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THE TERROR, THE TERRORHumanity’s place in nature is terrifying. Fires, floods, landslides, predatory animals, starvation...
02/09/2024

THE TERROR, THE TERROR

Humanity’s place in nature is terrifying. Fires, floods, landslides, predatory animals, starvation, poisoned water, infection, plague; the list of depredations goes on. Were it not for each other we’d have never survived; alone we are weak and vulnerable.

Some animals are solitary, but human beings are not. We are intensely social. The bonds we form as members of a family can and do get extended to others as clans, tribes and groups. Together, we form collective bodies for protection, support and comfort. Given our success as a species, our social habits are an obvious advantage.

Despite that collective success, however, on an individual basis life remains filled with terror. The prospect of death, our own and of those we care about, is always with us no matter how hard we try to forget about it. Pain and injury are in store for all of us at some time or another. The likelihood of being maimed by a bear is low, but rather high when it comes to being maimed by an auto accident. Being alive is traumatic.

Levels of trauma range from modest to severe. Modest trauma is enduring the stress and disappointments of ordinary life. Civilization offsets many of the traumas inflicted by nature; indoor plumbing, air conditioning, refrigeration, electricity, etc. soften the blow of living, but are accompanied by a general sense of helplessness. Few of us can repair our own refrigerator. As civilization coddles us it also increases our vulnerability.

When once we had to master the basic skills that living required - growing food, hunting game, butchering, cooking, sewing, setting broken bones, etc. - today we rely upon civilization to meet our needs. To buy goods and services we use money and trade our time to accumulate it. This makes us subject to the ruling social order. To gain security, we give up some freedom.

For many, the security of a job comes at the cost of self-respect. When work was utilizing mastered skills like cobbling shoes or baking bread that helped others conduct their own lives, the day ended with a sense of self-respect and value. Today’s mindless jobs, by contrast, routinely leave people feeling empty and undervalued. It’s a form of modest trauma that accumulates over time and becomes chronic, leading to anger, resentment and substance abuse. In this way, even modest trauma becomes debilitating.

There is severe trauma, of course, such as being the victim of violence or s*xual abuse. Severe trauma can be self-perpetuating when victims repeatedly act out their experience of trauma on others. This what psychologist Sue Grand calls the reproduction of evil.

Whatever its level, either sublimated through artifacts of civilization and modest or severe and experienced directly, trauma generates terror, just as nature once did and still does. When unprocessed, the terror of trauma seeks relief, sometimes in the form of blame. By blaming others - immigrants, g**s, Jews, Muslims, blacks, Asians, the poor - terror is displaced, the textbook definition of scapegoating, a transference of anger at one’s own vulnerability and disappointment. Once an ancient group ritual of magic, scapegoating’s now a social media phenomenon.

The root cause of so much anger in America today is life of desperation, and nowadays it’s not quiet. People feel helpless and deservedly so. Modern life demands surrender to technology, economics, social change, and repeated experiences of terror. If you’ve ever gone online to try to correct inaccurate medical bills, you know exactly what I mean.

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The owners of the Cooperage building, sometimes referred to as the Ice House, will appear before the City Council on Sep...
31/08/2024

The owners of the Cooperage building, sometimes referred to as the Ice House, will appear before the City Council on September 4, 2024 at a public hearing.

The owners of the Cooperage building, sometimes referred to as the Ice House, will appear before the City Council on September 4, 2024 at a public hearing. The appellants are requesting that the co…

Exciting news!!
28/08/2024

Exciting news!!

Sausage Emporium’s Miranda Ives teased us with an announcement of something new in the works, and now that we know what it is, we could not be more excited! The new name of the restaurant is …

Author Katy Byrne will be at Readers Books in September, until then, let’s talk about hairballs.
28/08/2024

Author Katy Byrne will be at Readers Books in September, until then, let’s talk about hairballs.

I’m glad my sweet kitty, Einstein, didn’t live to see the day we have a politician putting him down. J. D Vance – a candidate for vice president – calling childless women cat ladies! Seriously? So…

LAST CALL!  Time to get your ads in for the September 5-20 issue! Ads@SonomaSun.com
28/08/2024

LAST CALL! Time to get your ads in for the September 5-20 issue! [email protected]

How far can you run?
27/08/2024

How far can you run?

While the Paris Olympics had most of us enthralled as it unfolded across our TV screens, John Litzenberg, Head Track & Field Coach at Sonoma Valley High School, had a uniquely personal and tact…

PLANNING FOR THE PASTLooking ahead to the future has never been easy. One transformational wave after another has swampe...
26/08/2024

PLANNING FOR THE PAST

Looking ahead to the future has never been easy. One transformational wave after another has swamped humanity in its wake. The control of fire was perhaps the first such event, followed by flint arrowheads, bows, metallurgy, the wheel, gunpowder and the internal combustion engine. One transformation following another, technologies have repeatedly disrupted our assumptions about the future, but plan we must, apparently.

Our ability to observe and record patterns and to thus anticipate outcomes is prodigious and has allowed us to make plans for the future. Not without suffering great pains of change, humanity has coped with disruptive transformation. The Industrial Revolution, for example, was a great transformation, the effects of which quickly restructured western society, simultaneously creating enormous poverty and enormous wealth. Professions that had endured for centuries disappeared nearly overnight while capitalism flourished.

Our technological revolution has prompted rapid transformation as well. Electricity, computers and digital technology washed across the economic landscape and rapidly swept away entire swaths of well-established professions. Artificial intelligence will do the same, but to an even greater degree. In the light of the acceleration of such transformational waves, can we plan for the future? Not likely.

We fetishistically retain artifacts of culture with meaning to us, and plan for the future based upon our attachments to the past. Those attachments can be economic, cultural, material, or ideological; we habitually envision a future in which our objects of attachment remain relevant despite the high probability of their obsolescence.

For example, America has been in love with privately-owned automobiles for well over one hundred years. The design and planning of our cities, homes, and neighborhoods are predicated on continuing this love affair with cars. And yet, the car I’m driving today bears only a passing resemblance to the car I drove twenty years ago.

My new car can drive itself: steering to stay within the lines on the road, managing the distance between it and the car ahead, and applying the brakes if it deems necessary. It’s more of a super sophisticated computer on wheels equipped with sensory radar than what I used to think of as a car. All that’s missing is its ability to communicate with other cars, and that’s on the horizon. Such communication will be another disruptive technology.

Autonomous cars that drive themselves and communicate with each other over a system-wide digital network will make private automobiles obsolete. Fleets of autonomous cars and trucks available on demand within minutes will transform the entirety of our mobile economy: insurance, financing, traffic patterns, design of neighborhoods, auto accidents. Autonomous robots of all types will do the same to the workplace.

Things are changing too fast; at some point, planning will by necessity have to abandon looking backwards to retain established patterns and attachments. The future is increasingly unknowable; the only guarantee is that it will be suddenly and unpredictably transformational.

Forecasts of all kinds are now impossible to make; long-held assumptions about jobs, climate, agriculture, health, politics, war and peace, in short, the whole of human culture, are being invalidated by successive waves of transformation. Calculating the psychological and emotional cost is equally daunting, but given what what’s already observable, it will be enormous.

Science fiction has a way of becoming science fact and perhaps provides the best way to plan for the future. So what will it be, racing to the stars, or a post-apocalyptic nightmare?

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Do you want to place an ad in the Sonoma Valley Sun? Every ad stays fresh for at least two weeks, as we put out a new Su...
25/08/2024

Do you want to place an ad in the Sonoma Valley Sun? Every ad stays fresh for at least two weeks, as we put out a new Sun every 1st and 3rd Thursday. [email protected]

25/08/2024
So sad to see them go!
24/08/2024

So sad to see them go!

On Friday, the ownership of Monday Bakery announced that their locations in Napa and Sonoma will be closing, indefinitely. A fire at their baking facility appears to have prompted the decision. Mon…

We want to hear from you! If you have thoughts about anything you read in the Sun, we want to hear them (I think). Let’s...
23/08/2024

We want to hear from you! If you have thoughts about anything you read in the Sun, we want to hear them (I think). Let’s have a conversation! [email protected]

Sonoma Valley Sun is a great value for your advertising dollar.  Every issue of the Sun is on stands for two weeks, givi...
23/08/2024

Sonoma Valley Sun is a great value for your advertising dollar. Every issue of the Sun is on stands for two weeks, giving readers plenty of time to pick one up, and save it to read. Unlike traditional newspapers, the Sun comes out twice a month, which means more eyes are on your ads longer. If you have an upcoming event, a great product, or anything at all you want Sonoma Valley to know about, the nonprofit Sonoma Valley Sun wants to support you as you support us! Thank you Sonoma! [email protected]

So, now what?
22/08/2024

So, now what?

The campus of the Sonoma Developmental Center is a unique and, we believe, historic resource. And yet, it’s being sold like a common spec plot to development interests who plan to demolish most of …

Sonoma Valley Sun is being delivered to newsstands now!
22/08/2024

Sonoma Valley Sun is being delivered to newsstands now!

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANTA central Buddhist teaching is that being human means living in the realms of desire, ...
19/08/2024

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT

A central Buddhist teaching is that being human means living in the realms of desire, and that desire and what flows from it - attachment, craving, grasping, defending, protecting - produces suffering. Sounds reasonable, and from what I can tell, is largely inescapable. As rock n’ roller Mick Jagger told us, “You can’t always get what you want.”

The dividing line between biological need and emotional desire can be razor thin. Does thirst precede or follow desire? The Coca Cola company spends billions trying to stimulate desire in responding to that question. Overall, advertising is about stimulating desire, often for something we don’t need at all or never even knew existed. Madison Avenue wants to turn us into Pavlov’s dogs, drooling with anticipation at the mere crunch of a sour cream flavored potato chip.

Hunger, s*xual urges, thirst; these all have roots in biology, so their connection to desire seems perfectly natural. Combined with memory, behavioral patterns are established that connect with the experience of pleasure, itself a combination of biology and psychology. Food, drink, and s*x generate hormones and chemical agents like endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine that stimulate pleasure centers in the brain’s hypothalamus, producing the desire to repeatedly seek them out. If uncontrolled, such desires and their satisfaction can become addictive, seeking pleasure obsessively in experiences and substances that we know are not good for us, that ultimately produce suffering, and often extend that suffering to others.

Being human is an emotional experience; happiness, comfort, security, safety, anxiety, concern, and terror are just the tip of the emotional iceberg, and all of these are powerful enough to qualify as needs, at least subjectively. The Buddha was on to something, given the close connection between need, desire, and suffering. However influential our rationality, its power often shrinks to irrelevance in comparison to the power of emotion.

When desire reaches the level of need, be it the desire to consume or the desire to control, our intellect, actions, and behavior are enlisted to produce outcomes. Satisfying desire accounts for the sum total of human accomplishment and fuels our penchant for more. So great is the force of human desire that it now threatens not only our own lives, but planet earth’s entire living system.

This is not a new idea. Every major wisdom tradition, from ancient to modern, teaches of the dangers of greed and warns of its terrible consequences. Uncontrollable desire fuels aggression, violence, murder, theft, deceit, and betrayal, and unsurprisingly these behaviors comprise the lion’s share of Hollywood’s plot lines about suffering. We’ve been warned, and are still warning ourselves but the biological and emotional forces within us resist amelioration. Like Mick sings, “I can’t get no, satisfaction.”

Will our rational selves be able to overcome our emotional needs and desires in time to prevent the human race from overdosing on more, more stuff and more power? The looming ecological and climate crises may wrest the choice out of our hands. The earth is a complex 4.5 billion year old adaptive system, our place in its history just a infinitesimally tiny blip in time. If we consume ourselves into oblivion the earth will recover just fine without us. No species lasts forever, after all.

We are, presumably, the most intelligent animals that have ever lived on earth, and if we can acquire enough wisdom, we might just squeak through a few more millennia. But that’s a big if.

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Sausage Emporium gets a rebrand, and a new menu! “You have just a few weeks left to savor the flavors you love before we...
19/08/2024

Sausage Emporium gets a rebrand, and a new menu!

“You have just a few weeks left to savor the flavors you love before we transform with a new name and menu. The same amazing team, led by founder Miranda Ives, is reimagining the space to bring you Lunch, Weekend Brunch, and Supper. Our new menus will feature global flavors, and there will be no more sausages. Don’t miss your last chance to enjoy our current menu!”

More news to come including a sneak preview of the menus.

Looks… BIG
18/08/2024

Looks… BIG

Hummingbird Cottages, a new housing development in Sonoma on Fifth Street West and MacArthur Street West is rising quickly. A combination of 15 homes, including 9 single-family homes and 6 duet hom…

♥️
17/08/2024

♥️

The owners of Picazo Cafe, the popular eatery located on Arnold Drive at Grove Street, have announced that they are temporarily closed due to a fire. “Unfortunately, we suffered a fire at our…

The County of Sonoma and the City of Sonoma have been working for months to determine the funding sharing mechanism, and...
15/08/2024

The County of Sonoma and the City of Sonoma have been working for months to determine the funding sharing mechanism, and must now sit back and wait to see what BAHFA will do.

The Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA) has pulled the $20-Billion affordable housing bond measure from the ballot, instead deciding to let voters first decide about lowering the threshold f…

14/08/2024

Planting of a new dense pocket forest on the Sassarini Elementary School campus, called a Miyawaki Forest, will happen this fall. The plan is supported by the local Garden Club, Sonoma Ecology Cent…

The Miyawaki Forest is a concept developed by Akira Miyawaki of Japan, a system that creates highly dense plantings that...
13/08/2024

The Miyawaki Forest is a concept developed by Akira Miyawaki of Japan, a system that creates highly dense plantings that mimic the dynamics of indigenous forests.

Planting of a new dense pocket forest on the Sassarini Elementary School campus, called a Miyawaki Forest, will happen this fall. The plan is supported by the local Garden Club, Sonoma Ecology Cent…

Wake up Sonoma is also planning an informational meeting.PROJECT 2025 AND THE THREAT OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISMSaturday, S...
13/08/2024

Wake up Sonoma is also planning an informational meeting.
PROJECT 2025 AND THE THREAT OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM
Saturday, September 7, 2024
6:00 PM 8:00 PM
WakeUPSonoma.com

On Saturday, July 27, a crowd of 250 people gathered in the Grinsted Amphitheatre at the invitation of nonprofit Wake Up Sonoma to protest Project 2025, the proposed restructuring of American democ…

Congratulations!
12/08/2024

Congratulations!

With no new candidate nomination papers submitted to the City of Sonoma by the deadline of August 9, 2024, both Jack Ding and Sandra Lowe will retain their seats and remain on the City Council for …

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