Dear Santa; a letter from a rational semioticist.
Dear Santa;
I'd like us to entirely abandon fossil fuels and the infernal combustion engine this year.
I would like a Space Elevator, for my species. I would like a way for us to move off the Profit Motive and into the Community of Humanity. I'd like us to cease our ancient quarrels, and observe our one (possibly) fit place as Guardians of the Few Remaining Species in our little petri dish of a planet.
I'd like us to take responsibility for our resource usage, and begin aggressive campaigns to utilize energy from photons (be it solar, or wind, or, preferably, *solar wind*).
Thank you for your past gift of getting most of us to agree that we don't eat one another anymore, and the still burgeoning work on the issue of us not owning one another anymore. This year I'm asking for your help in getting us all to agree that we don't kill one another anymore. Agreement that we won't harm each other in any way is for next year's letter (prior planning helps, I know).
Thank you again, Santa, for the joy in reading you brought me as a child, when you gave me Heinlein and Asimov, Aristotle and Plato and Epicurus, and McCaffrey and Niven and LeGuin and Clarke to read, all of History to learn others' mistakes from, and the chances these readings opened to my imaginings. I'd like you to share these, and others - David Brin, Margaret Atwood, Gavin Menzies, for instance - with my species, this year, and hope that they get a dawning sense of their inter-relatedness and interdependence with each other and their environment - backyard, local, global, and galactic.
Could you possibly spur a species-wide interest in Astronomy again? We don't need a comet overhead anymore; just a bit of enthusiasm for what's out there and what we can do with it and where we can go, provided we look at these things as a species, rather than as nations.
Sometimes, Santa, I wish that I could still ask you for tangible, personal things. I do know it would make it much easier. These transpersonal things, however, are much more important to me than any item I could "possess". Thank you, Santa.
Yours &c.,
~Gaffer~
I'd like us to entirely abandon fossil fuels and the infernal combustion engine this year.
I would like a Space Elevator, for my species. I would like a way for us to move off the Profit Motive and into the Community of Humanity. I'd like us to cease our ancient quarrels, and observe our one (possibly) fit place as Guardians of the Few Remaining Species in our little petri dish of a planet.
I'd like us to take responsibility for our resource usage, and begin aggressive campaigns to utilize energy from photons (be it solar, or wind, or, preferably, *solar wind*).
Thank you for your past gift of getting most of us to agree that we don't eat one another anymore, and the still burgeoning work on the issue of us not owning one another anymore. This year I'm asking for your help in getting us all to agree that we don't kill one another anymore. Agreement that we won't harm each other in any way is for next year's letter (prior planning helps, I know).
Thank you again, Santa, for the joy in reading you brought me as a child, when you gave me Heinlein and Asimov, Aristotle and Plato and Epicurus, and McCaffrey and Niven and LeGuin and Clarke to read, all of History to learn others' mistakes from, and the chances these readings opened to my imaginings. I'd like you to share these, and others - David Brin, Margaret Atwood, Gavin Menzies, for instance - with my species, this year, and hope that they get a dawning sense of their inter-relatedness and interdependence with each other and their environment - backyard, local, global, and galactic.
Could you possibly spur a species-wide interest in Astronomy again? We don't need a comet overhead anymore; just a bit of enthusiasm for what's out there and what we can do with it and where we can go, provided we look at these things as a species, rather than as nations.
Sometimes, Santa, I wish that I could still ask you for tangible, personal things. I do know it would make it much easier. These transpersonal things, however, are much more important to me than any item I could "possess". Thank you, Santa.
Yours &c.,
~Gaffer~