We tend to think the world’s getting smaller, but that’s been coming on a long time, coming back to where it started, I guess. We may have all descended from a single group of DNA-improved hominids that may have numbered no more than a couple hundred in their formative years. It may have taken thousands of years to get out of Africa, but hey, better late than never. The transportation systems in some of those countries still probably aren’t much better; ditto for life expectancy. We’ve come a long way since then, choosing sides as gooks and honkies, so that we’d have somebody else to fight when we aren’t busy fighting with ourselves. We even took the fight to America, honkies claiming the turf even though the gooks got there first. Or did they? The more we separated, the more we came back together. Aryans took their Motown chariots over the steppes all the way to India in the second millennium BC, kicking gook butt the whole way. Then Alexander, representing the honkies again, showed his troops how to ride bareback and proceeded all the way to Central Asia in the fourth century BC by the southern route. Well, that kicked over a hornet’s nest, you can be sure. The gooks invented stirrups and then Genghis Khan and his brother Don finally returned the favor fifteen hundred years later, kicking honkie and gook butt alike. They screamed down out of Outer Mongolia, and took China, central Asia, Persia, Russia, and half the known world as their province. This new state of affairs was not lost on some merchants of Venice and the Catholic Church. They decided to capitalize on the situation and thus capitalism was born, peddling trinkets to homies all over the world. Money is the measure of motion, a great scientific discovery. Then when European sailors realized you could sail south of the Equator and not fall off, it was a whole new ballgame all over again, the Age of Discovery. Muslims and Chinese already knew that, but, situated at the crossroads of trade, the Muslims were the problem, not the solution, and the Chinese were chicken shit. They had gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and printed paper, but couldn’t think of a thing to do with it, except print more money and gamble it away. The Middle Kingdom expected the world to come to them. Meanwhile the homies back in Africa didn’t do so well. Their average life expectancy never got much past that of our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins. When British tightwads discovered that the money they hoard and the gadgets they create could spur industry that would revolutionize the world, creating more and more money in a never-ending spiral, a big wad of cotton candy fluff was born that looks a lot like our modern world. Welcome to it. Good luck out there.
Geoffrey Thomas is discussing. 
streaming consciousness... 
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