Some years ago I dreamed about a couple of lives that were possibilities for me in either the Roman Empire or far in the future. The life in the past was somewhere on the Mediterranean, perhaps on a island. It was an opportunity for a pleasurable and sensual experience but otherwise uninteresting. Millennia in the future, I had a chance to look back through time at what had been the United States of America.
Layer after layer of civilization, overlay the space that is now the US and I was shocked at how quickly my age was submerged in history. Unexpectedly, we're gone in not that many centuries. It was uncomfortable for me that we were gone so fast and that no one remembered us.
In several thousand years a small group of Hasidim on a side street in one of the burrows of New York City believed that Manhattan was given to them by God; AK47's out and at the ready. Dressed in today's classic gray business suit and dark hat, they were taking their City back.
Why is it that the more things change, the more they stay the same?
Going to an embarkation point for a journey to Europe, I traveled down a broad avenue past the ruins of a contemporary business park, overgrown with palm trees and jungle vegetation. As old as Babylon, or some Inca ruin and just as dead. This was just few years ago, and the dream forecast the collapse of our business civilization.
I flew across the sky from the extreme South West to the South East arcing from Southern California through the upper Midwest, I saw the deserts of the West growing and expanding to meet the deserts of the South East. The upper Midwest was still fertile and green and the green extended north.
