my 26 best friends

Our Fickle Brain

I walked with the Whittier Democrats in California back in 2003. We all had signs begging George Bush to change his mind about invading Iraq. We were out there at the corner of Painter Avenue and Whittier Boulevard, a busy intersection. A few cars slowed down and tooted their horns in support. But, mostly, there was little interest in the war then. It was a long way from Whittier, after all, and we were just going in there and get Saddam Hussein and destroy all those weapons of mass destruction he had stockpiled in his country. A week maybe, and it would be over. So our signs and shouts to passing cars didn't work. Bush invaded Iraq in spite of us. And now four-plus years later - longer than World War II (our last justifiable war) - 165,000 young-too-young boys and girls are STILL THERE - risking their lives every day in Bush's Iraq War. A war we learned didn't have to happen because there WERE no weapons, there WAS no connection between Iraq and 9/11. Bush even stopped looking for BinLaden and concentrated all our troops in Iraq. That man is crazy. He wants to Christianize and Democratize the whole Middle East. Christians have always been kind of flaky. Bush has simply brought Christian flakiness to a new high.

Citizens of the United States of America can be a pretty slow bunch sometimes. It's taken them almost seven years to figure out how bad Bush is. His latest approval figures show 24% of Americans approve of that idiot. 24% is about the number of Republicans that are the really sick fringe - the Christian Jihad, the people who worry about things like abortion and keeping "under God" in our schools' pledge of allegiance, or putting the Ten Commandments up in public buildings. We should make a deal with those folks. We'll give you the Ten Commandments if you stop trying to get ID - Intelligent Design - into our school books. They have about 10 scientists (out of about 800,000 in the U.S.) who think God created man. The rest of the scientists - ALL Nobel Prize winners, the man who discovered DNA, everyone - knows that humans evolved from lower animals. AND that we are continuing to evolve. Just look at our brains. As homo sapiens (thinking humans), we have been walking Planet Earth for 30 million years. It took hundreds of thousands of years before we learned to use fire to cook and to protect our caves; before we learned build spears and bow and arrows to protect ourselves from otheranimals...to build shelters....to cook food....to learn to speak....to paint pictures on cave walls. All

that time our brains kept evolving..little by little...synapse by synapse...until we learned to write and and speak and plant

seeds and grow food....until we learned how to communicate with other human animals....and how to teach one another and how to heal one another.

And now look at how big our brains have evolved. Our brains are planning vacation trips to Mars.;..and planning cures for cancer....and finding a way to end all disease, all microscopic killlers like malaria and AIDS. Our brains are in a race with Bush-like fanatics who would risk blowing up the world to get his way - a race between the WAR WORMS and the people who want peace throughout the world. In nature, there are no wars. Only one-on-ones -- a cheetah chasing a gnu for dinner; an eagle swooping down on a unsuspecting prairie dog; two mountain rams banging their horns together in a fight for a ewe in heat. But you never see ten thousand wolves marching on ten thousand tigers. All other animals - except the human animals - don't have the evolved brains humans have to building giant armies, to organize troops and plan strategies of war. There is just no animal smart enough to figure that all out. Just us. And if we are not careful, our brains are going to carry us into a war with ourselves - with chemicals, nuclear bombs and billions of teeny tiny bugs all with lethal poisonous bites.

Our brains have given us life. Where the average American lived 48 years a hundred years ago, he or she now lives 74 years. Our brains have given us knowledge of the world and how it works. We can track our orbit around the sun, in juxtiposition with all the other planets in our Solar System and with millions of named and positioned stars, comets, planets and moons throughout the universe. Our brains have created ways for us to see the world we live in as no other animals can. We can fly to China tomorrow and enjoy their Festival of the Tiger. We can drive our daughter to the hospital when she's broken her water. We can talk to our new friends in Equador on our IPod. The same brains that give us so much can take it all away. Isn't that a bitch though?