There has been a lot going on in this little brain over the last week. My social interaction has been severely curtailed so I have to find my own way to entertain TTG. 

I went to the boob tube and found little that was of comfort. I have given up on PBS after every newscast was full of bias and subdued hate during the unending presidential campaign. McNeil, Lehrer would be disappointed. As for regular news, I completely understand and respect COVID. I just don’t need it every night. Lines for testing everywhere in America and the 49th closeup of people dying in ICU’s have numbed me rather than intrigued me. 

How about Frontline? The latest on the Uyghurs being deemed subhuman in China? Perhaps The Social Dilemma which will cause you to toss everything technological that you own. I am not dismissing any of this. It is just difficult to find anything uplifting.  

A friend very nicely dropped off a book to me called,The Kill Chain by Christian Bose. I read it in two days. It discusses war from a new technological perspective. I will admit it was an incredible page turner but at the end I wanted to have a stiff scotch. That was at 8:00AM!

I picked up my Wall Street Journal from the driveway this AM hoping for solace. It’s Tuesday, so the crosswords don’t offer respite. Let me see,COVID again, Trump still denying, student debt, congressional inaction on monetary aid, Pearl Harbor, the Pope’s inaction in China. What’s a nice guy like me doing in a place like this? 

But wait, there is a full page ad taken out by the HANS Foundation. Probably looking for money but let me peruse. It seems it is run by this guy from India, Manoj Bhargava. A former monk who turned entrepreneur and had this “5 Hour Energy” drink. Made him a billionaire. My type of guy. 

His latest venture is called the Hans Premium Water Invention,HPW. It can turn brackish, chemical water into crystal clear pure water much like that Guy turned water into wine at Cana. This thing is the size of a dishwasher and doesn’t use chemicals. I have to read on. There has to be a catch somewhere?

If he is right then we don’t have to buy water in plastic bottles. We can go to God forsaken places like Calcutta and provide people with aqua pura. There are one billion people in the world today without access to clean water. 80% of the water in China is contaminated. Forget about that. What about Flint, Michigan?

Sucked in, I kept reading. He never asked me to buy one of these things. He never asked for money. This dude actually gives away billions to the poor people of India. He wants to provide at no cost, this device to regions and countries in the world with no access to fresh water. Is he for real?

I immediately sprinted to my laptop to find some sort of critique. He had to be a whack job at best or charlatan at worst. The fact is I could not find anything derogatory. There was an article in Forbes five years ago and just recently in Crane’s Detroit. But no malice or forethought. Hmm. 

The best imprimatur I could find was a deal he just cut with Culligan Water Treatment to distribute his products in the US. I don’t think an operation of that size would risk their rep on a fly by night. Wow. A positive story, that he had to pay the WSJ for. 

Point being is there are some good things happening out there that get little or no ink. If I had breezed by page 10 to find the editorials, I would not have had my sprint uplifted. If I had not researched I would not have discovered a billionaire doing good things whom I had never heard of, much less know how to spell his name. Imagine that. 

There is whole lot of good stuff out there that costs very little or nothing. Go to a body of water. It can be the ocean or a pond or perhaps a puddle. Look at and into it and just think about nothing but simple things. 

Take a walk down a path where there is nothing around you but beauty in its most primordial form. No, I am not going Thoreau or Chopra on you but trying see life for what it is. Sure we have been thrown a few curve balls lately but that is the hand we are dealt. 

Can I find bad in today’s world? You bet. There is a bunch of it. Is there a whole lot of good. Yup! You just have to look a little harder or even better as that full page ad demonstrated, not overlook it. A little bit of sanity is starting to creep in. Don’t worry, not too much in my case. I don’t want to lose my reputation. 

As always 

Ted The Great 

Factoids:

68.7 % of the fresh water on earth is trapped in glaciers. 30% of the fresh water is in the ground in aquifers. Water is 71% of the world’s surface. 80% of all illness in the industrial world is water related Yikes!

Approximately 400 billion gallons of water are used in the United States every day. About 6,800 gallons of water is required to grow a day’s food for a family of four. Unsafe water kills 200 children in the world every hour. 

The number of negative news stories far outweigh the good. Humans may be neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information because the potential costs of negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information.

Uyghurs are a Muslim population in the Xinjiang province of China. They number about 2.5 million and have lived in the area for over thousand years. The Communist Party in China has been trying to root them out since 1931. Most have been imprisoned in what are called “reeducation facilities”.