Life and Time

On any given day, there is a huge three-lane parking lot of cars moving at the speed of snail in both directions of I-95, while the two-lane EZ-Pass is almost empty because nobody can afford the confiscatory fees set by the “investors” who were given free reign to the taxpayer-built road. Time is money and life but on this suffocated road time seems still. Our lives ticktock away while we wait to move a few feet before we stop again as if we have all the time in the world.

Time has little significance when you wait in endless lines under socialist societies run by the Communist Party to buy bread and rationed kilos of flour, rice, oil, and sugar.

Time is not important when you visit the one doctor assigned to 10,000 patients in the area, wait in a crowded room the entire day, and receive a prescription for your temporary ailment, prescription that you cannot fill because the pharmacies are empty. Survival and the black market preoccupy us, not time.

What happens when immediate survival and looming starvation are most important variables? How do we view time then? Standing hours in long lines makes time unimportant.

How do we use our limited time on earth? It depends on each person’s idea of living, fast or slow. How do we frame time delays caused by life’s variables? How do people accept them?

Delays are not something people in western societies think much about in terms of time wasted that can never be brought back; we are always in a hurry, and delayed gratification is forgotten because we have so many choices that frame time and possibilities differently.

How people tolerate and react publicly to delays is another matter. Impatience and tolerance for delays are easy to see in people’s actions and in the incidence of sidewalk and highway rage.

Impatience to time wasted can be measured by the number of seconds of sound bites we are willing to listen to or watch. Yet people glare at inserted ads without questioning time wasted on those cumulative moments. Those trying to make money are robbing you of time.

Oliver Burkeman wrote that calculations have been made to determine how long a shopper is willing to wait on slow-loading pages on electronic devices. It was calculated that, “if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.” (p. 163, Oliver Burkeman, “Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, 2021)

Our impatience is strongly related to the realization that the average human lives a short 4,160 months if they live to be 80 years old?

Most people stopped reading books with the excuse that they have no time to read. There is a huge flood of information that requires their precious time. Yet they trap themselves on social media surfing for hours or playing games to escape reality.

Prior to 2008, we had to wait a long time for the dial-up modem. Before that we had cable and a myriad of channels, but Baby Boomers had a simpler life and four channels to waste time on.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping yet nobody stops to think what they could do with some of that time if our bodies did not need sleep to stay alive.

Are we “speed addicts” or just realize suddenly, thanks to technology, how limited our time on earth is? Perhaps we experienced a traumatic event, and it brought the realization of finite time, if nothing else bad happens?

Once this level of realization is reached, time seems to fly even faster. We appreciate time deeply, we tune in to surrounding nature, and a profound awareness of limitations vis-à-vis the remaining months of life. The tendency to distraction becomes smaller. “Being alive becomes the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”

Distraction is seen as divergence from your timed life, an accumulation of lapses in focus. Burkeman wrote about the “attention economy” which persuades you to direct your attention to things that are not important in your finite life.

Social media is a huge life interrupter and time stealer. It redirects your attention to “Reels,” sound and video bites, sometimes educational, but often worthless entertainment. Ads for that magical ingredient that might cure what ails you, traps you for forty minutes before you find out at the end what it is.

I often waste my time with amateur photography. I have taken over 24,000 photos and videos of museums and places I may never visit again. Instead of enjoying those moments more, I spent time capturing them on film so that I can re-visit them later which seldom comes. My husband jokes that, during our hikes through the woods, I have taken photos of the same trees, during different seasons.

We are all guilty of utilizing and wasting time in diverse ways based on our temperament, hobbies, habits, and skewed valuation of time on earth or lack thereof.

 

 

 

A 1979 Time Magazine Article about Islam

“We Muslims are one family even though we live under different governments and in various regions.” – Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s revolution



http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19790416,00.html

Thirty-seven years ago, Time magazine dedicated its cover to “Islam, The Militant Revival,” and published a lengthy article, “The World of Islam,” in which John A. Meyer wrote, “We want to examine Islam’s resurgence, not simply as another faith but as a political force and potent third ideology competing with Marxism and Western culture in the world today.” It was April 16, 1979.  

The editor, Marguerite Johnson, penned the cover story because “the Iranian revolution has made it especially important for Westerners to understand the driving energy and devotion Islam commands from so many.”

Senior editor John Elson indicated that “Islam has been frequently misunderstood, partly because so many people have tried to apply terms from Christianity and Judaism to it.” In writing this article, the editors have attempted to draw a picture of Islam for what it really is, “a way of ordering society.”

According to Time magazine, there were 750 million Muslims and 985 million Christians in 1979, a large group ready to assert the “political power of the Islamic way of life.” The people of Iran apparently voted overwhelmingly to create an Islamic republic, the nation’s first “government of God,” as Ayatullah Khomeini declared.

This theocratic and freedom-stifling government replaced, after one year of revolution, “a dynastic autocrat who dreamed of turning his country into a Western-style industrial and secular state.” Changing a westernized society into a government by religious mullahs was described as “a new dawn for the Islamic people.”

Time magazine quoted the Cairo’s magazine Al Da’wah (The Call): “The Muslims are coming, despite Jewish cunning, Christian hatred, and the Communist storm.”

And it came to pass - the Muslims are really coming, by the millions, invading Europe and America, welcomed with open arms by a senescent and suicidal Europe ruled by technocrat elitists who are only interested in failed multi-culturalism, their power, control of the emerging tower of Babel, and their bank accounts.

Time magazine described the revival of Islam in the 70 countries around the world, reflected in the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, unchanged for 14 centuries; this alleged revival took place among the young who desired sharia law, burkas, hijab and other forms of enslaving women to their half-person status, genital mutilation, and harsh punishments in cases of rape, divorce, adultery, and abortion.

Time magazine assumed that this alleged revival had taken place for decades because “Islam is no Friday-go-to-mosque kind of religion. It is a code of honor, a system of law and an all-encompassing way of life.”

This resurgence was inspired and fueled by a “quest for stability and roots,” a deep-seated hatred for Western values, and “the population explosion in those Islamic nations where birth control is little practiced.”

Marvin Zonis is quoted that “Islam is being used as a vehicle for striking back at the West, in the sense of people trying to reclaim a very greatly damaged sense of self-esteem. They feel that for the past 150 years the West has totally overpowered them culturally, and in the process their own institutions and way of life have become second rate.”

“Islam is a political faith with a yearning for expansion,” said Marguerite Johnson. And the history of its expansionist desires is quite telling, an expansionism that necessitated the Christian Crusades in order to regain territories occupied by Islam.

Arabs raided and conquered many lands and their traders carried Islam with them; the Persian Empire, the Byzantine Empire, North Africa into Spain, the Middle East, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, the black tribes in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, were all forced into submission and conversion to Islam. Time magazine added that, “On the Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia, in Africa and the Pacific, millions of Muslims were under colonial rule.”

Time magazine remarked that “Islam is frequently stereotyped as unmitigatedly harsh in its code of law, intolerant of other religions, repressive toward women and incompatible with progress.” No mention is made of the Koranic quotes which advise their faithful to kill the infidels.

Salem Azzam, then Saudi secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe, was quoted as saying that seeing this Islamic resurgence in a negative light is nothing but a “return to colonialism – indirect but of a more profound type.”

Other Muslims and their defenders claimed that “Islam is not monolithic, that it is compatible with various social and economic systems, and that far from being a return to the Dark Ages, it is wholly consonant with progress.” The reality is that the Taliban had oppressed and regressed a thriving Afghan society.

The “war refugees” from Syria, who have invaded welfare-generous European countries and are raping and pillaging the host societies, have gravely affected the very tolerant and multi-cultural nations who foolishly invited them in with open arms.

Devout Muslims are described in this article as opposed to the “materialism of the West and the atheism of Communism.” But they welcome “individual initiative, respect private property, and tolerate profits.” But moderation and “communal responsibility” are most important. Usury is forbidden but interest is allowed if used for the “common good.” Community and the common good are communist tenets.  A zakat of 2.5%, levied against individual assets, was allowed for the benefit of the community.

A devout Muslim objects to the evils associated with modern life but enjoys everything free that the west must provide, such as welfare, housing, TVs, cell phones, cable, cars, electricity, A/C, etc. The Time article stated that Islam objects to “liquor factories,” to the “breakdown of the family structure, the lowering of moral standards, [and] the appeal of easygoing secular life-styles.” But Muslims “are demanding the best of the West: schools, hospitals, technology, agricultural and water development techniques.”

Devout Muslims, no matter where they live, are required to abide by Sharia Law, “the path to follow.” The consensus of Islamic scholars in charge and the deeds and sayings of Muhammad become an “all embracing code of ethics, morality and religious duties.” It is thus a complete control of one’s life.

Once entrenched in the western civilization, Muslims start chiseling at its foundation in an effort to turn it into Sharia-compliance; everything that made western schools, hospitals, agriculture, military, and technology great in the first place, will be replaced with what is approved by the Islamic theocracy.

No matter how the media spins Islam then and now, Sharia Law and our U.S. Constitution are not compatible. Moral relativism and tolerance to the point of ignorance will result in national suicide.