Little Stone
author: petros
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creative response to loss of critical thinking within our education system.
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(What if... )
Unless one was to believe this story as unalterably true, it would be as shallow as the words on this page. If you are of the scientific persuasion, suspend disbelief - if a person of faith, believe with all of your heart.
"Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." KJV Holy Bible. From that verse, Peter became Little Stone. Of course hippies laughed, thinking he was really a little stoned. Peter insisted and persisted. They realized that he was one of the high, holy hippies that walked among them untouched by their lusts and altered states.
Classrooms had become battlegrounds for the last souls of America. Predators lurking in distant fortresses needed soldiers. Soldiers must obey without question. They must be able to think about practical things like acquiring body armor from scrap, but not critical enough in their thinking to imagine depleted uranium drifting like an unseen banshee upon the battlefield.
For this purpose, the ghouls in their Washington, D.C. think tanks devised Intelligent Design. It was the perfect thought weapon to seduce emerging masses of teenagers and their devoted parents. They began an experiment with Peter. With the help of his brother, a psychiatrist, they asked him to redirect a promising scientist into a completely humanistic endeavor. The brother's motive, like Esau's, was to depose Peter from his rightful inheritance. Peter, the son of a second marriage, replaced the brother in the father's affections. The brother was sent off to Andover - in part the result of manipulations by the second wife. This led to intense jealousy. Denied the nurturing of a father, the psychiatrist periodically tried to undermine Peter's success. It was easy to turn the young college student from a career in the sciences. That required only a few summers of decadent seduction before graduation. Then something untoward occurred. Peter slipped under the radar for six months. Elite in Washington assured the psychiatrist that Peter would return, that he was just testing his manhood. When Peter returned to civilization, he had changed. A holographic image had replaced the real Peter who moved outside the stream of time.
Once in October of 1987, Peter came as a glittering sword to challenge the Old Men Rockefellers. Using Native American skills, he bonded with the land and broke the psychic chain that nurtured these warmongers. The Rockefeller clan communicated by thought among themselves. In conversation with a tree, Peter had become so tuned to Nature that he was inconspicuous. Inadvertently a member of the Rockefeller clan entering the Rockefeller personal estate spoke in thought language to Peter. His anger had become directed, "Be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down on your wrath." The stock market temporarily crashed the next day.
The first time the Elite noticed Peter - for them an experiment gone awry - was his role in undermining the Cold War through Soviet friendship groups. They tried their usual fixing of the data to incriminate and marginalize him. It failed - to the Elite, a fluke occurrence from intervention by Peter's father. The psychiatrist knew Vice President Dick Cheney personally. Later, at an opportune moment the V.P. directed the psychiatrist to compromise his brother. Cheney was one of the architects of a planned takeover of America by International Corporations.
"Your brother is becoming a problem for us. We can't get to him. Probe his past and find his weakness," Cheney ordered.
The implementation of Intelligent Design was going as planned. It had morphed from the failed creationist approach to the more sophisticated Intelligent Design. The goal was the same, to create skilled technicians who would obey directives from the Elite. Soldiers were needed while oil remained the primary energy source. Once gone, the centralized infrastructure of the Elite would collapse.
The psychiatrist called Peter and as usual focused on pre-hologram events, trying to determine when the shift had occurred. As the conversation progressed, Peter by chance related an assault to demonstrate to his brother that he did not lack courage. His hope was to get his brother to suspend judgment and establish real communication.
"I gained the trust of a Republican by convincing him that I was unlike most non-violent progressives. I was not enjoying the fruits of our American lifestyle without being willing to fight. I was not leaving the fight to others, but willing to put my life on the line."
The psychiatrist prompted, "Sure"
"No, really. When I was hitchhiking from Oklahoma City to Dallas, a male nurse picked me up. It was late, around 11 P.M. I was tired. I had been going all day, and had walked a good twenty miles. He gave me a sixty-mile ride, offered me coffee, and said he'd take me another thirty miles after that. As I was pouring a third cup of coffee, I felt the point of a knife in my back. The guy was queer and told me to drop my pants. Instead, without fear or anger, I prayed out loud in tongues. The guy slammed across the living room, leaning against the wall for support. He said, 'I don't know who or what you are, but you're free to go'. I walked out the door and a shooting star went across the sky."
The psychiatrist reported to his handlers, who worked for Cheney, and they sent him a check to continue his lawsuit that would be the big payoff. Meanwhile, Peter struggled with a strategy to confront the advocates of Intelligent Design. They were becoming highly successful in the schools. Teachers that taught critical thinking were allowed to retire. The testing service that certified teachers was privatized. An essay component was added. Any teacher that demonstrated independent thought was selected against in the scoring.
Interestingly, it was a re-make of the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, that provided Peter with the clue to juxtapose two socially engineered polarities. In the last scene, a noted attorney defended the teacher who advocated thinking. Originally written to confront McCarthyism in 1956, the play ended with the attorney for the defense taking both Darwin's Origin of the Species and the Holy Bible home to read.
As Peter was in MacDonald Forest, he considered the logic of those supporting Intelligent Design. It was religion, not science. No testable experiment could be set up. Punctuated equilibrium could explain the gaps in the fossil record. The mechanism for mass extinctions had recently been established. When global warming reached the level where carbon dioxide was at 1000 ppm, that led to ocean warming. Currents stopped. The oceans became anoxic without currents to add oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria produced sulphuric acid gas, which killed all living things. A religious fanatic would simply believe it was the foreordained end of the world. The Elite would retire their bunkers with self sustaining life support systems, and re-emerge when their big problem was removed - overpopulation of the planet. (Present levels of 400 ppm are expected to reach 1000 ppm in 60 years with present anthropogenic sources adding to carbon dioxide emissions.)
The solution came to Peter quite innocently. MacDonald Forest was a large tract of 6,000 hectares used to test forest management practices. Oregon State University had put in miles of gravel road, crushing local basalt rock for that purpose. As he was walking along, he saw a piece of gravel with some bird droppings on it. Picking it up, he was surprised to see that it was not bird droppings, but feldspar crystals embedded in the basalt. One image was an exact depiction of the first letter of his last name. The second image was a spiral - known in Native American tradition as the verb of nature.
How could such an anomaly come to be? What were the odds that such a design would appear at this moment? It was not illusion, for he later showed the stone to others. Invariably, their response was silence, a few choice cuss words of surprise or God is speaking to you. In order for that little stone to appear at this moment, volcanic eruptions occurred before the appearance of man. Later the stone was mined and crushed, then distributed on the forest roads. Who could argue against such evidence for intelligent design?
Peter used this knowledge to bridge consciously designed polarities between progressives and Christian fundamentalist. A corporate attorney turned environmental advocate linked him to Federal and private monies to establish a sustainable forestry program in the schools. As a privately funded education supplement, Peter was free of the normal constraints imposed on professional teachers. Field based, with transportation and parental oversight, the project quickly allowed a return to a critical thinking process that had been the cornerstone of public science education in the past.
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