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Learn more about Neil deGrasse Tyson.

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day [April 7, 2013], remember the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust for being Jews and for no other reason, and the millions of others who were murdered by the Nazis.

Actually, the really frightening lesson is NOT that they were murdered simply because they were Jews. They were murdered because the most advanced society at the time allowed itself to fall under the sway of theories of race purification and eugenics whose origins can be traced to another advanced society, the United States. (See Eugenics Cold Spring Harbor  and Sterilization United States) We fool ourselves into thinking that the Germans represented some sort of aberration when, in fact, they represented the apotheosis of Western civilization, having been the source of major advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and so forth. The danger lies in self-induced complacency brought on by focusing solely on the result — the killing of six million — without also focusing on the sequence of events and socio-politico-scientific rationalizations that made mass killing possible from both a theoretical and technological perspective.

“I alphabetized them so I could find them. Do I put this new one under ‘I’ for ink, ‘T’ for toner, or ‘S’ for Staples?”

She recommended S for Staples.

“I know I’m giving away my age,” I added, leaning in a bit as if I were letting her in on a secret, “but when I bought my first laser printer, it cost me over $1,200 dollars.”

She gasped.

Literally.

“It’s still up in my attic. The thing won’t die.”

I’m still in shock at how much the prices of these things — computers; laser printers, and other gadgets — have dropped over the years. Theoretically I should be swimming in dough with all the savings. But while the prices of these goods have dropped, gasoline has gone from 75 cents a gallon, when I started driving, to $4 dollars a gallon. Monthly phone bills have gone from $24 dollars per month — there were no cell phones or internets to worry about when I got my first apartment — to $400 dollars per month for four cell phones, internet access, Hulu and NetFlix. To put that in perspective, my first apartment cost me $500 per month. Home prices, in parts of Brooklyn, went from $34,000 dollars to well over $400,000 dollars or more. When I went to college, tuition was so low that I could pay for each semester in full simply by working some part time jobs.

It seems that in a few decades, the world has turned upside down. We’re drowning in affordable must have gadgets, the very same gadgets that cost $1,000 dollars or more when they first appeared on the market. Over the years we rejoiced as the prices kept dropping, making them more affordable for more people. But while our gaze was focused on the deluge of affordable gadgets that make up the basic staples of modern life, the other staples of modern life, the ones with lasting value — home; education; secure retirement; secure job — have become astronomically expensive, beyond the reach of more and more people, and in the case of secure jobs, have disappeared altogether.

I wonder if it’s possible to turn back the clock, to go back to 75-cents-per-gallon gasoline and $1,000 dollar laser printers. If that can be done then maybe, just maybe, I can get back my union job, my rotary dial phone with its $24 dollar per month bill and, for the sake of my children’s education, maybe they can get $600 dollar per semester tuition at the local college.

This was my response to the email:

I know how I should feel at the end of this story…but the sacrifice we ask men and women to make just to assure that Exxon and BP have access to crude oil…well…it angers me to no end. For almost my entire life, this country has been at war. I’ve seen generation after generation destroyed and killed to protect the assets of multinational corporations. Yes, my heart goes out to this man, his family, and all the others that have sacrificed life and limb, but when I ask, has it been worth it, I cannot answer in the affirmative. We lost 50,000 soldiers in Vietnam and killed at least 1,000,000 Vietnamese. We have napalmed villages, spread Agent Orange around the world, propped up tin-pot dictators and oil sheiks. We have destroyed so many lives, both here and abroad, that there are times when I wish I wasn’t an American citizen because I hate what this country has become.

Note to the blog reader: You can learn more about this brave soldier at this website – http://timdoddphotography.com/blog/News/taylor-morris