Somebody shoot me...

So I'm no longer a believer in faith-based healing. Not that I was incredibly religious (ok, even sorta) to begin with, but with the recent train wreck of a bug that hit my wife and I, I'm really not amused. I am not one that gets sick on any kind of regular basis--truth be told, I'm fortunate in that I can't really remember the last time I was sick. However, that usually means that anything tough enough to batter its way through my defenses tends to put me down for the count. I'm an all-or-nothing kinda guy, and so I tend to believe (with the backing of experience) that no matter what, I'm not going to get sick with the latest superbug traversing the neighborhood. A bit arrogant, sure, but its worked for years.
I believed wholeheartedly that I wouldn't get sick this time around, even though my wife is sick as hell, coughing and wheezing and sore all over, and so I thought nothing of being around her constantly, bringing hot tea, warm blankets, water, etc. to make sure she was as comfortable as humanly possible, until the morning I woke up with a headache. Hmmmm. I haven't had beer in several days, so it's not a hangover (not that I drink enough to get one to begin with, but you gotta eliminate possibilities here). Ok, maybe I got a cold or something... Until the next morning. Full-blown flu symptoms. Owwwww--even the air hurts.
So since the belief system didn't work, I turned to medical science--specifically, the art of the distiller... A hot toddy is a mixture of honey, lemon juice, hot water and whiskey (or brandy, but that stuff is vile...). Somehow, with all of the cough drops and drugs and various other chemical crap the pharmacy companies try to shove down our throats, the most basic remedies are often the most effective. I had one and am now feeling quite a bit better... Driving may be out of the question, but I wouldn't want to give anyone else what I have, so it's entirely an altruistic notion on my part...

Easy Hot Toddy Recipe:

1-1/2 oz whiskey
1 oz honey
1/3 oz lemon juice
3 oz hot water

Blend in a mug and sip. Salut!

The Center Cannot Hold (A return to humanism)

We cannot keep this up. We have become a nation, a world of specialists, so driven to maintain the cutting edge that we are unable to take the time to look at the greater picture. The increase in knowledge has become exponential, with more knowledge having been gained in the previous twenty years as in the whole of human existence. That includes the Classical era of Cicero and Plato, the Renaissance of Plutarch and the Enlightenment of the 18th century, all periods with (then) vast advances in the collective of human knowledge and thought.
The burgeoning, nay, explosive advances in science, mathematics, physics, engineering and other so-called “hard” sciences has led to fantastic achievements never dreamed of even a century ago—we have split the atom, looked billions of years into the past with massive telescopes to the beginning of the universe and seen inward to the depths of the very building blocks of reality itself, postulating that at the end of all things is a sort of “quantum foam,” with bits blinking in and out of existence, seemingly randomly.
However, with this focus on deeper, faster, greater, farther, we have begun to neglect those disciplines that provide a framework both moral and practical to take that knowledge and focus it towards a greater good. We have management overseeing scientists creating technical advances that go far beyond anything a business degree even begins to touch upon. There is becoming a vacuum between those who create and discover and those who control what is done with it. We are in a widening gyre of our own making, and the center is beyond our reach.
The neglect of the arts and humanistic disciplines is leaving us a nation of technicians with no idea of how to place these wonderful and terrifying creations into an holistic world view. Like the Italy of the 13th and 14th centuries, their nobility and our current leadership is determined not through who is the best fit for the job, but is due in large part to nepotistic cabals of old money and landed gentry. There is no concern for the greater good, and even a contempt for it, as they are safe in the knowledge that we as a public body can no longer come to a consensus about anything at all, even for the greatest of causes such as the ostensible election of the most powerful executive officers of our collective reality.
We as fragile human beings live lives that are far too short for the achievement of true wisdom by any but a select few who have given their lives, sometimes sacrificially, to the furtherance of a greater human consciousness, based less upon science and more upon the implications of what our knowledge is being used for and by whom. The lack of community engendered by our espresso-fueled culture is fracturing our cities, leaving them open to coups by the rich, whatever their intentions. We need to back away from the cutting edge long enough to see that it is only cutting us, severing our ties to kith and kin, with no time for creating or maintaining bonds or any sort of perspective. We have become a nation of moles, always burrowing deeper in search of a greater discovery, a higher truth, a bigger den.
A return to a humanistic perspective will not solve the great world problems alone, but by studying history, art, literature, we can better understand who we are as a culture, as a race, a species inhabiting a world we have to share, and at our current headlong pace, we are bound to hit the wall. Let's hope that the aftermath will resemble the mercantile coup de maître of the nobility at the start of the Renaissance, taking the power out of the hands of squabbling rich families and returning it to the public in the form of a Republic. We have lost our Republic in the name of progress and are slipping towards a wasteland of our own creation.