By Jim Heffernan
I found this when I moved my printer. It’s from April of 1996 when I was taking WR246 at TBCC. The last paragraph is new, but otherwise 26 years old.
It’s maybe a little bitter-sweet. Shortly after this, I became the “refrigeration guy” at the cheese factory and my day-job became all-consuming. Ah, well.
Something within me wants to put a label on everything. My spiritual philosophy is no exception.
Years ago, I rejected the theology of my Catholic upbringing and replaced it with a fuzzy amalgam of Buddhism, science-fiction, and socialism.
Now I think of myself as a Fullerite. I may be the only one. Then again, maybe there are thousands, isolated from me and calling themselves something else. I just don’t know.
I began to think of myself as a Fullerite after reading “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” by Buckminister Fuller.
Fuller describes the earth as a marvelous spaceship, heaped with treasure, hurtling through space at a phenomenal rate.
We are the crew. We began our journey at an unknown spot in space and time. Our destination is unknown. The precious cargo we carry is our spirituality and intellect. We have an absolutely perfect life-support system to sustain us, provided we operate our spaceship carefully and respectfully.
The craft is perfect. The cargo is coming along nicely.
The crew rates no higher than poor-to-mediocre. We are too concerned with our own personal desires and care too little for the needs of the ship and the well-being our fellow crew members.
I hear rumbles suggesting that maybe we are becoming aware of how poorly we are treating our spaceship and our fellow crew members. I hope it’s not too late. It would be a tragedy if our spaceship should arrive without its cargo.