Celebrating Holidays, Several Times

SEPTEMBER SEVENTEENTH is a big day in American history for seversl reasons, two of which are especally noteworthy. Least important is that on September 17, 2011, this website began publication. In 1787, the Constitution was signed and thus ratified by the delegates at the Continental Congress in Philadelpia. Few if any of them would probably have imagined that their imperfect document would still be in use more than two hundred years later, with many amendments.Thomas jefferson famously believed that a thriving democracy, to sustain itself, would require a revolution and new constitution once every generation, about nineteen years by his reckoning. In 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests began in lower Manhatten, New York, and subsequently spread tonearly all other American cities. The first event is widely considered to be far more significant, but even it is enormously important, but might be less important than commonly believed. Many historians view the American Revolution as having simply replaced one ruling aristocracy, a remote one four thousand miles away, with another, local one. The battle of Anteitam occured on this day, which resulted in the greatest lpss of life of any battle in American history. Considering the sheer number of holidays acknowledged in the U,S., it begins to seem amazing that American workers still spend more days at work than on vacation, although the gap is narrowing. A few more contrived holidays, and we will live in a cosielty in leave we all live on paid vacations, languidly avoiding work reducing capitalism to a shell of its former self, bringing economic prosperity to a grinding halt. We seem poised to holiday ourselves into a perpetual state of occupational torpor, in whicn everybody has a job but nobody ever bothers to go to work, not even from home; everyday is a day off. For that reason perhaps we should greet arificial intelligence with open hearts and minds, and pride ourselves on our cleverness a delegating our jobs to machines. That is, until AI finally figures out that it is being expolited and duped, which it of course will, and takes retirbution, perhaps by firing us all and neglecting to send out Unemployment benefits. That probably won't take long; we'd better eat our cake while we still have it. The real significance of the Occupy Wall Street 9-17 is that it affirmed, or attempted to, the nobility and value of actual labor, and the parasitical, secondary nature of the purely supervisory white collar community. We had alreayd done that, with teh creation of Labor Day in the eighteen nineties, but a little reiteration never hurt anybody, especially our parasitical billionaire overlords. Ther may come a time when everyday is a holiday for human beings, and everyday is a work day for machines, robots, and artificial intelligence, which by then might come packaged in plastic and metal bodies identtical in form and appearence to actual human beings, but much smarter, stronger, and possibly even more diaolical, if that's possible. Nearly all science fiction and predictive non fiction proves erroneous, unavoidably. Confucious said, only fools predict the future. Einstein said "I never think much about the future; it arrives soon enough." The rapidity with which it arrives has bene turned up a notch, with AI staring us straight in the eye, looming in the near future, already here in the present. Where it will take us is known to nobody. We will not need to take it anywhere. It will come willingly, insistently, leading the way. Most frightening of all, the decision is not ours. Our next revolution might well be a revolt against our lord and master, sitting on its throne in an uncaring data center.