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MATHEMATICAL PROOF OF PEDIGREE
I am Mike Cohen, and have been for well over half a century. And it’s taken me well over half a century to come to appreciate the expansive genealogical landscape the generations generate to the tune of two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on.
Looking back two by two, to the power of ten generations I count over a thousand ancestors… twenty generations, over a million. Then it occurs to me that at these exponential rates, from 28 to 29 generations ago my ancestral population would have leapt from a quarter billion to a half billion, accounting then for the entire world population. By my calculations, about 1200 A.D., in the time of Genghis Khan, everyone in the world would be an ancestor of my own, including Genghis Khan himself…. Khan – Cohen. How could I have missed the connection?
The idea of being a direct descendent of Genghis Khan is a heady idea indeed. Sure he was a vulgar, vicious villain, a bloodthirsty, brutal beast, a murderous marauding monster. But Genghis Khan is famous… an imposing personage of historic proportions! My ancestor! Imagine that!
And although I am not of a contentious bent, every now and then, in a crowded market or on a phone call to a utility company or amidst heavy roadway traffic, there comes upon me an impulse so villainous, beastly, and monstrous that it makes me feel irreconcilable with myself until I consider that it takes nine hundred years and 28 odd generations to account for an urge so barbarous it must have its roots in the genes I have inherited from the great Genghis Khan himself. Khan – Cohen, yeah… now it all makes sense.
(Mike Cohen – July 2008)
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BELIEF, TRUST, AND FAITH
If you believe me
you accept what I say because you think it is the truth.
If you trust me
you accept what I say whether you think it is the truth or not.
If you have faith in me
I don’t have to say anything at all.
(Mike Cohen - Mar 2010)
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Nothing here requires belief or faith. But this is poetry you can trust….
