For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures of the Blue Planet:
ravelers with off-world experience will love this planet. Stable and free enough to support unencumbered observation - enlightened and funny enough to keep boredom at bay.
The comical small-town politics of tiny nations is food for the funny bone. Short, belligerent leaders strut the world stage, racial insensitivity and cultural belligerence all but printed on receding foreheads, hairline symbolic of career.
Leaders of larger legions are little smarter than their furtive, whispering ideologues. Delightful (refreshing?) to see intelligent, powerful people beach their unassailable ships of state on shoals of arrant stupidity.
Short life spans and hectic agendas probably to blame, the old chestnut is alive and well on yet another globular domain: "power corrupts, arrogance blinds" (translation lacks elegance of our original).
Families, like governments, are similarly dysfunctional as members assume disproportionate self-importance. Villages, towns, cities, states and nations succumb to selfish, greedy buffoons, humility an elusive quality in these competitive, paranoid cultures.
Irony is a universal constant of sentience, it seems. Here, too, the "public service" oxymoron thrives.
Kind parents, the people in this fair, sunny city are a microcosm of the nation, itself representative of the global community.
This city, one of fifty three same-named communities on the planet, is indeed a place to grow and die in eternal obscurity, intoxicated, as by a tropical island or a balmy ale, one might quickly lose the will to leave this serene paradise.
Sublime dusky evenings at beaches, restaurants and theaters by the water; invigorating, crisp, dew-laden mornings immersed in untainted wilderness. Seduction! Recumbent in the golden-orange sun this ancient brown continent sleepily ages, seducing aborigine and immigrant to its timeless ways.
Should I awaken not knowing you, dear fond Parents, I would be a blest and contented native.
espite benefits, there are reasons to avoid large cities
So, Mum and Dad (as they revere parents around here), I’m still debating if a quiet backwater is the best place to survey pre-emergent noogenesis.
Should I have made camp in New York 
or is backwater the best vantage?
Megalopolis dwellers gain sophistication at the expense of perspective. The spot is too hot, the cultivated too cosmopolitan - and not necessarily cool.
Though more sages than have ever lived now do so in New York, London, Paris, Manila, Delhi, Beijing and Tokyo, their combined accumulated wisdom is diminished by metropolitan proximity.
Peer feedback is too tight, audience adulation too loud. Perspective and independence suffer.
Consensus reality comprehensively consumes intellect - and irresistibly so in societal pressure cookers, aka cities.
Acumen is absent in both urban media and its consumer, the nexus so tight between these symbiotes that the only intellectual oasis is the nexus itself. Like bridging matter in a binary star, surviving in the nexus requires balancing irresistible forces. Only the strongest intellect resists being sucked into either suffocating soup of confused consensus.
Entertainment’s staple, sangfroid rustic’s adroit lampooning of city cousin, takes as given dry wisdom the undoing of urbane.
Truth implicit - self-sufficiency sets broad conceptual scope. Trivia challenged, superfluous soon shed for survival.
Non-city folk are, by definition, unsophisticated. Not dumb, nor easily duped. As shysters and sophisticates are easily unmasked, so too stupid, dangerous ideas stand exposed for what they are in the purifying vastness of field and forest.
Small cities happily lack sophistication. The ‘in crowd’ is small and of minor influence (legends only’ in their own lunchtime’), ruling only the feebleminded. And unlike small villages and towns, offer freedom to broad perspectives.
Overly-fashionable ideas from über-cognoscenti deflate like cheap party balloons in the absence of affectation. Self-serving vortices of fashion and cults dissipate in regional realities as whirlwinds fade from the storm.
A large pond in a small forest - I shall stay in this tiny town.
econd month on this planet and I like these people - they follow a path, albeit one they’re not aware of!
Discontents, malevolents, criminal and social imbecile are in far greater numbers than our quiet, progressive world, and still their societies grow, mature and prosper.
An endless flow of innocent children dilutes despotic, bureaucratic, psychotic and criminal organizations from within. Biological convection feeds intellectual nutriment to brain-dead governments and corporations.
As watersheds of robotic intelligence and genetic engineering loom, advanced nations seem well structured to resist the disruptive chaos of explosive technology, but might collapse to an onslaught of vandalistic terror.
Ironically, the "godless" Christian societies are most favorably resilient to this impending paradigm shift. A flexible mentality emerges from the technology blender of competitive capitalistic intellectualism - thinking that allows for all possibilities.
Social fragility in more spiritual cultures, however, means their survival is not guaranteed. These strangely fossilized religious states avoid being bypassed and totally isolated only by the lifeblood of commerce and the plasmid educated elite, who comprise a modern state within the ancient, controlling shell.
As mentioned, their DNA series slews towards more than expected violence - and in a recent upheaval (50 Earth-years ago) evil nearly washed them all into the deepest sewer, coercing powerful nations to declare war on their fellows in a six-year global conflict.
This pattern through history shows great people create vast, indomitable nations that yet succumbed to natural law: apogee then oblivion.
The events AND language of history overwhelm the intellect. One begins to fear survival is too fragile and unlikely with thousands of perilous years teetering increasingly near oblivion.
History fails to show the inertia of civilization, the invested capital of effort, the reactive feedback inherent in nature. Conflict of ages is little more than a bloody nose on the face of survival.
Only a natural catastrophe - or their falling victim to oft-demonstrated suicidal stupidity - will halt this intellectual juggernaut’s grab for the stars.
Blithely, inexorably, deliberately, civilization advances. A delight to witness.
