What a difference

a day makes! Skies are blue, the breeze is balmy and the only sign of yesterday's storm is the overnight sprouting of green where there was brown. All the lichen coming back to life at once.

In the Caribbean we are always aware of the possible storm systems rolling in and speak in measured tones of troughs and depressions; tossing around longitude, latitude and millibars as though they were cricket balls in a warm up session.

I was speaking to our chief meteorologist and was enchanted to learn that most clouds have a life span of three to six hours unless something happens to increase their longevity. It gives a whole new tragic dimension to cloudwatching. The vigil. The dissolution. The sheer fact that someone has studied clouds so deeply that we can talk with authority about their lifespan.

Human beings are at once the most amazing and most disappointing creatures on the surface of the planet. Our quest for knowledge, our curiosity and unwillingness to just accept has moved us forward from the stone to hi tech age with blistering speed.

Perhaps too fast for us to assimilate the knowledge effectively, but what is done is done. Too bad our moral compass has not expanded at quite the same rate. It saddens me that information is so thoroughly, so instantly available and yet we still slink and scheme and make snap judgments, point fingers and seek to shrug off blame onto other shoulders while whining about our rights and abrogating all responsibility.

Although I do not read the threads that are nothing more than glorified popularity contests, even I was aware of the topics dedicated to the 'winner and runners up'. Mere days later they are being sniped at from the bushes or openly verbally slapped around.

Sour grapes from those whose candidates were unsuccessful? I neither know nor care; but I learned more than I wanted to about some whose posts had been interesting enough for me to make a point of reading them. Until now. Ah well, it is all just a virtual experience anyway. I can turn it all off with the click of a button.

The average thread on a forum has a life span of a couple of hours although it can be resurrected, much like lichen. The tendencies people show on these threads, though. Can they be turned off? Are they virtual or is it who they really are? Sometimes I read the threads and weep.