"Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind. / Dust in the wind. Everything is dust in the wind." -- "Dust in the Wind," Kansas, 1977

The older you get, the more obvious it is that you don't know everything -- or even half as much as you thought you did. Solutions to our most vexing questions don't seem so black-and-white the closer you get to 50. Even solemn lyrics from a prog-rock band 30 years ago resonate.

Even so, as a member of the human race, some values will always be non-negotiable as far as I'm concerned. Torture is morally evil, no matter what a former vice president of the United States says to justify it. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Don't follow leaders (and watch the parking meters).

Sometimes I try to imagine what it will be like to take my last breath. I'm a person of faith, so I'm not particularly terrified by the thought, but it still saddens me. My agnostic and atheist friends describe similar feelings of comfort and dread. No one looks forward to the prospect of saying goodbye to the world with so many unfulfilled dreams scattered on the road behind us.

A bit late, perhaps, but I'm just coming to grips with the fact that the world will carry on without me long after I'm gone. It's almost insulting that the cycle of days and nights will continue without interruption forever. Sunshine and rain will continue to fall on the just and unjust alike.

Well, that's not entirely true, I suppose. According to the latest scientific orthodoxy, 5 billion years from now, the sun will betray whatever's left residing on our bright blue marble by completely filling the sky before setting the atmosphere on fire and burning off the world's oceans. It would certainly be a drag to be an immortal when that day comes.

In a flash, the inner planets from Mercury to Mars will be completely engulfed by our expanding sun. When it contracts millions of years later, the dying star will live out the remainder of its nuclear-starved days as a white dwarf. Only dust motes dancing in the radiation-filled vacuum of space will testify that we were ever here. Even the cockroaches will be gone.

So, for the purposes of our thought experiment, it helps to deal with a more modest time frame than billions of years out. Whatever our current problems, from global warming to massive budget deficits, the sun will rise 10 generations from now just like it does today -- but most of us will have been utterly forgotten. It helps to remember this when we're screaming at the top of our lungs across ideological fences.

Despite our insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things, it will be up to decisions we make today about war and peace that determine whether the sun shines on an apocalyptic wasteland -- or on a world in which in which we share resources in a cooperative and respectful way.

Wars are fought over the allocation of precious or diminishing resources. Most of our wars today are fought over oil and energy, but future wars will be over the control of water and arable land. Some wars -- the really stupid ones -- will always be fought over religion and racial paranoia.

All of this talk about torture and American values in recent weeks has made many of us think about what is true and how we think we know it. What are our values? How much of our received wisdom comes courtesy of our corporate-military-industrial-entertainment-complex? Do we know or even care what we believe?

If there are people in our society who don't agree that, say, torture is wrong, is that a failure of society or a failure of that individual to think the issue through? What if such people routinely ascend to political power -- when they wage war or launch actions based upon amoral assumptions, should the rest of us suffer in silence? Should we ignore their overstepping of morality and decency simply because they've left office?

Or does even torture not matter in the end? Ten generations from now, both the torturer and the victim will be forgotten. And what does torture mean if the sun is expanding in 5 billion years and only dust and embers of a world that lost the ability to tell the difference remains?