Post Alpaca Lips Posts

Incrementalism or gradualism is a social construct and a historical façade. Photo by   David Clode   on   Unsplash ,   Always Baby Steps??? Also published on Medium . . The main reason   incremental progress is best   rings false has to do with our selective memories, and historical   flattening . It is like saying humans are the greatest animals that evolution could have produced merely because we are the most advanced   hominid   species that survived.   Modern   progress occurs in various spurts and starts, leaps or lurches forward, retries and redos, and backpedaling. The Middle Ages for western culture was a stalled era in many ways, and a backward move in others. Going further into the past, there have been   five mass extinctions   since life began on earth, and before humans arrived on the scene. For evolution, often considered a gradual process, this means — in the most profound sense — it is   the surv...

When you are down and out, wealthy Americans are there to kick, and knock you about. Photo by   Solal Ohayon   on  Unsplash . Originally published on Medium . . In mid 1974, seven months after my father lost his job, we were all a few weeks away from living in the street, Dick and Dot, myself and my four sisters. Thankfully, dad did get six months of severance pay, at 60% of his salary. Yes, that was better than nothing, but getting your pay cut 40% overnight will dramatically change your current, and near future perspective. Few Americans are able to continually save enough of their take home pay to cover such a deficit for very long. Luckily, dad was able to get a loan from his aunt. Shortly afterward he also found a job, or just into the eighth month of joblessness. Sadly, he was never able to regain the same financial footing; he died in debt 33 years later. . My birth family’s full story was not a terrible one. It came very close to an all too frequent tragedy, and n...