Wars, News, Sports And The Herd

Wherever we turn to read, listen or watch in our multimedia age, we are faced by belonging and not belonging, i.e., herds of various sizes and kinds for various reasons and of various origins. Young versus old, native-born versus immigrant, colour versus colour, accepted "history" versus accepted "history", gated condos versus all outside. The possibilities, indeed the probabilities, are endless.

We might put it all down to improved means of communications, the Web, the computer, the transistor, the now-nearly-obsolete vacuum tube, the alternating current, the direct current, the early physicists like Ben Franklin and his kites in the lightning storms, and we would not be wrong.

In various isolations, living material, that is ourselves, imbeds variations into varying DNA, and biology repeats in miniature our customs, hatreds and loyalties. Despite this, we have forgotten prophets like Trotter, with his Instincts of the Herd. With communications increasing at an increasing rate, we now have collisions of herds which over long ages went their calm separated ways. We have been told we are becoming, or already are, One World. Are we, or are we becoming shells of concentric worlds which will react vertically by shell rather than horizontally by geography, or whatever?

I do not know who said it -- it might have been myself -- but I hate to die; I want to see how it all turns out!