When Life Begins

Cells depicted are not to scale relative to each-other.

Is there really a beginning and an end to life? Many people think life begins at conception. Many people believe life begins with the first breath.

According to the word of God through Moses in Leviticus 27: 1-9, God placed no value on life before age one month and no value on life after age sixty. In those days, life expectancy was extremely low.

Someone close to me thinks the abortion issue is tearing this country apart, but I suspect that most people really don't care that much, just the media hype when scandals erupt.

Congressman Tim Murphy, a self-described pro-life, family values politician resigned after it was discovered he encouraged his extra-marital girlfriend to get an abortion.

Self-described "conservative" billionaire, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner signed a bill expanding tax-payer funded abortions, enraging his base to the point where John Tillman, chairman of the Illinois Policy Institute which helped thrust forward Rauner's campaign, called him "Benedict Rauner."

But when does life really begin? Does it even really have a beginning or an end?

Men produce millions of sperm every day, but it takes 74 days before they finally mature, then they only live from three to five days. This three to five day window is when sperm are able to find and fertilize a female egg. But an egg is only ready to be fertilized for twenty four hours before it dissolves, and not another egg is ready for twenty eight days. Sperm left behind die and are either reabsorbed or pass from the body in urine.

Meanwhile, Only three hundred to four hundred of a female's eggs will be ovulated in her lifetime, leaving hundreds of thousands of potential candidate eggs behind.

So, hundreds of thousands of abandoned eggs and millions upon millions of abandoned sperm are left behind to never combine and grow into people. And this is just from one male and one female.

Where's the the outcry? Where's the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over this horrific tragedy?

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Alma Mater Calling

I received a phone call from my Alma mater a couple of nights ago.

The caller graciously as he could (considering his wage and status as a temporary telemarketer) conveyed a congratulatory message written for him on his computer's monitor, slightly above the din of clattering worn computer keys and the muffled voices of his cohorts.

The university wanted donations from its alumni.

"Look buddy," I said, "it must be rough but I have to say this. I'm still waiting for my initial investment to pay off. Still waiting for those high-dollar corporate recruiters to show up who are looking for professionals."

Sure there were the job fairs with the usual suspects looking for clerks, typists, sales persons, and the one idiot who tries to do it all until he or she gets burned out, blows a circuit and winds up working for tips at Deja Vu.

I'm with a Temp agency making minimum wage. I did the telemarketing job twenty years ago.

"Oh, uh, well, I'm sorry to hear that..." he said. He went off script and it sent him over the cliff of improvisation into the stuttering scrub.

"No problem, I got the same message you did from the temp agency, but I decided to ignore it. I'd be you right now if I picked up that phone. We probably work for the same company."

Then I apologized for taking his time because I knew that he had a minimum quota of calls to reach that night. I wonder if he was also a graduate from the University of Illinois?

Job hunting

I’ve been looking for work. Any work. I’m a college graduate. It should be easy, right? I keep my eyes and ears to the media, hoping to find something. Then I see statistics that show more high school graduates are working than college graduates.

How is that? That's easy! College graduates are not supposed to be looking for jobs. They are supposed to be making jobs. So, why are college students complaining about not finding work?

Evidently, it’s a symptom of a bigger problem, the General Requirements Curriculum. The big picture was completely missed. A plan was never formulated. In my case it’s easy because I got an Associate degree somewhere else and transferred credits, so I couldn’t even declare a minor.

My education was fractured by circumstances engineered by a capitalist society with no vision of long-term consequences, only greed at the top.

So now we have a large number of college graduates who don’t know entrepreneurship. They just try to look for work. This has been going on for a long time in the U.S. And guess what.

We have been creating our own terrorists. We have sent far too many foreign-exchange students out into the world without the crucial information needed to actually make work instead of complaining about not finding a job.

It's far too easy for zealots with money to take advantage of so many people who know just enough to make a bomb, but not enough to start a company making better mousetraps.

Here in the U.S. it's manageable because we have such a powerful and intrusive law enforcement system, and the culture is so homogeneous that volatile social cohesion is limited to urban street gangs.

Some high school teachers have caught on to this and are teaching entrepreneurship in the K-12 levels. It's too little too late because of one major obstacle, tenure.

Gee, it took me this long to figure it out? I'm in really bad shape. But at least I can see the candle in the distant window. Now I just have to find my way around the dark fjord of capitalist influence.