When You Watch Television, You

Americans Love Marriage Too Much. We Rush Into Mariage With Abandon, Expecting A Micro-utopia On Earth. We Pile All Our Needs Onto It, Our Expectations, Neuroses, And Hopes. In Fact, We've Made Marriage Into The Panda Bear Of Human Social Institutions: We've Loved It To Death.

If You Can Attribute Your Success Entirely To Your Own Mental Effort, To Your Own Attitude, To Some Spiritual Essence That You Have That Is Better Than Other Peoples, Then That Must Feel Pretty Good.

Some Of Us Still Get All Weepy When We Think About The Gaia Hypothesis, The Idea That Earth Is A Big Furry Goddess-creature Who Resembles Everybody's Mom In That She Knows What's Best For Us. But If You Look At The Historical Record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, Poison Ivy, And So Forth Down The Ages - You Have To Ask Yourself: Whose Side Is She On, Anyway?

I Think It's Tragic That We Have This Human Capacity, Which Appears To Be Hardwired, Or So The Evolutionary Biologists Say, For Collective Joy. We Have These Techniques For Generating It That Go Back Thousands Of Years, And Yet We Tend Not To Use This.

A Lot Of What We Experience As Strength Comes From Knowing What To Do With Weakness. Nickel And Dimed On (not) Getting By In America