"I don't understand your blog," with Reply by Dr. Waug

WAUGkidsWeb
December 9, 2007

Dear Dr. Waug,

I don’t understand your blog. Who write it? What’s a WAUG kid? Who are you? What’s going on? I am fascinated by the ideas presented in the letters from WAUG kids, but I can’t follow the time frame. Please explain everything for me.

Confused in Cincinnati
(I don’t like being referred to as a member of the “GDNG.” What does that mean, and how can someone call me a “GDNG” person?)

REPLY FROM DR WAUG

Dear Confused non-GDNG person,
Your letter asking for help in understanding the WAUGkids idea reminds me that most people are not really in the GDNG (Great Do-Nothing Generation), but are doing nothing for the WAUG kids because they simply don’t understand what’s happening today, and why I feel compelled do something, like start this blog, for them.

WHAT THIS BLOG IS ALL ABOUT, AND HOW IT GOT STARTED
This blog is about real human beings, living, breathing, walking, talking, loving and living and dying.

The difference between them and “us” is the same as the difference between the people of the United States in 1946, for example, and those of who are alive now, but who were not even dreamed about in 1946. For example, my wife was not living in 1946, but she’s alive now. Tom Hanks, Hillary Clinton, Tiger Wood, Peyton Manning and Jay Leno were not alive in 1946, but are very much alive now.

WAUGkids are those who are not living, breathing, walking, and talking right now, but are just as real as the celebrities named above. It’s just that the world, which is all bound up in a time/space matrix, has not gone through the changes it needs to go through with reference to some kind of cosmic Center Point to allow the WAUGkids to actually inhabit the molecules and tissues and skin that will be theirs in the next ten, twenty, fifty, or even one-hundred years. So for example, if you are my age, 70, and your kid is expecting a child, that child is as alive as my mother used to be, and will develop into a living, loving, caring, and eventually dying person, like all previously alive people did. So your are making a little gift, say, a small investment in an IRA, that will be there when your as-yet-unborn grandchild arrives at maturity, say, in the year 2028. That will be part of your legacy for your future grandchild. You may set aside two or three of these little legacies. There may be children who receive them later, though we are not fortune tellers, and can’t know for sure. But the idea that someone will inherit this planet in the future is pretty sound. Even if that future inhabitant is not a descendant of mine, or of yours, does not mean he or she is not “real.” It just means the future person is not here yet because the proper alignments and configurations of DNA and RNA and cytoplasm and all the other necessary components have not all arrived in the same place at the same time yet.
So the WAUG kids are those who will “for sure” be born in the future.

They will inhabit the earth. No matter how much you’d like to believe in some kind of cosmic escape hatch or “wormhole” or other device, there is little likelihood that a new planet will develop nearby for our use. There is also little chance that human beings born anytime in the next 100 years will actually set up a new existence somewhere else that is self-sustaining and comfortable.

At present, this planet is still self-sustaining from the point of view of human beings. There is water, food, sunlight, wind, weather, and abundant animal and plant life to sustain human being for a long time, currently.

The birthrate, however, is climbing in exponential numbers, so that we can expect that demand for the basic necessities will continue to grow faster than the supply, which will lead to much competition, vast migrations, and a lot more human problems than we have today.

The quality of life depends a great deal on the quality of our air, soil, and water, and the workings of weather. Whether we like it or not, the human race has steadily been soiling the nest, like a hen who continues to hatch new chicks everyday without taking a stroll to drop her droppings. The “soiling the next” behavior of human beings is both visible and invisible. Visibly, we can see rusting cars, collapsing factories, falling towers, crumbling stonework, cracked roadways, leaking drains, oil spills, clouds of smoke from power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, deliberate burning of sugar cane foliage, forests, and trash, and many other ugly sights. Invisibly, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and a host of aerosols, halogenated hydrocarbons, and volatile compounds, and even the vapors of mercury, which has a density thirteen times heavier than water, are mixing and diffusing through the earth’s atmosphere at ever increasing rates. These gases do a number of unwelcome things, but most threatening is their ability to trap infrared (heat) radiation in the atmosphere the way the closed windows of an automobile raise the temperature inside a parked car in the summer time.

This atmospheric heat and the incessant solar heat that cannot be reflected back out changes the temperature of the water and soil on the earth’s surface and creates ever more active weather extremes, with the resulting increase in storms and the heating of the seas and oceans. This in turn melts the ice caps and enables various insect and parasite borne diseases to find new homes in what have been temperate zones in historical times. As malaria, dengue fever, and other warm weather diseases move from equatorial regions toward the poles, we can expect that more and more lives will be affected or terminated by them.

Lakes and rivers are drying up, depriving human beings of fish, which for many is the main source of animal protein and vital oils. This is not an imaginary tale, but a fact of life.

The reason I decided to start the WAUGkidsWeb was that unless everyday people become aware of what “climate change” and “pollution” and “irrational finances” and “unjust arrangements” really mean inhuman terms, this current generation will be remembers forever as the last generation to live on a really nice planet in relative comfort, where terrorism and war, disease and poverty were often “other people’s problems” and people in advanced societies like the USA, Canada, the UK, Europe, Japan, Russia, and other major countries could get along pretty well.

Without realizing it the generation currently alive and able to “do something,” is like a great family celebrating a wedding or a birthday in a huge mansion which is teetering on the edge of a cliff. When a little kid shouts, “Look at the fireworks!” and points his finger out the rear window, the crowd shifts ever to slightly toward the rear of the house, and the entire house and its human contents plunge into the chasm.

We are on the edge of a historical precipice. Yet we do nothing. Today’s news tells us that when the leaders of the world met in Bali to discuss pollution and climate change, China and the USA clinched, deadlocked on who is to pay for the damage and the clean up necessary to slow (not stop, only slow) the destruction. Oh boy.

That why the current generation is seen, or will be seen, as the GDNG, or the Great Do Nothing Generation.

All I’ve done is committed myself to doing something about it. So, Confused in Cincinnati, if you don’t like being called a member of the GDNG, you have to get out and do something for the “What About Us? Generation.”

That’s what this blog is all about. I hope you join the Great Get it Done Generation or GGID Generation before it’s too late.

To Get it Done, write your newspaper editor when you see mention of the Bali or Kyoto agreements, or disagreements. Tell them you expect action, and ask for other readers to contact their representatives in their governments, their presidents, prime ministers, finance ministers, and so forth. Make phone calls. Send
E-mails. Forward the WAUG blogs to your friends, and have them contribute their ideas, have them forward the WAUG blog to their teachers, preachers, mayors, managers, stockholders, partners, mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, grandparents, enemies and friends. We have to get this thing going, and the Internet is the best and fastest way to do it.
Dr. Waug, Advocate for the What About Us? Generation kids who are begging, pleading, demanding, and writing their little hearts out hoping that someone in this generation does something to help them before its too late.

Write me at WAUGkids@gmail if you have feedback or suggestions.