BABY UPDATE: Doc says not to worry, completely normal for first timers...Still, I have to admit the frustration.
I'm also a little disappointed in the lack of comments on behalf of friends and family but hey, that's selfish of me.
I read this essay the other day by H. Bloom. Thought I'd put it here for your enjoyment. It got me thinking.
--Over 200 billion red blood cells a day die in the interest of keeping you alive. Do you anguish over their demise? Like those red corpuscles, you and I are cells in a superorganism whose maintenance and growth sometimes requires our pain or elimination, suppresses our individuality, and restricts our freedom. Why then, is it of any value to us?
Because the superorganism nourishes every cell within it, allowing robustness none of its individual components could achieve on its own. Take for example, the Mediterranean superbeast known as the Roman Empire. Rome was an evil creature with a despicable lust for cruelty. Julius Caesar, according to Plutarch, "took by storm more than 800 cities, subdued 300 nations and fought pitched battles at various times with three million men, of whom he destroyed 1 million in the actual fighting and took another million prisoners. he didn't carry out these deeds with kindliness. When he leveled enemy cities, he occasionally killed off every man, woman, and child just to teach would-be resisters a lesson.
The governors sent to rule the Roman provinces periodically lost their tolerance for nonconformists and punished them brutally. They crucified a backcountry preacher of peace and humility named Jesus, because his views differed from the standard-issue dogmas approved by imperial authority. But the former carpenter was only one of thousands who twisted for hours, hanging by nails from a crude wooden beam. Even the affluent folks back in the city of Rome were hungry for the sight of blood. Their favorite recreation was an afternoon at the Coliseum watching desperate captives disembowel each other in the arena. Roman sports fans took bets on which contestant would manage to live until nightfall.
Rome stamped out or swallowed entire rival civilizations. She even reduced the land she most revered -- Greece-- to a sleepy sycophantic occupied territory. Rome was a vicious society, one whose habits could make anyone with the slightest scrap of moral sensitivity physically ill.
Yet Rome's rise was part of the world's inexorable march to higher levels of form. By force--sometimes sadistic force-- she brought an unprecedented mass of squabbling city-states and tribes together. In the process, she allowed an exchange of ideas and goods that radically quickened the pace of progress. What's more, during the 300years between Augustus and the imposition of Christianity under Constantine, she made an additional contribution. She introduced pluralism, an easygoing attitude that allowed wildly diverse cultures to live peacefully side-by-side.
Just how much the empire contributed to her sometimes-oppressed citizens could be seen when Rome fell. A set of heroes impelled by ideals of ethnic conquest led their rebel bands against the colonialist power. The mavericks toppled the hegemonic tyrants forever and turned the city of Rome into a ruin.
In the process, they brought deeper despair to Europe. During the next two hundred years, half of the Continent's population would die. Plague ran rampant. Multitudes starved to death, denied the food that had once been transported on roman ships and roads. Without the stable organizing force, the paved highways on which provisions had traveled sank into disrepair. On land, bandits and warrior chiefs ended the lives of any who might contemplate a trip along the old paths to carry desperately needed supplies. At sea, pirates destroyed the former Med lanes of trade. The grain that had once sailed from Egypt in fleets no loner came across with the tides. In the Gallic town of Barbagel, the complex of roman-run mills that had turned the imported wheat into flour for eighty thousand consumers fell into disrepair causing millions to perish.
Those who survived learned to live as prisoners in self-contained fortress communities, cut off from the ideas and the delicacies that had once made life sweet. The barbarian "freedom fighters" had loosed the chains, not of life, but of death. For Rome had been an oppressor, but Rome has also been the source of nourishment and peace. In her absence came pestilence and war.
The superorganism is often a vile and loathsome beast. But like the body nourishing her constituent cells, the social beast grants us life. Without her, each of us would perish. That knowledge is woven into our biology. It is the reason that the rigidly individualistic Clint Eastwood does not exist. The internal self-destruct devices with which we come equipped at birth ensure that we will live as components of a larger organism, or we simply will not live at all.
Hegel said the ultimate tragedy is not the struggle of an easily recognized good against a clearly loathsome evil. Tragedy, he said, is the battle between two forces, both of which are good, a battle in which only one can win. Nature has woven that struggle into the superorganism.
