h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am watching a cable recording of your Charles Darwin program and it struck me that I did not watch Oprah Winfrey's program called "Life" because it was on Discovery Channel, which is loaded with war propaganda and other inacurracies.

So I wanted you to know that no matter how long I live I will hear your voice in my head talking about nature and I wanted you to know that. The places you have been, the animal programming, your knowledge of what you're talking about is not to be challenged. No one is better or has taught me more about the interconnection of life on earth.

I'm wondering what you think about the global warming planet as well as the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq (to be followed soon, we're told, by Yemen). I am a non-zionist Jew and the Israelis embarrass me whenever I think of my heritage. As you may know if you see my birthdate, I was born about one month before the killer state of Israel.

Anyone would think that the holocaust goes on forever and gives the Israelis the right to take their "god given" land from the Palestinians, who are semites, just like those Jews. They are cruel beyond words and I'm sure that people are starving in the streets because their houses have been destroyed, for no understandable reason, children killed, and there's a curfew and rules that keep them from working. Meanwhile, most of the olive trees that they depended on have been destroyed too.

I can't help but think that you have some strong opinions about these matters and would love to hear from you if you ever get back to people.

Prof. Howard Zinn, one of my other heroes in life, is dead--and I cried as if I were related to him. I recently wrote to Prof. Noam Chomsky because he has the most amazing mind I have ever gotten near (I used to work at MIT, and once temped in his office, although he wasn't there). He was writing about the brain chemistry of speech and I could barely understand the complexity of it, and he seems to know more about politics and the earth than any two people possibly could. He was nice enough to answer both my emails because, of course, he is one of the last of his type now that Dr. Zinn is gone. He and his wife had been friendly with the Zinns for 43 years and I touched a chord with him.

But this is about you, and you are perhaps the Chomsky of ecology--I can't help but think that we and our fellow creatures on this planet will be gone within the next 50 or fewer years because we are so greedy and short-sighted. For instance, this western depression we're having we try to pain as something much nicer than what it is and as for global warming, former Vice President Al Gore claimed to be concerned with the environment and then did not sign the Kyoto Accords. He also claimed to have INVENTED the internet--of course he didn't. And he is responsible for the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allowed more media monopolies than one country can stand and also allowed cable TV companies to buy other forms of media. Soon, there will be no printed newspapers here, so nothing good that he does now when he gets up and speechifies is ever going to make up for what he actually did during his 8-year term.

I would not be surprised if you know Gore Vidal, a brilliant man and a cousin of the Tennessee Gores. He has plenty to say about their reality and is a much better human being than any of them. So, I'm sorry about Presidents Bush 1+2 and Vice Presidents Gore and Cheney, but politics are run by money--and we don't have any, so we are run by the lobbies belonging to the huge companies on Wall St. For this I also blame Alan Greenspan, who continued in his job much longer than anyone bad should be allowed to.

Well, I really don't want to be alive when the planet dies because death is preferable to what agony will reign upon the Earth--a place that you love and that I love just as much. I must admit that people with more than 2 children are a problem here, but I only had one--so I do not feel guilty. My brother brought forth 4 and is proud of himself! He seems to want to take all of us with him when he dies, thinking that he'll see us again. I don't believe it. The Bible is a book of rules to live by and is misused and abused wherever it exists.

Call me a radical Constitutionalist living without religion. Religion is responsible for more killing than any other single cause.

I hope that you actually get to read this.

Sincerely,

Carla Herwitz