Where has humanity come from? Where is it going?
Will it ever find a way to integrate its impulses?
Will it ever learn to discriminate between leaders & frauds?
Will it ever get over its awe of mere size & confidence?
Who are the Caucasians?
Where did the Celts & Teutons come from?
Where did the ancestors of the ancestors
of the Hellenes & Romans come from?
What sparked the Vikings' voyages of conquest?
Underneath the professions, liturgies, & scoffings
what are the heart-felt beliefs of the Europeans?
What is the relation between altruism, insecurity, & greed?
How far along is the machine revolution?
Who are the Africans?
What is the relationship of the tribes & nations?
What is the relationship between the genes & plains & jungles,
& mines & teeming cities & international commerce?
Will Africans organize & integrate?
Will they be an overwhelming army
or an enlightened race of cooperation?
Will Africans be defeated by their legacy of victimization & poverty?
Will a great prophet appear in their midst,
only to have his or her message bogged down
in generations of administrators' competition for authority?
Will Africa continue to be the land of plague, drought, famine, war?
Who are the Semites?
Will the Hebrews & Arabs find their common cause?
Will the Aramaens, Phoenecians, & Parthians re-emerge?
Have the Assyrians forever been assimilated by other peoples?
Where did the Sumerians come from?
Were their gods truly space-travelers who cloned human laborers?
What is the true history of agriculture, metallurgy, brewing, cities?
Who are the Hindus? the Chinese? the Japanese?
Where did the Polynesians come from? the Ainu?
Aborigines? Mongols? Finns? Basque?
Who do the Central American flat-nosed Olmec statues represent?
Who else is gone without a word of history?
What is the origin of the tribes of America? -
the buffalo-hunters, pyramid-builders, canoe-voyage traders?
When did it all start?
Is humanity forever bogged down in wishful thinking, panics, greed?
Will the necessary questioning always be suppressed
by those with the most force & those whose struggle
has been to find a comfortable way to serve them?
Will the only impulses - the noble impulses - that might unite us
always be feared, handicapped, ridiculed, persecuted
by those afraid to postpone even for an instant
adaptation to whatever unjust status quo prevails?
Is humanity a primitive organism
with attributes that are merely startling preludes
of what a more successful species yet to emerge will manifest?
Or is it a joke, a dead-end, a bragging drunk about to collapse?
Or is humanity still in its infancy -
& wisdom refraining from grabbing the most popular toys
& working for a maturity never yet experienced -
& only occasionally & briefly conceivable?
Is humanity early on, or in the midst of a stage of development,
or on the brink of a sudden transformation? -
like birth, death, spring, or the metamorphosis of caterpillars?
Will it be able to recover
after reaping the bitter harvests
planted by those no one could or would stop
in waters, atmosphere, foods, & soils -
& after the enraged striking-out of victimized youths
no one cared enough about to help effectively?
Eric Chaet