HDT WHAT? INDEX 2009 2009 EVENTS OF 2008 General Events of 2009 SPRING JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER APRIL MAY JUNE FALL JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN According to prophetess Lori Adaile Toye of the I AM America Foundation, a series of Earth changes beginning in 1992 and ending in 2009 would have caused much of the world to be submerged, and only 1/3d of America’s population would have been able to survive. Guess we must have dodged the bullet on that one! MILLENNIALISM At this point the United States of America had somewhere between 9,400 and 10,400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics somewhere between 12,950 and 13,950. That’s enough to make the rubble bounce! In addition, the People’s Republic of China had somewhere between 184 and 240, France in the vicinity of 300, the United Kingdom 160, Israel somewhere between 60 and 200, India some 60 or 70, Pakistan about 60, and North Korea 5 or perhaps 6. Professor John E. Mueller pointed out, however, in ATOMIC OBSESSION: NUCLEAR ALARMISM FROM HIROSHIMA TO AL-QAEDA (Oxford UP), that we might as well cease declaiming about nuclear weapons and eat our corn muffin and get some sleep. The problem we are having is a problem with our rhetoric, a problem of scare tactics, rather than with the proliferation of such a technology. Actually, he indicated, atomic weapons are “difficult to obtain, militarily useless, and a spectacular waste of money and scientific talent.” (Professor Mueller is well known for his opinion that “War has almost ceased to exist” and gave a blockbuster interview on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on October 31, 2006.) EVENTS OF 2010 HDT WHAT? INDEX 2009 2009 “If anything bad can happen, it probably will.” — Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955) THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF ROBINSON JEFFERS, WITH SELECTED LETTERS OF UNA JEFFERS: VOLUME I, 1890-1930 (Karman, James. ed. Stanford, California: Stanford UP). Samantha Cassista’s “A Discussion of Theories Relating to Population Dynamics of Passenger Pigeon Populations: Abundance and Extinction.” Undergraduate Journal of Anthropology, Volume 1. pp. 141-149. Accounts show that passenger pigeons population rates were fluctuating. This could be a side effect of a rapidly growing outbreak species giving way to oscillations under the strain of resource depletion or habitat/breeding range being at capacity (Neumann, T.W. 1985. Human-wildlife competition and the passenger pigeon: Population growth from system destabilization. Human Ecology 13(4): 389-410). ...causes for how passenger pigeons’ numbers could have swelled so rapidly have never been firmly stated or scientifically critiqued. Mark Peck (Phone interview, March 28, 2008), a scientist in the ornithology department of the Royal Ontario Museum, stated that there had to be some climate change or resource abundance change to allow passenger pigeon populations to grow exponentially between approximately 1400 and 1600. As discussed above, there was indeed a climate change known as the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1400 to 1850. This led to an expansion of pine forests, and is a potential cause for the migration southwards of the depleted populations of Aboriginals. Passenger pigeons also have a high metabolism and Schorger (Schorger, A.W. 1955. THE PASSENGER PIGEON. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI) reports that they could withstand cold wind and temperatures, as long as snow did not accumulate and hide their greatest nutritional resource, deciduous tree forest mast. E.O. Wilson’s and Bert Hölldobler’s THE SUPERORGANISM: THE BEAUTY, ELEGANCE, AND STRANGENESS OF INSECT SOCIETIES (W.W. Norton & Company). Gabriele Gentile and colleagues described a previously overlooked pink iguana on the Galapagos Islands, referred to as “rosada.” This pink lizard species might represent the earliest divergence of land animals on the island chain that Charles Darwin had made famous. PALEONTOLOGY Chris Henshilwood and collaborators described 13 engraved ochre artifacts from South Africa’s Blombos Cave, some dating back 100,000 years (this discovery supplemented earlier finds pushing back the advent of human artwork). Nicholas Conard and collaborators discovered 35,000-year-old flutes in Hohle Fels Cave at Ulm, Germany — one nearly complete flute carved from a bird bone, and flute fragments carved from ivory. HDT WHAT? INDEX 2009 2009 Anthony Martin and colleagues announced three 106,000,000-year-old burrows in Australia that were being considered to have been made by dinosaurs, perhaps to keep warm during the winter while Australia had drifted closer to the South Pole. Australian paleontologists announced Zac, a plant-munching sauropod found on a sheep farm — the same sheep farm on which paleontologists had in 2004 discovered Cooper the armor-plated titanosaur. Erik Seiffert and coauthors argued that the “missing link” Darwinius masillae described earlier in the year was not an ancestor of modern apes and monkeys but instead of modern lemurs and lorises. THE SCIENCE OF 2009 Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference). Friend Kenneth L. Carroll gave a talk “My Spiritual Journey” at his Third Haven Meeting in of Easton, Maryland. Here, it is abridged from an imperfect tape casette: How did I get from there to here? I am only one mile from where I started at a Methodist Church just up the street to where I am now, at Third Haven Meeting. Yet, it took a lot of miles and many years to do the trip. I’ll be 85 in May. The small Calvary Methodist Church where I started was located where the Safeway store is today. I sometimes jokingly call it the Safeway Methodist Church. Many of my family members attended there. Sunday school lessons at calvary were memorable, particularly the story of Nathan’s condemnation of David who had broken three laws (adultery, theft, murder) when he arranged to have Uriah slain. I was very impressed that a Prophet could “speak truth to power” — seeing that this prophetic element was a very important aspect of religion. I remember other moving stories such as Elijah’s and Elisha’s opposition to Ahab and Jezebel. But I didn’t see the other side of the prophets (the human element) until later. We had many pageants at Calvary, where there was not much talent so that I ended up in almost every one of them — especially as the leper with red spots on his face, a bell in his hand, saying “Unclean, Unclean.” When they did the Good Samaritan, I was the one robbed and beaten (some say that all this miscasting is why I left the Methodists!). Singing among Methodists in those days had a tremendous amount of emphasis, but not necessarily with understanding as to what we were singing. After attending Sunday School for twelve years, I learned something of importance of scripture. I am very thankful for that. I grew up in the Great Depression. College was not immediately possible, so that after high school I worked for a year and I received $10 for a 60 hour week! After a year of saving I left for Duke, arriving on the Greyhound bus, at age 18. A required “Year In Religion” was my most exciting Freshman course. It was liberating and exhilarating in that it freed me also from literalism. I majored in history, minored in economics, political science, and religion, and I took languages. From my Freshman year I knew that I wanted to get a PhD and teach religion (or in more recent years “religious studies”). I spent ten years at Duke, followed by 35 years at Southern Methodist HDT WHAT? INDEX 2009 2009 University teaching in the field of Religion or Religious Studies. While in the South, I saw first hand many troubling examples of segregation. While I was at Duke, I noticed that the US was becoming a lot more militaristic. Association with some pacifist students (and becoming a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation) broadened my understanding of the peace keepers/ peace testimony, which became a much more positive thing in my life and thought. The next development for me took place in what I’ll call “church behavior.” Actually, this was a preparation for my becoming a Quaker. I had stopped taking communion before I went to Duke. Then I really began to listen to the words of the creed and decided to stop saying them. I also began to listen to the words in hymns. Some hymns are full of “slaughter house theology” — not reflecting my experience of the nature of God. I felt that it was really taking someone else’s experience and making it your own when you sang these hymns. On a particular Sunday the sermon that I was listening to suddenly seemed dead or lifeless to me. Finally the collections or the Offerings were the only things left! So I gave up attending church services. I arrived at the idea or belief that religion is purely personal: that all I needed was prayer, the Bible, and time with God by myself. Yet, in time, I discovered that religion is not totally personal, coming to believe that I needed a religious community in which to continue my search. I tried all forms of religion (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Synagogue). I finally found a small Quaker meeting in Durham, NC, where I felt I heard: “Be Still and Know that I Am God.” I knew that I had found what I was looking for.