsake our religious avocations. There is a reason that the human race turns to the worship of the Lord, or the gods, seeking heavenly wisdom, guidance, or forgiveness.
We evolved from a species of ape…. a particularly aggressive ape… or versions of apes. Only over centuries have we learned to set aside our weapons of mass murder to begin cultivating our fields. Unfortunately, at times, we become atavistic and we lose our ground. We regress to our less civilized behaviors, and then we make war on one another and on other species. We destroy ourselves and our civilizations. And after we’ve sated our blood lust for a time, and reduced our excess population so that we are no longer raging because of our loss of perspective, then we begin to raise up our civilizations again.
It’s sad really, tremendously sad. The cure for this madness lies, in part, in the management of our reproductive obsession. When our species becomes burdensome because of over-population, then we become angry, frustrated, and hostile to one another. Of course, Umair doesn’t feel like explaining all of this to us when he’s sharing his inspired vision of the end of the world as we know it. That’s the way a Sybil behaves…. by giving half the story, and leaving you to figure out what the other half is, or what the deep meaning of the message may be. Sigh….
