“If man were meant to fly,” runs the old adage, “he would have been given wings.”  Today, where evolution has failed to assist us, we have turned instead to making lightweight plastic garments with webs between legs and arms.  Some of the most intrepid members of the human race have zipped themselves into these birdman suits and have jumped off Norwegian cliffs a gazillion meters high to fly. Just for fun.

Risking certain death, the birdmen plunge headlong downward until the large pockets of their suits fill with air, then they glide more slowly down, out, and away from the cliff face, floating over the ground a long, long way beneath them. They glide forward two meters for every one meter they fall, giving them the feeling of real flight as they progress at speeds over 100 miles per hour. Then, when the danger of crashing is imminent, they pull a ripcord and are taken gently down by parachute the rest of the way. Of course, some birdmen have died.

Contrast that adventurous, highly risky scene with the pilot of a remotely controlled aircraft, often referred to as a drone. The military-speak is “UAV,” which is short for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. No intrepid birdman he (or, perhaps, she).  The pilot leaves the comfort of home near the Air Force base in America, drives his car to work, and, no doubt , gets himself a cup of coffee before sitting down at a desk and taking over the remote controls of a UAV aircraft already in flight thousands of miles away.

The plane may be scheduled to do reconnaissance work somewhere over Iraq, or to blast the living daylights out of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, holed up in the foothills of northern Pakistan. No doubt this serene pilot can manage a break for lunch and will eventually quietly hand over the joystick to a night-shift colleague and return home just in time for the evening news and supper before going out bowling with his wife and kids.

The disconnect is palpable. Whereas the birdmen have only the brief space of a few heady minutes to fly like birds, the British-made QinetiQ Zephyr solar electric reconnaissance drone can stay aloft for 82 hours and 37 minutes. Even the MQ-1 Predator, made in the USA for $5 million, armed to the teeth with 2 AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, can fly aloft without refueling for over 40 hours. No wonder it looks likely that in future the Pentagon will be ordering more UAV drones than manned aircraft.

WODEN SAYS: There is no real connection between birdmen and drones and none is intended, but the disconnect is amazing and speaks to our condition.

A couple of years ago when I was having a little channeled chat with the soul of Winston Churchill*, he made an interesting point. I asked him: “Do you feel that we don’t have as much adventure now as you did?” He replied: “There are not the opportunities that I had—there are no Calgaries. Those days we went on fox hunts. They even forbid that now! Where’s the sound of the trumpet and the hammer of hooves across the moor? That’s all gone…”  The old adventurer mourned the loss of tangible excitement in human life.

We live in a sanitized world. CDs and iPods bring music into our ears in a steady stream. News is given us in “shows” laced with “human interest stories.” Watching games on the telly, putting messages on Facebook, and buying an occasional lottery ticket is our idea of adventure. War is now so clinical that, as we “take out” the enemy with helicopters and drones, it seems positively uncouth to find the roads of Iraq and Afghanistan littered with intemperate IEDs awaiting the vehicles of the occupying powers to run over and set ablaze, killing and maiming their occupants.

We seem these days to be caught in high-tech traps of our own making. Those hand-held mobile phones seemed like a good idea until they were found to be a source of death on the roads. Now add texting and twittering to that original driving distraction and we all are in very present danger. Then, of course, there are the largely unheeded reports of dangerous radiation from the radio waves that make cell phones work. Oh dear! Not another thing to give up in addition to cancerous cigarettes and polluted food! Even our clinical warfare has let us down. It is all so intense that hardly anyone comes home from the battlefield without suffering to some extent from PTSD for life.

In today’s world, ordinary pursuits have become so lethal that it is difficult to criticize the birdmen for the risks they run. War is so awful that it is hard for us not to call “sissy” the desk-bound pilots flying UAVs five thousand computerized miles away. And all the while, poor old polluted Mother Earth gets hotter and wetter, and we suffer an increasing number of seismic disasters—earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions—while the weather is more and more unpredictable. Yet we still don’t understand the message that every little bird tells us: We get the world we deserve.

(*Winston Churchill’s interview is in Talking with Leaders of the Past, or a single-chapter download. Both from  www.celestialvoicesinc.com.)