Reflections

A look back, a look forward

Mar 26, 2026

Temple, photograph 2005

Greetings everyone,

Yesterday, I came across an older journal entry that seems fitting to repost in these present days. A lot has happened since 2008, especially with regards to AI, but it’s always good to remember that slogan: Yes We Can! We need it now more than ever.

Journal Entry, November Sixth, 2008

This morning I’ve risen, as I often do, before sunrise. Clear skies, dark but luminous , with a faint scattering of stars. In my outside kitchen—an open room perched on the roof of my home—I feel the world rushing eastward toward some new promise so palpably full of hope, like a fine soup of delicious joy rising from the hearts of millions. Even here, in the northern hills of Thailand, I can sense a joyful thrumming, one huge sigh of relief.

I don’t believe anyone can deny that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States is less than a phenomenon of epic proportions. Against so many hurdles—the punditry, the endless prattling and inane gossip, the evisceration of fear, racial ossifcation—Obama was able to skate before an avalanche of pessimism with extraordinary adroitness. Cool, calm, and resolute.

But if this man is who we think he is, who we want him to be, he is, nonetheless, just a man. He is not a deity. Barack Obama represents an aperture through which we focus our collective consciousness on those human qualities we hold as noble, self-sacrificing, and yet pragmatic. It is for good reason that, across our many languages, we have words with meanings for all that is seeded in the human mind: what is noble and what is ignoble, what is cathartic and what is cynical, what is blind faith and what is hope, what is selflessness and what is greed. We are all of it, a concrescence of the best and the worst.

I have heard men spin out justifications for their inexhaustible hunger for wealth, power, and prestige. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is a hollow cry from the bleakest spirit. As the brilliant Richard Dawkins points out, we are survival machines, each one of us living the briefest moment in time, whose purpose is to carry forth the immortal gene, searching for potentiality. If humans are to survive more than two or three centuries, which is, at our present course, unlikely, unless we change, and if we wish to remain a stable species from which our genes can move outward, we cannot rely on one mere mortal to solve our problems. Not Confucius, Lao Tzu, nor Jesus. And not Barack Obama.

I do believe, as did Confucius and Lao Tzu, as did Socrates and Jesus and countless others, that reciprocity (Confucius’ Silver Rule, Christ’s Golden Rule) is good for the individual, good for the community, and good for the slow boat of genetic evolution—not only between humans but all species and our habitats. That is the weave and weft of what is. Whatever we expect of a new president, we must expect of ourselves, and more. How many of us, now that the election is over, will simply roll back over onto the couch, expecting someone to solve the problems that each of us shares, each of us, in varying degrees, has brought upon this beautiful orb, spinning among the stars.

Lotus, photograph 2018\

We have witnessed the technological evolution of the Internet. It is this tool, with its access to and the dissemination of information, that won this election. Unlike television, which is a passive medium that can only lower the common denominator of any kind of intellect, the internet offers many advantages for connecting people. Our thoughts can ping back and forth between each other. I can grab a recipe for bouillabaisse, the meaning of the word ‘cahoot’, the population of Zaporozhe, and what happened in August 1952 while brushing my teeth and working on an essay.

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