The Miracle of life


The Daily Targum
By James O’Keefe
Published: 9/19/2003

Each time a man ejaculates, 500 million sperm - a number exceeding the population of Europe - eagerly swim forth. Ingrained in each one of these feisty chromosome-filled tadpoles is the incessant, instinctual, dire need to pursue and discover the pot of gold over the rainbow. Every human being was at one time a mindless, helpless, microscopic piece of bean sprout-looking matter with a mere chance of one in 500 million (all other things being equal) of fertilizing our mother's egg. But somehow in a world of six billion, each one of us has beaten these astronomical odds. We are walking and talking exceptions to a statistical impossibility; virtual pieces of art sculpted from bare nothingness; manifestations of an oppressed chance in a world where we can't even win the raffle at a little league baseball game. But not all sperm are created equal. Take a look in the mirror. You are essentially looking at an Olympian. You sprinted through dark canyons, solving mazes and using inherent superpowers to break through shells of steel. You emerged triumphantly winning the gold medal in a race of 500 million. First place receives a bright journey filled with meaning, truth and accomplishment. These special sperm grow up to become doctors, lawyers, puppeteers, and professors - perhaps curing a disease, becoming president, preventing a war or writing a thesis on kangaroo psychology or what-have-you. The other 499,999,999 (give or take a couple) vanish into the dark recesses of an unacknowledged life they never get to live.It amazes me that an entire species is composed of these Olympians - those special sperm who beat unthinkable odds and come from nothingness with no probability of ever existing to persevere over those statistical detractors. Right now take a look around you at the people who take their lives for granted. Look at them. They don't even consider how incredible their journey has been. They don't realize how much of an impact they will have on the world around them. Everybody has an impact on the world around them. If Christopher Columbus's mother didn't have sex with her husband on the exact day she did, in the exact form she did, the whole fate of the western world would be changed forever. When Columbus was a sperm he could have decided he would give up on his way to fertilizing the egg, tired of meandering through tunnels of darkness with no egg in sight. A different, less adventuring sperm could have mistakenly bumped into him and fractured Columbus's tail. The other sperm could then reach the egg, and Chris could have grown up with different interests to become a jester, instead of a skilled entrepreneur like Columbus. The entire free world would have ceased to exist as it does now. Perhaps Japan or the Swedes would have discovered us. Native Americans could have lived in tranquil serenity for another hundred years. Perhaps we would turn into a communist breeding ground. But whatever the outcome, everybody would be having sex in different ways with different people in different places. Maybe there would be no melting pot. Entirely different people would have been born. Life on earth would be irrevocably changed into a new paradigm that would have stayed the course of human history forever. Perhaps we should really accredit the discovery of the "New World" to the less adventurous sperm not getting in the way of Columbus.As you can see, this isn't just a reproduction phenomenon. It is also connected to fate. We choose a path, take it and one thing leads to another. One could eternally retrace steps not taken and roads less traveled to no end, realizing there were so many people and places not encountered. That is why when I'm talking to anyone, I realize how amazing it truly is that I am with that person, at that time, in that place, when things could have turned out completely different in infinitely many ways. A 100-year-old man has discovered so many forks in his journey, so many twists and turns since he was conceived. There will be generations of people affecting the world due to the choices he made; due to the fact his parents decided to immigrate to America. He has made an eternal ripple on the pond of time. Billions of people, just like him, operate all over earth. We meet in subways, at Starbucks or in school. If we change our desire for coffee one morning, or our decision to take the F instead of the EE, perhaps we'll be missing out on potential friendship or some type of epiphany; deciding to have a cappuccino could change our lives drastically.Now you can't live your life like this. You would probably never choose your major here at Rutgers. You would never marry anyone ever. You would obsess over every decision you have to make. But the next time you hear a mathematician belittling your chances of winning the lottery, tell him both of you were once facing odds approaching 1 in 500 million. You were both one of about 10 trillion sperm produced in a man's lifetime. Explain that you both beat the impossibly small likelihood of meeting each other in a universal realm of infinite space-time. Perhaps he'll look at you, shrug, and say, "You've got a point." Whatever you believe in, whatever your origin and whatever ideology you ascribe to, you cannot deny the miracle of life. Believe in yourself and in your ability to achieve impossible things, because you already did.

NJO: Originally appeared in Rutgers University's newspaper The Daily Targum, later posted on the blog Feathers of Steel at liberabit.blogspot.com.

Inside the Mind of the Rutgers Professor, Part IV: Prejudice

Prejudice

Professors at Rutgers, particularly in the psychology department, have become obsessed with eliminating prejudice – and not necessarily the illogical and unjust biases that dominate the connotations of prejudice. The wise prejudices like common sense, moral principle and empirical fact have been eliminated with the incorrect justification they are related to racial discrimination.

Everything the Rutgers student knows upon entering the University must be replaced, everything learned in the household, community, and religious texts. “Preconceived” or “inflexible” ideas must be abandoned. Only then is the Rutgers’ student’s mind empty, and only then can the brainwashing begin.

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.

Inside the Mind of the Rutgers Professor, Part II: Relativism

Relativism

Rutgers Professors believe there is no such thing as truth. Moral and ethical truths are a matter of cultural constructs and personal experiences. Human action has no value; a terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. If we free ourselves from the moral principles custom and religion bind us to we shall become what Nietzsche called Übermensch, or “Superman.” A Rutgers relativist may wish to justify genital mutilation, genocide and Stalinism with a statement like “who’s to say who’s right?” From this pseudo-thought stems the ridiculous but prevalent notion that proponents of injustice are victims, due to a lack of social, financial, or racial privilege. Therefore, according to the relativist, societies are responsible for the actions of freethinking individuals. After all, “evil” as we have known it is an outdated Judeo-Christian concept, and if relevant, only applies to deeds, not people. “Good” is never defined. Judgment is the only cardinal sin. The irony of the professors’ view is that the relativist position itself is the opposite of relative. It is absolutist! Any moral axiom, for instance, “don’t have sex with babies,” is wrong according to your professor, because it labels an action as wrong. This clearly violates his own view of moral indifference – the view itself is a contradiction.

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.

Inside the Mind of the Rutgers Professor, Part I: Multiculturalism

Indoctrination has Led to the Decline of Our College Experience

BY JAMES O'KEEFE

Multiculturalism

Every student at Rutgers is required to take a “non-western” course in the humanities or social sciences, though there is no required course in “western” humanities or social sciences. The multiculturalist administration wants to incorporate “excluded” works of literature, art, and philosophy into our curriculum that have been unaccounted for due to prejudices of our culture. To the multiculturalist, appreciation for American Culture is completely baseless, founded only in prejudices and propaganda perpetuated by ignorant, racist dead white men. Furthermore, the multiculturalist says principles like natural rights, which unite us, are not grounded in any sort of truth, but are arbitrary and hostile to “diversity” and our differences. Although the word “multiculturalist” sounds like an appeal to a sense of community, to them, an isolated non-Westerner is more “cultured” than a Southern American Christian, even though the Southern American Christian is far more exposed to people with different beliefs and lifestyles. Thus, eventually culture turns into a sort of non-conformist individualism – exactly the type that is celebrated by Davey Thoreau. This explains the contempt American liberals have for rural folk in the heartland with common virtues and a strong sense of community and tradition. It also explains the contempt for patriotism and civic virtue. One often sees Rutgers students in class or on a bus, walking or sitting with their heads down, drowning out their environment with music playing on their Ipods. These students have evolved in educational institutions that have enforced so much independent thought, they find solace in isolation, in virtues they can find only in themselves (thanks to Instant Messenger, students rarely need to leave their dorm rooms). The emphasis on the self is further promoted by the influence of Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud and his perverted philosophies. Students sometimes congregate (due at times to things like mandatory meal plans), but state universities like Rutgers, despite their numbers, are remarkably lonely places. This is because the virtues that bring us together, like respect for the (or any) concept of God, allegiance to the ideals of Country, and reliance upon ethics to govern our actions toward one other, are despised.

The multiculturalist connoisseur desires a “transcendent” view, a “cultured” view, a “different” view, other than that native to his homeland. Multiculturalist Rutgers professors have become eccentric elites, sadly out of touch with American culture, family and purpose.

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.

The Conservative Manifesto - Part III

A spectre is haunting Rutgers — the spectre of conservatism. All of the powers of the ivory tower (Rutgers) have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: “diversity” proponents, speech-code advocates, multiculturalists, feminist radicals, and your professors.

Where is the student that has not been decried as “conservative” by the liberals in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of conservatism, against the more advanced liberal ideology at Rutgers, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Conservatism is already acknowledged by Rutgers to be itself a power.
II. It is time that Conservatives should openly, in the face of all their professors, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of conservatism with a manifesto of the ideology itself.

To this end, I have assembled the following manifesto, to be published in THE CENTURION:

A conservative believes in natural rights. A conservative believes in natural rights; those rights endowed to human beings by their creator. They believe in a system of government ordained around truths that are self-evident. Furthermore, he does not believe “No culture’s way of life is better than another,” as anthropologist Theodosious Dobzhansky has argued. Allan Bloom claims in his book The Closing of the American Mind that America promises, “the untrammeled freedom to reason,” and
therefore the highest achievement of truth and self-actualization. Conservatives are guilty of the sin of pride. We are proud of our nation and its values. We would rather study the political philosophies of freedom, justice, and liberty by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Hobbes which have inspired generations of prosperity. We choose not to buy into the political philosophies of conflict theory and revolution by Marx or Mao which have inspired only genocide. A conservative is not afraid to tell the multiculturalists and western intellectuals that ridding the world of genital mutilation, infanticide, religious discrimination, patriarchy, cannibalism, forced abortions and corrupt dictators is not “culturally imperialistic,” or “ethnocentric.” It is rather our civic duty to our fellow man.

A conservative believes in objective truth. A conservative professes external order. He is firmly opposed to relativism's claims that truth is relative to the eye of the beholder, or claims that it is contextually constructed. He defends his view that there exists an outside truth by pointing out that disagreement doesn’t entail interminability, that there are undeniable facts like “the world is round,” and if there was no ethical or moral truth, then there would be no distinction in virtue between Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler. A conservative believes strongly in virtue: pursuing the good life for man for its own sake. He also beliefs in family and the traditions ordained in the family. Discipline, faith, self-confidence, personal responsibility and conviction are essential in all of man’s pursuits.

A conservative believes in limited government. “Government is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem” (Ronald Reagan). While law enforcement, basic education and maintenance of infrastructure are all necessary, the government does not have a good track record in succeeding at what it sets out to do. He knows this for two reasons. One, government is not some distinct, almighty, independent moral entity; rather it is comprised of human beings with all the innate characteristics and corrupt susceptibilities that affect those “evil” corporations and masses of ignorant citizens it attempts to govern. Second, government operated programs fail economically, because unlike profit, there is no measurable end to determine the level of achievement. The conservative prefers the alternative of privatization; private ownership of the means of production. Privatization is more successful that its government counterpart because it is vastly more efficient, self-regulating, and cost-effective. Examples of successful areas of privatization the conservative points to include health care, social security, mail delivery, prison operation, etc. While Norwegian president accused the United States government of being “stingy” with the tsunami relief effort and other charitable contributions, private United States companies had already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort as well as to other charities worldwide.

Prosperity, incentive, free market, growth, human fulfillment and the pursuit of happiness are created from the bottom up, not the government down. He believes that a free-market will lead towards human prosperity and happiness. While doomsdayers and naysayers warn that overpopulation is due to prosperity, the exact opposite is true. The most industrialized places on earth have a birth rate far below what is needed to maintain their population.

Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free, and only then can human beings achieve happiness. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.

A conservative is Politically Incorrect. A conservative reveals the facts regardless of whose feelings get hurt. He acknowledges there are differences between the sexes. He knows what a statistical bell curve is, and understands that an outlier or exception cannot disprove a rule, sin qua non. He is against language reform and other futile and aesthetic attempts to soften reality by calling toilet paper “bathroom tissue,” freshmen “first-year-students,” and more recently Christmas trees “trees of giving.” A conservative does his best to act rather than talk and does his best not to get caught up in names, labels, and terminologies. Buzzwords like “inclusion,” “tolerance,” and “diversity” are racist, hypocritical, and exclusive to, as Leo Strauss said, “those who have stated clearly and forcefully there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.”

A conservative believes in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. That being said, he is strongly opposed to racism. He recognizes there are many human beings who lack opportunities. But current programs that institutionalize racial consciousness, like affirmative action, must be reformed on the ground that they encourage racial identity, promote suspicion of minority success, and violate civil rights by putting skin color before character. Racism is most prevalent in college admissions where skin color alone determines how one acts and thinks. In some cases, race is all that matters. “Diversity” becomes nothing but skin tone. One’s desires, intellect and even background become irrelevant. The postmodernists, whose philosophy is founded upon fragmentation, assume skin color alone can determine how one acts and thinks, therefore bringing a range of perspectives. Conservatives suggest an alternative program based solely on socioeconomic need. Such an alternative would bring diversity of economic backgroun and benefit minorities because, as the left itself confesses, a disproportionate amount are “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” A conservative is against “identity politics” and racial pride movements on the grounds that they too identify and polarize skin color. The conservative recognizes that since the 1960’s, activists have shifted their cause from civil rights to racial identity, a cause which will serve as an impediment to racial equality.

- James O'Keefe

NJO: Originally published in The Daily Targum in 2004 and later printed in Issue 3 of The Centurion in February 2005.

The miracle of life

Each time a man ejaculates, 500 million sperm - a number exceeding the population of Europe - eagerly swim forth. Ingrained in each one of these feisty chromosome-filled tadpoles is the incessant, instinctual, dire need to pursue and discover the pot of gold over the rainbow. Every human being was at one time a mindless, helpless, microscopic piece of bean sprout-looking matter with a mere chance of one in 500 million (all other things being equal) of fertilizing our mother's egg. But somehow in a world of six billion, each one of us has beaten these astronomical odds. We are walking and talking exceptions to a statistical impossibility; virtual pieces of art sculpted from bare nothingness; manifestations of an oppressed chance in a world where we can't even win the raffle at a little league baseball game.

But not all sperm are created equal. Take a look in the mirror. You are essentially looking at an Olympian. You sprinted through dark canyons, solving mazes and using inherent superpowers to break through shells of steel. You emerged triumphantly winning the gold medal in a race of 500 million. First place receives a bright journey filled with meaning, truth and accomplishment. These special sperm grow up to become doctors, lawyers, puppeteers, and professors - perhaps curing a disease, becoming president, preventing a war or writing a thesis on kangaroo psychology or what-have-you. The other 499,999,999 (give or take a couple) vanish into the dark recesses of an unacknowledged life they never get to live.

It amazes me that an entire species is composed of these Olympians - those special sperm who beat unthinkable odds and come from nothingness with no probability of ever existing to persevere over those statistical detractors. Right now take a look around you at the people who take their lives for granted. Look at them. They don't even consider how incredible their journey has been. They don't realize how much of an impact they will have on the world around them.

Everybody has an impact on the world around them. If Christopher Columbus's mother didn't have sex with her husband on the exact day she did, in the exact form she did, the whole fate of the western world would be changed forever. When Columbus was a sperm he could have decided he would give up on his way to fertilizing the egg, tired of meandering through tunnels of darkness with no egg in sight. A different, less adventuring sperm could have mistakenly bumped into him and fractured Columbus's tail. The other sperm could then reach the egg, and Chris could have grown up with different interests to become a jester, instead of a skilled entrepreneur like Columbus. The entire free world would have ceased to exist as it does now. Perhaps Japan or the Swedes would have discovered us. Native Americans could have lived in tranquil serenity for another hundred years. Perhaps we would turn into a communist breeding ground. But whatever the outcome, everybody would be having sex in different ways with different people in different places. Maybe there would be no melting pot. Entirely different people would have been born. Life on earth would be irrevocably changed into a new paradigm that would have stayed the course of human history forever. Perhaps we should really accredit the discovery of the "New World" to the less adventurous sperm not getting in the way of Columbus.

As you can see, this isn't just a reproduction phenomenon. It is also connected to fate. We choose a path, take it and one thing leads to another. One could eternally retrace steps not taken and roads less traveled to no end, realizing there were so many people and places not encountered. That is why when I'm talking to anyone, I realize how amazing it truly is that I am with that person, at that time, in that place, when things could have turned out completely different in infinitely many ways. A 100-year-old man has discovered so many forks in his journey, so many twists and turns since he was conceived. There will be generations of people affecting the world due to the choices he made; due to the fact his parents decided to immigrate to America. He has made an eternal ripple on the pond of time. Billions of people, just like him, operate all over earth. We meet in subways, at Starbucks or in school. If we change our desire for coffee one morning, or our decision to take the F instead of the EE, perhaps we'll be missing out on potential friendship or some type of epiphany; deciding to have a cappuccino could change our lives drastically.

Now you can't live your life like this. You would probably never choose your major here at Rutgers. You would never marry anyone ever. You would obsess over every decision you have to make. But the next time you hear a mathematician belittling your chances of winning the lottery, tell him both of you were once facing odds approaching 1 in 500 million. You were both one of about 10 trillion sperm produced in a man's lifetime. Explain that you both beat the impossibly small likelihood of meeting each other in a universal realm of infinite space-time. Perhaps he'll look at you, shrug, and say, "You've got a point." Whatever you believe in, whatever your origin and whatever ideology you ascribe to, you cannot deny the miracle of life. Believe in yourself and in your ability to achieve impossible things, because you already did.

James O'Keefe is a Rutgers College sophomore majoring in philosophy. His column, "Feathers of Steel," appears on alternating Fridays.

NJO: Originally published in The Daily Targum.