I hate ultimatums. I hate the kind that say you must comply by a certain date or your new digital camera will be whisked away if you have not finished the payments or at least come up with a credible excuse or explanation.  I am horrified by the tough love kind of treatment given miscreants for them to shape up or ship out or, my way or the highway.  I suppose there are cases like this and the sad fact is that we created the conditions that produce the people who do not conform to the desired results. Perhaps we do not like a world of alternatives.  Perhaps we demand conformity with everyone the same and everyone marching starting out on the same foot.

Time can be many things – a bully or a friend.  Right now time goes by so fast that one season blurs into another – but that might be a Florida thing where it is always summer.  It goes fast for me for there are so many demands by others and self-imposed ones that I find I have forgotten a great many dated things that sort of meant that something had to be done by that date or …else.

Right now we have the clock ticking inexorably faster by the actions of a dangerous man in an impoverished country.  He has wormed his way into the highest councils of nations because he now has the power (claimed by him and discounted by others) of the big bullies like the U.S. and other Atomic Powers.  It is interesting to note that for some reason this has terrified our people and many others in other parts of the world.  Time, it seems, is running out.

What we fear is the dropping sharp blade of the Guillotine on the necks of all of us.  The time is approaching when we will have to fish or cut bait – where we will have to make the crucial decisions involving the life and death of this planet.  This is no longer the time when gun-powder replaced bows, arrows and spears and swords.  We have had the power to blow ourselves up and destroy this planet for some time but there was this tightly held belief that it cannot happen.  We will somehow not let it happen.  We also said that we could never heat this planet by too many of us using too much of its resources.  These same people, the “we” in we said, have claimed that we could not possibly pollute our air and destroy the quality of life for all of us.  Time is just slipping away and we watch it as it inexorably reaches the point of no return.  We know this but we do nothing about it.

Time is a precious thing but it is tyrannical in that once gone it cannot be reclaimed.  We fool ourselves in thinking there is time to do it all again. We have movies, tapes and discs that are records of our brief time on earth.  But that’s it. Once gone so is the opportunity to wisely use the time apportioned to us.  To use another cliché, we cannot step into the same stream twice.