CAN YOU FEEL IT? OH, IT GOES DEEPER THAN THE HIGHEST IQ

I started thinking about this the other day as I watched this neatly dressed woman dutifully following her Golden Retriever with a pooper-scooper. With each neat scoop, dog looked at owner quizzically. As if to say: "Fine with me, altho I just can't believe you're still doing this!"

It reflects the thousands of years over which anthropologists tell us wild dogs gradually chose to be domesticated. Yes, chose is the correct word even though humans assume we did the choosing. Dogs -- like cats, horses, and birds -- evolved to a point when it just seemed a helleva lot easier to cater to humans who would then cater to you for the rest of your wonderfully domesticated life.

This was a tectonic shift in human culture. There are all kinds of such shifts going on all the time. Only, living through them, we may hardly notice them. Take for instance our own 21st C. Too early to tell, but this one may be one of the big ones written about a couple centuries from now. We may be too busy living these shifts to notice them, but lets consider some possibilities [possibilities more empirical minds often miss, for they are so gosh-darned busy look for hard evidence they miss the everyday subtle hints].

While the empirical mind may fixate on the hard GNP statistics contrasting China and the US, more subtle economic shifts are afoot. You can hear them everyday in barbershops and beauty salons where discouraged Americans are lately beginning to shrug, "Well, I suppose now it's their turn...!"

While the empirical mind may study the theological twists and turns in the Vatican. you can hear disgruntled Catholics leaving Sunday Masses reflecting on the chant from the disenchanted Bostonian faithful: "Keep the faith, change the church...!"

While the empirical mind may draft endless new Pentagon papers, the terrorists are re-reading Mao's strategies for asymmetrical warfare in which small mobile forces can beat large lumbering forces once you get them on your own turf.

While empirical minds re-churn the same playbooks about re-structuring our big-city schools, the good teachers still hanging in these neighborhoods remember what both the cities and the unions have forgotten. Without recruiting and rewarding gifted teachers, the glitziest restructured campuses will keep yielding only marginal human results.

Sometimes the experienced residents can sense the tectonic plates shifting far beneath them. Animals too, often even before the empirical vulcanologists. So while some are always looking for the Big One, little ones are probably with us everyday. You just gotta know where and how to look. Then, when and how to respond...