Hilton Head Island: by the window

There are many fine places to sit in our condo, but I spend more time in a chair by our bedroom window than at any other.  I am there now just before sunset.  As I have mentioned before this is the first place I have ever lived where I can observe at sunset through the year how far the sun moves north and south.  It is near its farthest north now with the solstice in a few weeks.  Here that puts it at the right hand edge of the window.  Six months from now it will be near the left.

Forgive me for repeating that I love the beauty here.  The to me previously unknown and unexpected beauty of the marsh.  The birds, the trees, the Spanish moss, the spartina, the acrobatic squirrels, the changing light on Skull Creek.

We are supposed to be having air pollution from far distances.  Smoke from fires in Canada.  Dust from the Sahara.  Rain seems to have washed them from the sky.

I have a small glass of Laphroaig at hand.  A friend asked me why Laphroaig.  I do not have an answer.  Perhaps because it is to me the taste and smell of the sea.  For whatever reason it is my favorite liquid and I take a sip.

I read yesterday an article about Yoshua Bengio, who is described as “the godfather of AI”.  In the article is expressed the “The ability for systems to assist in building ‘extremely dangerous bioweapons”…as soon as next year.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/godfather-of-ai-calls-out-latest-models-for-lying-to-users/

In ‘Last Born’ I suggested perhaps the most humane way of ridding the planet of the cancer our species has become.  I doubt that AI will be so kind.

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lastborn.html

I recently read Barbara Tuchman’s A DISTANT MIRROR about the Fourteenth Century which with the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, and the schism and corruption in the Church—at that time there was just one in Europe—she found a mirror of the disaster of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

As I have observed here before there are generations born on the wrong side of history.  My grandmother’s was one.  Born in the 1890s the young men were of age to be slaughtered in what we now call World War 1–far more in European countries than those born in the United States; then they endured the Great Depression; and if the young men born around the turn of the century lived long enough to have sons of their own, those sons were of age to be slaughtered in what we call World War 2, which as you may know I am certain in time both wars will be seen by historians to be one war, separated by a twenty-one year cease fire by countries bleed dry until a new generation could become old enough to be destroyed.

I sense that those now young are on the wrong side of history.

I’m old.  I found my way between the cracks.  I’ve had a life.  

I hope I am wrong and that the young do too.