Of Recording Life and Saving Life

Congratulations to Cornell University’s Macaulay Library, “the world’s largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings.”  It is an expansive effort to capture and preserve the sounds of life of the entire animal kingdom, an important part of preserving life itself. 

It really is wondrous to find the recorded sounds, and in many cases recorded videos, of so many species of animal life.  This ongoing effort has been decades in the making, to save—and to make available—the sounds and sights of what has been in the making since before time.  The goal is to record it all, the entire encyclopedia of animal life.  The task is daunting, and may never be finished, but these busy “recordists” are ever getting more and progressing closer to their unreachable completion.  You can wander through what they have done so far here:

http://macaulaylibrary.org/

It reminds me of another effort that I learned about a few years ago to collect and save seeds from every species of plant life.  Again, that is another effort that may never be finished but which is ever getting closer and more complete.

Each of these works is a powerful reminder of how much variety the Lord has created for us all, how complex and intricate and diverse life is.  It is also one more source of awe for the work of the Lord of Life and the magnificence of God’s creation.

Considering this wondrous variety and the greatness of life in all of its many forms, I do not find it credible to assume that among the galaxies—or even within our own galaxy—this is the only world where life is to be found.  Why would God create all the rest of the numberless worlds?  The answer is, to do there much of what He is doing here, to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39)

In a modern-day revelation the Lord confirmed what the Apostle John taught, that Jesus Christ is not only the Creator of this world but of the many worlds (see John 1:1-3).  The Lord added, that Christ is also God of people on those many worlds, “That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” (Doctrine and Covenants 76:24)  Note from this revelation that God’s eternal work, too, is still going on and will never be finished.

Returning to the Macaulay Library project, there is pleasure and wonder in wandering through the recordings.  Below is a link to just one inspiring example, recorded nearly 50 years ago.  It saves for us the sound of an ostrich, still in the egg, shortly before it emerges—not into life since it is clearly already alive, an appropriate part of the recorded history of living things—but shortly before it emerges into the open:

http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/793/struthio-camelus-ostrich-united-states-new-york-william-dilger

You have to be patient and listen through the chatter of the recordists.  The wait is worth it, and of course the people doing the work merit remembrance in sound, too, as no less active and valuable members of the society of the living.

Therefore, a concluding thought I would leave you with:  it would be a tragedy to lose recordings like these, as much as it is a treasure to have and preserve them.  Consider the greater tragedy if rather than recording these sounds the recordists crushed the egg and the life within it.  What a loss, a waste, and a sin.  What if the recordists recorded such wanton destruction and shared that with the world.  We and many others would be disgusted, in fact we would be right to be outraged.  Would those same people be outraged when a human life, still encased and protected in his or her mother’s womb, is wantonly destroyed, its life crushed and ended? I do not know if there are any sound or video recordings of such destruction.  Would it continue at the rate of millions of destructive acts each year if there were?  I wonder.

Of Guns and American Democracy

One recent morning the commentator on a Washington-D.C. area Spanish-language radio station was declaiming at unusual length against private gun ownership.  What caught my attention that morning while driving to work was his expression of wonder at the deep and widespread interest of people in the United States in owning firearms.  He could not understand or explain it.  He was lost.  The interest in private gun ownership was a foreign cultural phenomenon to him. 

No doubt it was, but he was correct to identify the passion for gun ownership as an element of the cultural life of the United States that is not only deep, but deep-rooted.  Those roots go back to the very founding of North America by the first colonists, reinforced by subsequent waves of immigrants.  The very first North American colonists had guns, as essential to survival as seeds and shovels.  As Germans joined the English, the Scots, and the Dutch in the new land, followed by Irish, Swedes, Italians and others, guns traveled with the pioneers west.

Western European society invented common firearms and spread them among the commoners.  By means of firearms the commoners won their new land.  With their firearms those commoners also won their freedom from the lords and ladies who could no longer control the armed rabble, particularly in the English colonies, and particularly in the colonies that became the United States.  Guns in the United States have been instruments of survival, physical and political.

What the kings and nobles of Europe could not know was that there is something powerfully democratizing in gun possession.  Firearms ended the reign of the mounted knight and made it hard for kings and emperors to keep their thrones.  No aristocrat in any palace was invulnerable to the meanest peasant armed with musket and ball.  Guns have been an historically powerful equalizer and defense against tyranny and pillagers. 

That democratizing process worked further and faster in America, where courage and a gun could tame a wilderness and provide freedom for the family.  Far from the reach of government,  and unanswerable for the pretended protection of the manor house, the typical American could take immediate responsibility for himself and his own security and that of his wife and children, backed up by the very real ability to assert that security.  No one seems to know the origin of the proverb, “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal,” but the armed nation builders of the American West understood and believed it.

That is to say that, in the United States at least, people have not needed government, and especially government protection, all that much.  Gun ownership has always been at the core of American independence and democracy, essential from the founding up into modern times.  It is a symbol of American freedom, but more than that, ownership of firearms is a tangible expression of the independence and self-reliance that are at the core of American citizenship, a culture of freedom new and sometimes foreign to people hailing from other parts of the world.  It is not accidental that not only the right to keep firearms but the active right to bear them is recognized in our Constitution as fundamental, alongside freedom of expression, the protection of private property, trial by jury, and other cornerstones of our liberty.

As the dangerous frontiers of violence encroach again on families beyond the timely protection of law enforcement, that innate American self-reliance is reenergized, and well it should be.  The examples of people saved by their guns from robbery, murder, and worse, are legion if little noted by the establishment media reporting from their armed security zones. 

In the face of increased violent criminal activity—whether from terrorists or thugs—why does it make sense to weaken the defenses of law abiding citizens?  Why would the government of a free people impose regulations to expose those who live peacefully to the barbarous cruelty of those who consider a regulation no barrier to preying upon the disarmed?  I do not understand it.  As an American, I do not understand it at all. 

Of Dead Family Members and Getting to Know Them

Some years ago a radio commentator expressed revulsion toward the popular fascination with genealogy.  To make his argument short, he did not see the point.  In his view all of those people are dead and gone. What do they matter?

Inasmuch as the comment was made before recent notable advances in research on gene-based hereditary diseases, we can excuse the radioman’s ignorance of how important genealogy can be to tracing the roots of many things that make us ill.  At the time, however, I would have liked to relieve his ignorance of other points perhaps even more relevant and important.

In all fairness, I agree with a narrow part of his argument, his objection to the democratization of the old aristocratic practice of using genealogy to prove yourself better than someone else.  Such a pitiful exercise in arrogance and pride is pointless.  Given how family trees intertwine in just a few generations, there is probably nary a person of western European background who is not a descendent of Charlemagne.  The story is similar for people from other parts of the world.  And we are all descendants of Noah and Adam, so where are the bragging rights? 

It is on his central point where the radioman’s rejection of genealogy falls to the ground.  What a woeful and lonely view of man’s condition is embodied in the view that once someone dies he is forever gone!  Genealogy, or more broadly speaking, family history, is founded on the belief that the dead in profound respects live on, that they do matter to us.  Let me suggest three ways among many, ranked in a generally progressing order of importance.

·         The members of our family who have passed on are in many aspects part of us, beyond the shared DNA.  Much in our habits, practices, language, beliefs, and our culture in general has deep roots in those who raised and taught those who raised and taught us.  Most of that is probably worth retaining and cherishing, some of it in need of overcoming, but there is a rich heritage there to be discovered.  Significant personal meaning can be found in the recognition that the current generation is only the leading edge of something very big that has been going on a long time.

·         As I mentioned, you do not have to do much family history research to discover that we are linked together, more connected than separate.  Few genealogists can avoid the powerful realization of being part of the family of man.  Our respect for humanity and for each other deepens.

·         Most important, the dead are not gone.  They have merely passed from this brief state of mortality, brief for all of us, to the next state on the journey that makes up eternity.  Each of us will soon be joining those who once walked where we walk.  Family history is the effort to get to know them now, whom we have the privilege of knowing better for a much longer time than mortality has to offer.

Explaining the resurrection to the Sadducees, Jesus Christ reminded them that our Father is God of the living, not of the dead (Mark 12:26, 27).  The mission of Jesus Christ is to provide life to all, to carry out the “work and the glory” of God, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” (Moses 1:39)

Jesus Christ speaks more than symbolically and beyond His own relationship when He refers to God the Father.  The family relationships and ties, so precious to us now, are eternal.  That means that they not only are intended to last forever, but they reach across the generations, beyond death—to generations past and future.  They can be among those few precious things we take with us to the grave and beyond.  That is not a vain wish of every loving husband and wife and father and mother.  It is an inheritance from our Divine Father. 

We can begin to build and extend and preserve those relationships here and now.  Why wait?