(Original post July 16, 2012 http://[email protected]) Please subscribe to my blog and let your friends know! Well I have made it past the half way mark; I am now on day 18 of my 30 day challenge.  I have been thinking about posting these last couple of days but could not settle on one theme and did not want to ramble, which I can easily do. At first I pondered talking about Ill Wind the 1041 page book I just finished reading.  I thought it was a science thriller but it really was a science fiction book about the end of civilization, as we know it.  An oil spill occurred in the SF Bay and a fictitious oil company with a huge refinery (can we say Chevron in my home town of Richmond, CA) had a depressed scientist who had developed an untested way to break down the bad toxins in the oil and contain it so that it would do a minimal amount of harm.  Well he was depressed because recently he had lost his daughter and wife in a car accident (of course the teenage daughter was an environmentalist) and his son who was a soldier in Iraq (oil again).  So of course unbeknownst to anyone he changed the formula into a virus that ate all petrochemicals.  I won’t continue because I am sure you are dying to read the book yourself to see what happens, but I will say it was interesting because it addressed how precariously close to chaos that we “civilized” humans” live.  Of course it ended on a more positive note after a lot of drama but the nice thing was that there was no “happy ending”.  But that is the nature of science fiction. It did get me thinking about human nature.  Most days I read the NY Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Root, BBC and Eccorazzi along with other news outlets and I am amazed at how often we humans find excuses for bad behavior.  “My neighbor did something bad,” (in this context it could mean the person living in the condo next door, or a geopolitical neighbor who shares the same border) so I too must choose to do something bad, or at least not in the best interest of people or mother earth.  Globally we have become so sensitized to violence that we have “acceptable” levels that we endure.  The Penn State tragedy comes to mind, educated, men who sanctioned child abuse, since it “wasn’t that bad” or may not have really happened.  Rape, starvation and torture, if it happens to one person, it is one too many but too often there seems to be a tipping point of tragedy that must occur in order to get people to react. Every day I wake with hope and inevitably there is always someone who helps restore my faith in humanity.  On the positive side, I have seen many random acts of kindness -brothers I am with who give a dollar to a man begging for money, several people rush to help lift a stroller onto a bus for a struggling mother, a driver paying the bridge toll for the next few car (one of my favorite things to do), donations of bags of blankets made to animal shelters -the list is endless.   I love random acts of kindness –perhaps there can be a global pause, one day a year that everyone must do at least one random act of kindness. Valerie