Bevy Mae and me are coffee drinkers. Bevy used to drink a dozen cups of fully caffeinated coffee everyday. By her third cup she could boogie with the best of them. But that was a long time ago, before we got old. Now she drinks about two cups, and it’s decaffeinated. Me, on the other hand, well, I still imbibe the high-octane stuff. I love it.
I drink the high-octane stuff.
If your marriage is anything like ours, you probably own one coffee-maker, but you and your spouse drink different brands, flavors or styles of coffee. For us it means we have to store the contents of at least one of our coffee-pots off-site away from the coffee-maker in containers and carafes; perhaps cups or bowls or glasses or whatever is handy. The coffee gets cold.
My wife and I have one coffee maker between us. It’s not enough.
Only one of us at a time can store coffee in the coffee-pot. But since we have two microwave-ovens, we don’t really need to keep our coffee hot. We can turn off the coffee-maker after we brew each pot to save energy. Everyday we reheat our coffees in the microwaves more than once; thanks to having two of them we don’t wait in line.
Two microwaves: they can sometimes save a marriage.
Bevy Mae and I have an eclectic collection of coffee mugs gathered together over decades of marriage. I’ve often wondered: how is it that no matter how big the coffee cup or how tiny; how robust the mug or how dainty; how full or empty we fill — or even which microwave we choose — my wife and I almost never set the timer to reheat our coffee more than once?
We always seem to set the microwave to exactly the right number of minutes and seconds to heat our coffee to exactly the right temperature.
She got the calculation right.
Think about it. Can there be any doubt that the mathematics required to accurately set the timer must be beyond the capabilities of 99% of the people who set these timers to reheat their coffee everyday?
The size of the cup, its thickness and material; the amount of coffee in the cup — these are important variables that are required to be taken into account when setting the timer. Not only these variables, but there is the subjective calculation: how hot do I want this coffee to be today? Real hot? Tepid? Mildly warm?
There are many tricky variables to track and put into an equation. And, if we are reheating coffee for our significant others, we have to anticipate their calculation of what the best temperature is for their mood and state of mind.
It takes a matrix of differential and difference equations plus a super computer to get microwave coffee right.
It really takes a sophisticated matrix populated with complex differential and difference equations to work out what the results might be under all the possible scenarios. And it might require a government super-computer to crunch the numbers.
Of course, I’ve never done the actual work of creating the matrix — or the equations. Even if I had, I would have faced the daunting task of isolating all the relevant variables, the tedium of tracking all the units to make sure I ended up with secondsonly in the answer, and the exhaustive testing of results to see if they match up with my expectations and experience.
Successful creation and application of a workable calculus might involve a lot of tweaking.
He didn’t bother with the calculation.
Come to think of it, why would I do that? Guessing seems to work better and it’s a lot faster. But I wonder. Am I really guessing? Or is my brain, somehow, doing the math in some far away place inside my brain, behind the scenes and beyond my conscious scrutiny?
It’s kind of mysterious, being right all the time, about something as complicated as getting the number of minutes and seconds correct when setting the timer to reheat coffee.
And my wife, who knows no math, is as good at the mental calculation as me. Go figure.
Billy Lee
P.S. Note to readers: On Valentines Day, 2015, Billy Lee bought a second coffee-maker for his wife, Bevy Mae. Why it took Billy Lee so long to solve his coffee-problem is a mystery even skilled mathematicians can’t solve. The Editorial Board.
Don’t try these calculations at home. Seriously. This man tried; his face froze — for. two. hours.
I wrote my first big story in fourth grade. I called it, Adventures on the Amazon. It’s now lost to history, but I remember organizing it into chapters.
Chapters were a big deal. I’d never written anything so long that it could be divided into paragraphs, much less chapters.
Each chapter was a little–kid-against-nature story. I battled hungry piranhas, pygmies with blow-darts, hippopotami, elephants, boa constrictors, fire ants, and so on.
It was a long story. My teacher awarded an A and invited me to read before the class. When I finished, my classmates applauded, so I decided to keep writing.
In fourth grade I wrote, Adventures on the Amazon. It took place in an exotic setting in a world I never visited.
My next big project was in seventh grade. In long-hand, I wrote a four-thousand word story about torture called, I am not a Coward. In it I tortured my brother to death to prove to the townspeople I wasn’t a coward. When I carried my dead brother into the heart of town to show the people what I had done, they weren’t proud of me like I hoped. Instead, they turned on me in horror and stoned me to death, while I screamed I am not a coward, I am not a coward!
I can’t tell you why I wrote Coward. I lack the courage to tell anyone why. I suppose I’ll be taking my reason to the grave. I really am a coward.
Before I showed the story to anyone, I taught myself to type. I thought, a story this good has to be typed. It deserves the simple dignity of a formal type-set. So I spent the summer with a book I talked mom into buying called Teach Yourself to Type in Ten Weeks. Iused it over the summer, between seventh and eighth grade, to give me the skills to type out my masterpiece.
It felt like I’d conquered the world, once I finished the typing. I had taught myself to type and written an incredible story, all without the aid of a teacher. It was important to me and a source of pride.
I decided to read, I am not a Coward, to my family. Dad gathered everyone into our small living room for the dramatic presentation. Excitement lay on every face. Billy Lee had written a story. He could write. Everyone beamed with anticipation. They were proud of me, it was easy to see. I cleared my throat and began:
They say I am a coward. They say I watched my brother burn to death without lifting a finger to save him.
Despite my short-story to the contrary, I’ve been a coward my entire life.
Dad lifted his hand. Hold on there, Billy Lee, he said, white-faced. He ordered everyone to leave the room. I think it would be better if you read this story to me, first. After the last family member had scampered away, he motioned for me to start.
So I read the story through to the end, while he sat across from me, silent. It took about a half-hour. When I finished, he paused to gather his thoughts. Billy Lee, he finally said. That’s the finest piece of mis-directed talent I’ve ever heard. Please don’t read it to anyone else.
It’s just not possible to suppress a story that rises to the level of I am Not a Coward. Over the next few months I gave private readings to friends, when Dad wasn’t home. After a while I had read it to everyone I knew, so I hid my story to protect it.
How I was able to preserve and protect my story over the years is nothing short of miraculous. I lived in a Navy family, after all. We moved every two years or so. My dad liked to say that every move is like a house fire. Things burn-up. Things get misplaced and go missing. Yet almost sixty years later, I am not a Coward survives.
During high school I wrote a number of stories that teachers asked me to read before students. I won’t bore you. But one story slowed my momentum. In ninth grade a closeted-gay teacher led my creative writing class. I submitted a story about a Navy medical corps-man who hid his gay identity.
The teacher seemed to dislike it. He gave it an A-minus. He told me I was a lazy writer, because I used too many adjectives. More powerful verbs and adverbs were the answer. Even today, as I write, his comments roll around inside my head. I still love adjectives. Some of them are just perfect, as far as I’m concerned.
Based on my experience living in Japan during kindergarten, I wrote a graduate level paper on a Japanese company I invented. It received an ”A.”
In college, money was scarce. To earn money for beer or whatever, I wrote term papers for people. I wrote under-graduate papers on economics, history and english, mostly. I charged by the grade, so getting an A was important.
I wrote only one paper at the graduate level — a microeconomics study on a currently successful Japanese company selected by the student. I invented the company I selected. Everything about it was imagined — even its name was fiction. My customer’s grade? A. I knew nothing about economics or Japan. Yes, I had taken a freshman econ class, and yes, I had lived in Japan — when I was in kindergarten. Apparently, it was enough. My writing career was on fire.
Joint Issue was an alternative community newspaper. Alternative didn’t mean the writers could write whatever they liked. This cover parodied a roadside billboard, popular in 1970, where a uniformed police officer was shown providing resuscitation to a drowning child. The caption on the sign said, ”Some call him Pig!” Police felt unfairly persecuted in the 1970s during the anti-Vietnam war movement when they clashed sometimes with protestors during demonstrations.
Eventually I dropped out of college to join the anti-Vietnam-war movement. I worked on staff for a community anti-war underground newspaper. All articles were critiqued and followed a commonly agreed to set of values. I found I wasn’t free to write, because every piece had to get by staff who had their own ideas about what was appropriate for our fifteen-thousand readers.
Though I continued to write and publish, my articles never seemed to rise to the level of good. People read our paper. It was highly circulated for an underground. We did some things right, I suppose. But I can understand why staff-writers on newspapers and magazines today feel the same pressures I did to conform to the values of the people who decide if they will be published. No one is the Lone Ranger, especially where writing is a business driven by profits or, in our case, ideology.
I stopped writing during my career as a mechanical engineer and machine designer. But eventually, after four decades, I retired. I thought, maybe it would be fun to start writing again. My writing skills lay rusty, in ruins, really. Why not start a blog, I thought to myself, and write about what I’ve learned and know? Maybe I’ll write about things I don’t know, too. Maybe I’ll pontificate, if I feel like it. Who can stop me? I had this crazy idea I could write anything. If I sounded like a communist at times, so what? Who was going to fire me? I was retired. I was free, and I was going to write like it.
Some in my family were blustering and pontificating on Facebook, crowding out the pictures and videos of grandchildren. I thought, why not give people another place to pontificate? It might go a long way to help free up the space we depended on to provide news about our little people. I figured readership would be tiny. I would fly under the radar of hostile readers, if hostile people actually lived in cyber-land as was sometimes rumored.
Gays and straights had problems with my story about a gay physician’s assistant.
The first unusual thing happened right away, after I published a short story about a gay physician’s assistant. Almost immediately a swarm of Asian bots from the women’s apparel industry attacked my site. Anonymous comments piled up fast. More bots landed from USA cosmetic and high-fashion sites. What was going on?
I reread my article. It was supposed to be neutral. It was supposed to describe the gulf between gays and Christians on the subject of marriage and hint at some possible common ground of interest and attitude. But the writing was poor. The article tilted strongly toward a Christian point of view. It lacked ambiguity and neutrality — important components in articles designed to make people think.
I rewrote the story. And I put restrictions on comments. From now on each comment would be reviewed before posting to make sure it was from a living person. Overnight, the attacks stopped. I had peace on my blog-site. My family could continue to indulge me, reading my pontifications to help me feel loved and listened to in my old age, I supposed.
I puttered along writing articles about everything and anything that popped into my head. After writing about twenty-five posts, I decided to do something different: something bold; something experimental. I would self-disclose my sexuality and challenge readers to drop their prejudices against gays. I wrote the article, tidied it up and pushed the publish button. All hell broke loose.*
Site views were running ten times normal.
WordPress, keeper of my blog-site, alerted me to unusually high view volume. I looked up my stats. Site views were running ten times normal and piling up fast. At first I thought, wow, people like my blog.
The truth was, some thought I was advocating for homosexuality. They believed my views were against the Bible, inspired by satan, and possibly embarrassing to my family. People swarmed my site trying to understand the article and how to respond to it. Some decided that, unless I took down my post, they would turn me in to church-elders, a necessary prelude to (if I didn’t cooperate) church-discipline, even to possible excommunication.
But by then church leaders were already rummaging through my articles. Some articles, they found wanting. Their attitude was, since I belonged to their church, because I was a baptized covenant member, I certainly was not free to say anything I wanted. Everything I wrote had to be consistent with scripture and what they thought it said. To show they meant business, they disbanded my Bible-study group and removed me from leadership.
Church leaders expected me to comply. Comply, I did.
Church leaders wrote me a letter which included a bullet-list of concerns. They announced my punishments. They presented another list; this time, demands. They expected me to comply, and comply is what I did.
I took down the offending article. My seventy-one year old wife was recovering from open-heart surgery. All her friends are in our church. The last thing we needed was to undergo an excommunication. Like Galileo, who blasphemed Jesus and the Catholic church by making the absurd claim that Earth was not the center of the universe, it was recant or be tortured — because having my blog ripped out from under me feels like torture. I didn’t see it coming.
Church leaders say they love me and want what’s best for my soul. I believe them. It’s what I want too. And truth is, my article was edgy. It pushed a lot of boundaries, even mine. I didn’t like some parts of the article either, it turned out. No one wants to go to Hell. No one wants to forfeit the love of Jesus. No one wants to lose friends they’ve had for decades over an article or two in a blog. I get that. I feel it, too.
I want to write; unafraid, if possible.
Decades spent in prayer, renouncing sin, loving the unlovable, giving aid to the wretched — the things we do as part of submitting to the will of Jesus — these things are supposed to humble us. But I want to write, unafraid, if possible. I can’t know, always, if something I write is going to offend someone well versed in the theology of our church.
In life, we all want to get it right. I don’t want to upset anyone. But no one gets it right one-hundred percent of the time; not even close. Even with a team of the best advisors available, no one gets it right all the time. Entire nations of praying people march off the cliffs of history, sometimes.
I have this idea that in America we have freedom of speech only if no one is listening to us. As soon as a handful of people start reading our stuff, even if it’s just family and a few Facebook friends, some people make it their business to bend us to their ideas of what is appropriate.
Try to speak freely. If people start to listen, you could be in for a sad surprise.
Freedom of speech means little more than bragging-rights to the people who run our country and manage our institutions, it seems to me. They brag to the world about how free we are; how easy it is to speak our minds. But try to publish. See what happens.
Start a blog and try to find your voice. Speak freely, tell it like it is, as you, your unique self, sees it — uncensored and unafraid — if only with your family and close friends. If you think America is the land of the free, you might be in for a sad surprise.
Billy Lee
* Note: we’ve included a link to the re-written, re-titled and sanitized version of the original article, Christian Love and Gay Pride. The rewritten version, which better articulates the views of Billy Lee, is called, Gay Love and Christian Pride. The Editorial Board
During my teens I followed a TV series called Twilight Zone. Rod Serling hosted and wrote most of the shows — but not all.
One episode has stayed with me: Number 12 Looks Just Like You. John Tomerlin adapted it from Charles Beaumont’s 1952 story, The Beautiful People.
Rod Serling 1959. Heavily censored by sponsors before he got his own show — Twilight Zone — Rod wrote freely until death at age 50 following multiple heart attacks, the last during surgery.
As I remember the story, people in some imagined future-world valued harmony. They thought unattractive people divisive and a threat to world peace.
They demanded that government use its powers to enable folks to better love and accept one another, which required that every member of society agree to a surgical procedure, called the transformation.
Surgeons transformed each person into one of a dozen archetypes — each archetype identified by researchers as appealing to all other people.
Collin Wilcox played Marilyn Cubele. She died of brain cancer in 2009.
The heroine, 18-year-old Marilyn Cubele, decided against having the surgery because her father committed suicide after learning to regret his transformation — it cost him his identity, he said. Nevertheless, Marilyn’s friends and family pressured her to go along.
After all, everyone else was having the procedure, they argued. Did she really want to be less attractive around beautiful people?
Eventually Marilyn broke down and agreed.
The surgery went well. The doctors administered a drug to ease her mind; to help her accept what was done; to reduce chances of post-procedure depression like her father suffered.
In the last scene, Marilyn confides to her best friend. “Valerie, you know the nicest part…? I look just like you!
Ayn Rand, author of Virtue of Selfishness and Atlas Shrugged. Ms. Rand died at 77 of heart failure. Economist Alan Greenspan attended her funeral.
At about the same time another writer caught my attention, this time from print media. I began to collect and read everything available from the novelist Ayn Rand. I even subscribed to her newsletter, The Objectivist.
Ayn Rand marketed herself as a utopian idealist who believed capitalism and minimal government worked best for rational human beings.I attended a lecture by this unusual woman, and wanted to meet her, but that story is for another time.
Ayn Rand is relevant to this article on Xanax, because she wrote about an ideal world where reality forced a certain fairness on people and on society in general. If people did irrational things, their lives unraveled; they tended to fall into disarray. Rand believed happiness must be earned. It shouldn’t be acquired without intellectual effort. It wasn’t a birthright.
People were to strive for and achieve happiness through rational thought and action; by right-living. Joy was not something just anyone could bestow on themselves with a drug, legal or illegal. Rand could not imagine a future where people would display bad or irrational behavior yet continue to experience a comforting happiness, all because they took tranquilizers and antidepressants.
Xanax, 0.25 mg. I took up to six a day to help prevent episodic supraventricular tachycardia, until surgery made them unnecessary.
But now, decades after Ayn Rand’s death, researchers have learned that people may suffer depressions for no easily discoverable reasons. Depression, it’s now known, may have nothing to do with behavior or right-living. In some people, it is a chemical imbalance in the brain and hormonal system that could have any number of causes not necessarily related to behavior.
Because depression is the main reason for suicides, doctors often prescribe antidepressants and other mood-elevating drugs — like Xanax — to suffering people. The clinical results are often amazing.
Psychiatrists today spend much less time administering expensive and time-consuming therapies, like psychoanalysis and out-patient counseling. The right drug, properly prescribed, is sometimes all it takes to rescue people from their emotions-gone-awry.
In the 1960s and 70s, before tranquilizers and antidepressants were widely accepted and prescribed, most public schools required students to take HealthClass as part of Gym.
Instructors taught that people suffering emotional distress had two options. They could change their environment — or change themselves. The third option — drug-rescue — wasn’t on the table. Many drugs available today hadn’t yet been invented.
Supraventricular tachycardia is a fast regular heartbeat. It feels like a little bird in your chest, flapping its wings.
I’ve never taken antidepressant drugs, so I don’t know how I might react to them. But I suffered for years from a heart arrhythmia called supraventricular tachycardia. Doctors prescribed a number of drugs to control it, including the mood elevating tranquilizer, Xanax.
Although it’s been a few years since my last exposure, I am familiar with Xanax, having used it daily for years during two separate periods. I quit the drug twice, once by tapering, and once suddenly — providing direct experience of its “dependency” properties, which for me at least were mild. Everyone is different and readers are advised to follow strictly only their doctor’s instructions.
For those who have never used it, the main thing I can tell you about Xanax is that it works as advertised. If you suffer from panic attacks (the cause of some episodes of tachycardia), Xanax stops them cold.
If you suffer from anxiety, Xanax stops that kind of suffering as well. The first time I took this brand of benzodiazepine, I dropped to my knees and thanked God for the people who invented it. Just knowing the drug is out there, gives me confidence to live without it. It’s that good, at least for me.
Didn’t suffer social anxiety when taking Xanax. Didn’t grow hair, either.
One thing I didn’t suffer while on Xanax was irritable bowel syndrome — an anxiety driven disorder that bothered me a lot when younger. Weeping stress blisters on my feet cleared-up completely.
Though baldness continued to plague me, social anxiety disappeared. I became somewhat fearless. I took risks in social situations unthinkable in pre-Xanax years. Most times, benefits outweighed risks.
Occasionally, I crossed boundaries with bad results. I still do but not as often. For some reason I want to believe that feeling the pain of social anxiety is morally superior to being dependent on a drug that eliminates it.
And truthfully, Xanax taught me what it felt like to live free, without fear. Once I knew it was possible — that my body and mind were capable of it — I let the drug go.
I guess I felt like Marilyn Cubele, the Twilight Zone girl, who didn’t want to be surgically transformed. It has something to do with the dignity of the human spirit, as writer John Tomerlin put it in Number 12.
I want to believe I can be happy without drugs — to think I can face life without a pill or injection to get me through.
The nicest part? — I want to be just like you.
Billy Lee
Note from the Editors: Despite the heroics claimed in his essay, Billy Lee continues to use Xanax to control anxiety and relieve the strain on his heart from chronic coronary artery disease. 26 November 2019
From 1950 to 1980, before the personal computer revolution and the birth of the Internet, a vigorous and pervasive paper media flourished in America. The underground press — as it was called then — included not only thousands of newspapers, but literary gazettes and alternative periodicals.
Hippie Rescues Drowning Child. Michigan legend, Denny Preston, illustrated this famous cover from the Underground Press.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is now working with libraries and publishers to find, rehabilitate, and digitize hundreds of underground publications that otherwise will be lost to history as they decay to dust in closets and basements across America.
Not on my watch, Kenny has pledged.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is the Director of the Digitizing our History Project
The task is enormous. [ click on link above to see how big ] The number of publications is in the thousands.
The underground press got its energy from millions of people who opposed war during a period when the United States raged racist wars in countries like Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Countless men and women of conscience opposed segregation in America; they dedicated big chunks of their lives to helping our country come to grips with its sordid racial past.
The underground press injected energy into a cultural revolution that brought hope to women, gays, racial minorities, the poor, the disadvantaged, and the physically and mentally challenged.
During the thirty years between 1950 and 1980 the underground press brought a fresh point of view, which changed not only America but the world. The earth became a better place to live for hundreds of millions of people who had been burdened and locked-out by discrimination and prejudice — the ravages of war and scarcity — brought by the greed and power of men, mostly, who didn’t give a care about who they hurt.
Today it seems like if it’s not on the internet, people think it never happened. If a PDF, Word file, blog, or web-site doesn’t write about it — or a YouTube video doesn’t feature it, people give up looking for records from past that exist only in the memories of folks too old to understand the internet enough to preserve their experience for the folks who will come after.
The risk to everyone — to the people who lived and suffered these changes — is that everything the smartest generation learned and accomplished will be forgotten.
Civilization will slide back into old the habits and ways that have wrecked society after society over the entire history of humankind. The politics of exclusion will push back the politics of inclusion. Peace will give way to war. Open and free-living will give way to gated communities and a fortress mentality.
The lessons learned from the struggle to save America will be lost, and our country will have to relearn them, at great loss to our national momentum toward a better life for all. Should totalitarianism take root, freedom will disappear, forever.
It’s a risk every thinking person is wise to take seriously.
The project to digitize the legendary past is big and important. I am grateful to Ken Wachsberger and his team for the effort they are making to save our history when so many seem ready to put it behind at great peril to future generations.
The question is simple: If circumstances conspired to take away cars and licenses so no one could drive again, would anyone feel free?
Can folks feel free, or happy, in a land without cars?
Maybe I would. I couldn’t bum rides or hitchhike, true. But if no one could drive; if everyone’s cars were taken, public transportation might improve, right? You know — planes, trains, and buses — how would anyone feel?
Speaking for myself, I think I might get sad and depressed. Thinking about not being able to come and go when I want, of having to depend on public transportation to venture anywhere more than a few miles from home makes me sick to my stomach. Freedom to travel on my own terms is a big part of what it takes for me to feel free and, yes, happy.
If the only way to travel to another town was by train, how would people feel?
So why torment myself with thoughts about something that’s never going to happen? What’s the point?
In truth, many people don’t drive, especially in large metro areas like New York City, for example. Not driving is a choice. In theory at least, New Yorkers can buy cars and move to the suburbs. Knowing they can drive if they choose makes not driving not so bad, at least for most.
In New York City, most people don’t drive.
Here’s my point. Someone is always telling us we are free, because we can vote for our leaders and start businesses; even keep the profits. No one can be arrested without cause. If arrested, all have the guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence under the Constitution. Everyone can own guns and fire them in their backyards.
Is it possible that whoever they are might be right?
What good is declaring independence, if no one can drive?
Think about it.
80% of citizens don’t vote regularly. 98% don’t own businesses unless franchises and pyramid-schemes like Amway count; then it’s 10%.
Few citizens are ever arrested, much less charged with a crime. And most folks — those who aren’t psychopaths — take no pleasure disturbing neighbors by firing rifle rounds in their backyards. In general most don’t participate in the privileges that define freedom. People don’t feel their freedoms most of the time.
But here’s something else to think about: 95% drive cars.
Isn’t it cars that give the feeling of being free? Take away cars and no one has the same carefree feeling– no matter what the Constitution guarantees or profs teach in school or university.
People can go into the back yard and fire a hundred rounds from an assault rifle. All that will happen is their ears start to ring and their neighbors hate them.
It’s cars that give us the feeling we’re free.
The thrill of freedom comes from stepping on the accelerator of a favorite car and feeling Earth slide away below us. Freedom is the feeling that anyone can come-and-go on their own terms whenever they want.
Traffic slowdowns and stand-stills are an assault on freedom.
Many Americans seem not to grasp that the right to drive is being methodically and relentlessly stripped away. In cities and towns across America, congestion on streets is presenting a clear and present danger to our way of life; it’s diminishing the freedom to travel under our own power; under our own direction, which is what everyone wants to enjoy.
Lousy roads, poorly planned road construction, neglected road repair, deteriorated bridges and tunnels — all assault freedom and degrade our quality of life.
Bad streets are an affront to freedom. Right?
It seems obvious that four-hour waits in line to vote wrecks freedom, because waits discourage voting, the foundational process of any democracy. But four-hour commutes, traffic slowdowns and standstills are just as disruptive. They break the efficiency of our lives and muffle the nation’s economy.
The folks who run America seem to care little about voting or roads. Americans might want to step up to put pressure on politicians to make driving free and unencumbered — make freedom on the road the number-one national priority.
Driving free must be first-in-line; it is our most heartfelt and defining freedom.
In computer-controlled aircraft, passengers are only along for the ride.
I learned that a few companies have already designed aircraft to take the place of cars. In the years prior to 911, I toured a number of these firms to learn firsthand how they implemented computer software to organize their engineering drawings, bills-of-materials, and tech-specs for vendors.
The plan, then, was to unleash at the right time a new era of transportation options for the general public that included light aircraft.
These companies were designing planes to fly on autopilot along pre-established routes in the sky. They took advantage of the three dimensions of space the same way city planners use tall buildings to create more working space.
The idea was to eliminate congestion and speed traffic by stacking routes and putting computers in charge of flying instead of pilots.
The view is great — when the sky is clear, and no one has to get out to stretch their legs.
It all seemed like a good idea at the time. But the events of 911 changed planners’ views of what it might mean to put hundreds-of-thousands — maybe millions — of flying vehicles in the airspace above America — even if the craft were flying on autopilot under the guidance of computers.
Had 911 not happened, the plans were that by now on any given day at any given time people who looked up to the sky would see and hear hundreds, maybe thousands, of high-flying aircraft buzzing to and fro 24/7.
Computer-controlled aircraft flying on 3D highways are a transportation-option, which is available for implementation when the time is right.
This high-flying, high-tech solution to highway congestion though shelved for now sits yellowing in the dark closet of national transportation options. It can be implemented when the time is right in the same way as the internet and personal-computer. But when it’s implemented, it will pose big problems.
3D highways in the sky populated by hundreds-of-thousands of computer-guided light-aircraft will have the same effect on travelers as if they were set on automated conveyor belts and whisked hither and yon.
The thrill that comes from commanding a piece of machinery and directing it to go where we decide will be gone. The feeling of empowerment and freedom experienced in cars will evaporate.
Because — you know what’s coming, right? If computers can direct the flights of millions of aircraft in three-dimensional space, they can do the same to cars on two-dimensional roads. And soon, very soon, they will.
Yes, it’s pretty. But if no one is flying it, does anyone care?
Because of over-population and the inevitable congestion it brings, the time may come when people will no longer be permitted to experience the freedom of a fast car on an empty road.
Our ancestors rode horses, after all. Most people have long-since adapted to the disappearance of the horse. Perhaps people will adapt. Circumstances will force grandchildren of today’s parents to go to private tracks to experience the lost joy of driving a car.
Riding in a computer-controlled helicopter, airplane, or other flying craft might become the norm for future travelers. People will be passengers — not drivers or pilots or navigators — for the duration of their trips. People will become dependent on another technology they don’t understand and can’t control.
We are likely to become a nation of flying and driving sheep who graze in a huge three-dimensional sheep-pen.
Will freedom ring? Will people feel the thrill that comes from directing the path of complex machines that run like wild horses? Will they feel the power that comes from being free?
Will children of the future experience the exhilarating freedom enjoyed by their parents during their season of control when no one felt threatened by a vice-grip embrace of an artificial-intelligence that is hovering ominously on the horizon?
