“Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness are, by their own nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Everyone who spends much time on the internet has favorite sites. One of mine is called World Clock, one aspect of a larger web site presented by Peter Russell who has been and is perhaps best described as “Eco-Philosopher Extraordinaire.” He is also a businessman/self-help guru who, through his web site, will sell you books, tapes, DVDs, meditation instruction and speaking engagements to help you find happiness as described by Arthur Schopenhauer. As such, Peter Russell is not for everyone.
But the World Clock is, and I check it out about once a month just to monitor some of the changes in our highly uncertain, precarious world.
World clock presents approximate data continuously updated by the second, day, week, month and year about a wide range of the earth’s dynamics, including its human population, species extinction, shrinking forests, expanding desertification, CO2 emissions and military expenditures. The clock gives concrete numbers to many of those highly uncertain, precarious and ephemeral and subject to chance sources that, whether or not we pay attention to them, affect our individual happiness and the collective lives of all creatures that live on earth. Like everything in this world, including each and every person reading this, the data and the dynamics they represent are inextricably connected.
At this writing, according to the clock, there are about 7 billion 116 million humans on planet earth with 170,000 more arriving each day. Almost 70,000 acres of forest are leveled each day and another 32,000 acres become desert. Each day, day after day after day. You can watch in real, present time the average temperature of the planet, and that figure never fluctuates, it only raises a miniscule amount every second. Hardly enough to notice (and all too many people don’t) until one realizes there are 315,576,000 seconds in ten years, and then those miniscule amounts noticeably add up.
One disturbing if interesting and surprising (at least to me) statistic from the clock is that each year more than 110,000 people commit suicide, more than the numbers of loss of life to war and all the other less organized forms of violence combined, at least for this year. During our nation’s search for phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for instance, loss of life to war numbers were considerably higher. There are more than 4.5 million new automobiles produced each year and more than 150,000 people are killed in traffic accidents. There are almost 14 million bicycles built each year. The clock doesn’t report how many people are killed and injured riding those bicycles, but it can be surmised that a significant percentage of bike riders are sufficient unto themselves and whose happiness belongs to them. At least compared to drivers of the automobile, especially, say, those in a southern California freeway gridlock where happiness is not the prevailing state of mind.
One of the most fascinating, unhappy items on the clock is “Military Expenditure.” The numbers in each time frame from day to year change so fast the human eye cannot keep up. These expenditures are not broken down by country, but every responsible U.S. citizen knows that the U.S. spends more on military than the next ten nations—China, Russia, UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil‑‑‑combined. Combined!! The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s military expenditures, paid for by nearly 50 percent of the U.S. budget. When you see the military expenditure numbers on the world clock moving faster than the eye can follow, it is useful to consider that 40 percent of those whirling numbers represent your tax dollars at work (or war or waste, depending on perspective). At this writing, the whirling military numbers were reporting just under 5 trillion (TRILLION!!!) dollars a week. This indicates that every week of every year more than 2 trillion dollars of your taxes are spent supporting what the U.S. military is doing in the world. Two trillion dollars a week.
The thought arises from contemplating such data that even, say, half a trillion dollars every week could be put to better use in America than it has been in, for specific instance, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. We could start with a health care system, the infrastructure of road and water systems or mass rapid transit systems. Personally, I would favor using that money for education. The U.S., which spends more on the military than any nation in history, is today ranked 54th among nations in education expenditures. And it shows. The U.S. is ranked 17th among world nations in education. Idaho, where I live, is ranked 47th in education among states in the 17th ranked Unites States. The implications are obvious. The possibilities are as vast as the data on the World Clock.
Check it out at www.peterrussell.com