Sometime around the year 2000 I bought a book entitled Millennium Year by Year, an account of the previous thousand years.* When I read it, I saw one recurring event: War. For a thousand years no year was a year of peace. Somewhere on the planet a war or a battle or a violent clash occurred, leaving no year untouched by conflict. The first vignette in the book is the story of Thorvald the Viking who was killed by an arrow during a conflict with the native people of “Vinland.” And then in a series of newspaper-style reports, the book entails the annual suffering and loss of life that continues even today. After only two decades at the beginning of this millennium, the pattern shows no sign of changing. Some 1,000 years from now, if humanity survives its own brutishness, another volume called Millennium Vol. II will detail ours and our successors’ legacies of hate. Big wars, little wars, skirmishes, coups, tribal conflicts sometimes going back more than the past millennium and threatening to stretch well beyond the next one as an endless highway of death. Underlying it all is an apparent seething anger, anger that the world isn’t an Interstate built for a single car, yours, or his, or hers, or… Anyway, rage on the road of history is the norm, and it often leads to crashes in clashes.
 
As the actual roads have emptied during “sheltering” during the pandemic, a virtual road of life has become the ribbon of collision. Want some advice? Wear your psychological seatbelt if you expect to merge with a string on Twitter or in some chatroom. The crowded highway of communication built on the avenues of electronic media is littered with verbal collisions. Unaware that they traverse an emotional path that millennia of people have traveled, today’s electronic travelers continue humanity’s wreck-full tradition: Respond to one another with hate, judgment, and condemnation. That doesn’t speak well for the supposed nobility of our species. It does speak volumes about a driving force in society, however. Where did this penchant for mental and physical violence originate?  
 
I’m reminded of a statement made by Sir James Hutton, the “Father of Geology.” After his unsuccessful attempt to pinpoint the origin of rocks and natural processes, Hutton wrote, “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Where do I look for the vestige of war’s beginning? Do I go back 500 years to the massacre of Aztecs by Cortez’s conquistadors in 1520? To Thorvald’s death a millennium ago? Farther back in time? To the reported Battle of Mons Badonicus and the rise of mythical Arthur in the year 500? “Keep going,” you say.
 
We don’t have record of the conflicts perpetrated by our hominin ancestors, but we can reasonably assume that they, like us and Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees, fought their share of battles and probably left us an inbred legacy of hate, or violence, or anger.
 
In the context of history, all who seek peace do so on the roads of humanity’s persistent and ubiquitous battlefield, a war ground people have paved as they have widened their geographic reach. if not dripping actual blood through copper wires and optic fibers, the new highway of injury and death is littered with intentional crashes among individuals or groups. Not being a pessimist is an ongoing and difficult task for anyone who wishes to build inroads of peace and wellbeing.
​
And here’s an example: The Surgeon General during the current pandemic is Dr. Jerome Michael Adams, an African-American (Why I need to give that qualification will become evident in a moment) anesthesiologist and Vice Admiral with B.S., B.A. MD, and MPH degrees. In addition to his studying at the U. of Maryland and U. of California, Berkeley, he studied in the Netherlands and Nigeria. Before becoming the US Surgeon General, he served as Indiana’s State Health Commissioner under two governors and as a member of a number of commissions, including the Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Commissions and wrote several academic papers and chapters. In short, Dr. Adams is an accomplished individual whose career centered on the health of not just a few patients but of millions: That “PH” in his MPH degree stands for “public health.” And then Dr. Adams, driving down a highway no one in the current generation ever personally experienced, the Pandemic Road, was involved in an unexpected crash. The background is relatively straightforward: Given that no one had any scientifically based information on the way Covid-19 spread and that there were shortages of face masks for health care workers, Dr. Adams asked American’s not to rush to buy masks. It was advice other doctors had given until the asymptomatic spread of the virus was confirmed. Adams, open to change, then changed his advice about face masks as so many other doctors had. Put that part of the controversy aside, however, and understand this one. In his attempt to reach the African-American communities hard hit by Covid-19, and with a professional career centered on public health, including anti-tobacco and anti-opioid drug overdose efforts, he used his family’s terms for “mother,” “grandmother,” and “grandfather,” after which the Internet highway crashes increased. He had simply asked people to stop smoking and using drugs and alcohol, especially during a time when some in the medical profession believed their use had deleterious effects on infected people, effects that exacerbated the disease. From one who had written a paper on the opioid crisis and who had served on a tobacco prevention commission, such a message seemed reasonable to most: It was a precaution.
 
Not so. The Surgeon General’s plea to the African-American community to avoid “alcohol, tobacco, and drugs,” for the sake, if not of oneself, for “abuela,” “big moma,” and “pop-pop,” elicited accusations that the African-American doctor was racist. Makes sense, doesn’t it? An African-American concerned about the safety of the African-American community is certainly the model white supremacist! It really doesn’t matter how well-intentioned one is to those living in egocentrism. The highway of opinion and good intention is a dangerous road to travel. Dr. Adams was driving an ambulance on roads no one had ever traveled when he encountered angry drivers at every onramp.
 
It makes me think, too, of Doctors without Borders and charitable medical staff members who have gone into danger zones to help people only to find themselves victims of hate groups. Such has occurred throughout the world. Or, take the famous story of Amy Biehl, the Caucasian-American who went to support victims of South Africa’s apartheid policies only to be killed by a black mob as she drove three friends to their homes outside Cape Town. Yes, another road covered in the blood of one dedicated to help others.
 
In spite of my belief that good intentions and actions drive many people along their life's pathways, I'm driven toward a pessimistic conclusion: History’s road is a continuous crash site. I see no vestige of the road’s origin, and I see no prospect for its end. Drive safely.
 
*Mercer, Derek, Ed., 1999, New York. DK Publishing Company.

[This April, 2020, all “unnecessary businesses” are closed and among them all those clothing stores with their spring and summer clothing lines now unavailable except by mail order. Is it time to reflect on why so many with closets filled to crush limits, actually need more clothes? Don’t many people have closets reaching critical density? What is the origin of this runaway consumerism, this need to buy more clothes?]
 
The recent discovery of fibers (fibres) wound together to make a cord attributed to some anonymous (Hey, aren’t they all anonymous?) Neanderthal who lived between 42,000 and 52,000 years ago (give or take a week), means that our “cousin species” had skills similar to our own.* Since the earliest human-made (Am I allowed to say “manmade”?) cord dates to only 19,000 years ago, is it not possible that some early human (also anonymous) learned the skill from a Neanderthal? And think what that led to: Not just the wearing of clothes, but the wearing of “fashions” from Versace, Hilfiger, Klein, Lacroix, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Armani, de Givenchy, Lanvin, Prada, de la Renta, Cardin, Lauren, Valentino, Wang, Saint Laurent, and so many more that their number almost rivals the population of politicians. What if humans inherited or learned fashion from Neanderthals, the first known weavers? Such is a mystery of our deep past. And a parallel to the mystery of cord-making’s origin is the question of whether or not Neanderthals could sing chords barbershop-style.
 
According to several reports, the Kebara 2 hyoid belonging to some anonymous Neanderthal who left his bones lying around in an Israeli cave some 60,000 years ago indicates that the individual probably had the capacity to speak very much as we do (or very little as we do, depending on the nature of the comparison and the side of the controversy about ancient hyoids and speech). If one reads a study by Ruggero D’Anastasio and others, one can reach the conclusion that Neanderthal speech was not only possible, but also probable.* And Dan Dediu, derives a similar qualified conclusion from his study of the Neanderthal hyoid bone.**
 
Anyway, if Neanderthals would weave and speak, what would they talk about while they were weaving? A guess:
 
“Ug, watcha makin’?”
 
“Just some cord.”
 
“What you gonna use it for?”
 
“Not quite sure, but if it lasts as long as a Glad bag floating in the ocean, it’s gonna be my legacy.”
 
“Anyway, Ug, when you finish that cord, you wanna join me and my group?”
 
“What group?”
 
“We call ourselves The Neanders by the Meander.”
 
“Why ‘Meander’?”
 
“Well, we sing down by the big river bend.”
 
“Can I sing? I guess I never really tried it.”
 
“Yeah. You can. You have to try. It’s just like learning to whistle.”
 
“What’s a whistle.”
 
“A sound that I make when I purse my lips and blow air over my tongue to call my only barely domesticated wolf.”
 
“Wait, you have a wolf?”
 
“Not really a wolf. Doggone it if I know what to call it. It follows me around, brings me a stick to throw at a bird, and makes a noise when a bear approaches, but sometimes it runs off.”
 
“Hey, I got an idea. Wanna keep your wolf close? Why doncha use some of my cord? You can tie it around its neck and around a tree with knots.”

“Why does the tree have to have knots? What am I supposed to do? Tie it or not?”
 
“No, not ‘not,’ ‘knot.’ It’s a thing I make when I twirl around my cord and make some loops. I couldn’t think of a use for it until now.”
 
“Are we becoming civilized like those sapiens people? They think they are so smart. But look, we can sing, and I’ve never seen one of them make a cord. I’ll bet they’re thousands of years away from making one.”
 
“Primitives. But I have to hand it to them, they certainly can talk. In fact, that’s what they mostly do, talk, talk, talk. Good thing they can’t do it over long distances or pretty much the whole world would be enveloped by incessant talking, most of it without a purpose. And what’s with all that verse? And singing? Gosh, gimme some quiet to do some meander knitting, a stitch in my time saves me from all that rhyme. So, no, I’m not gonna join your Neanders by the Meander group.”
 
“Okay, suit yourself.”
 
“Wait, whadya just say?”

“I said, ‘Suit yourself.’”
 
“Hmmmm. Just got another idea. What if I took not just a few cords, but many and wound them together? I could make a cord suit, something to wear.”
 
“Not bad. What’s next, dyeing it?”
 
“Just got another idea. What if I made a bunch of colored cord outfits? I bet I could barter with those smarty sapiens. They’re so vain, always looking in the lake to see what they look like.”
 
“Sounds like a plan. I think you’ve got something there. Show me how to make those cords. Now that we know we can talk, we can make fun of our human customers; we can keep ourselves in stitches as we stitch.”
 
And thus, dear human, some 42 to 52 millennia after that first cord, is how you became so enamored of and addicted to fashion and why you have a closet overstuffed with clothes. From that one cord a whole industry developed with the sole purpose of adding more clothes to your closet. Want to talk about it?
 
 
Hardy, B.L., Moncel, M., Kerfant, C. et al. Direct evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology and its cognitive and behavioral implications. Sci Rep 10, 4889 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61839-w Original in PDF found online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61839-w#citeas
 
**Hogenboom, Melissa. Neanderthals could speak like humans, study suggests. BBC news. 20 Dec. 2013.

I suppose from anecdotes I’ve heard that there are still some people who in the midst of a pandemic are largely unaware of its spread. Even though I am locked down in my rural neighborhood and property, I’m still connected to the world through my TV, computer, and smart devices, so I believe I can count myself among those who are aware of the geography of this disease. Those venues of news provide updated maps of Covid-19 cases and deaths. Some are interactive maps, such as that put out by the government of Pennsylvania. With a hover of my cursor and a click, I can see county-by-county tallies, a map of Death’s movement across the Commonwealth, at first a rapid pace in the East with its dense population and now a seemingly slow walk or even a standstill in my western county and nearby counties.
 
And yet, according to friends and family who have ventured out in gloves and masks to seek necessities, there really are still people who act as though little has happened: Some reportedly shopping without any protection and not even using disinfectant wipes provided by grocery stores, and others indiscriminately touching anything and everything with bare hands; even one, I’m told, observed to be pushing a similarly unprotected child in a grocery store cart seat.
 
Add to the above anecdotes to stories of partygoers “celebrating” in supposed immunity the disease in defiance not only of governmental suggestions and restrictions but also in obvious defiance of commonsense: In sum, what you get is a show of hubris and folly perpetrated by ignorance. If only more people could read a map! Although some might demonstrate general ignorance of all things practical—and we’re all a bit guilty there—in this particular time some exhibit their ignorance of cartography in its modern manifestation as geographic information systems. Strange that in the Digital Era, so few know the significance of digitizing. It’s like watching one of those B-movie tales of horror in which the audience is aware that over there in the dark shadows some monster is lurking while the unaware character backs toward those same shadows. (Maybe in the theater of my life, I won’t yell a scream of surprise, but, rather, a cough. Sorry if that seems like very dark humor over a disease that isn’t relegated to shadows) No, Covid-19 can hide in the brightly lighted aisles of a grocery store or in the air of a queue outside a Walmart. But that’s what makes mapping its presence so important. Wouldn’t it be better to know where its presence is more likely than not?
 
Now, I know that not everyone likes reading maps, what with all those symbols, shapes, and colors. And I also know from years of teaching the earth sciences that people are generally unaware of geographic relationships, many of my former students having the belief that the Mississippi River empties into the Pacific Ocean and that “north” means “up.” Many of them, also, incapable upon entering college of pointing to where they live on a map. I also know that on a planet occupied by humans for hundreds of thousands of years that there are just too many places to keep track of, especially since so many have undergone name changes: Peking/Beijing? Burma/Myanmar? Upper Volta/Burkina Faso? Constantinople/Istanbul? Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg? Or, even in my area: French Hangard/English Fort Burd/Redstone Fort/Redstone Old Fort/Brownsville? I can’t fault anyone for not keeping track.
 
But when a creeping, and at this time onrushing, threat starts in China and makes its way across the Pacific to Washington and then also hopscotches across Europe and the Atlantic to infect Americans from two directions, one might think that paying attention to maps is a matter of health—or even a matter of life. When the pandemic subsides as it will through both natural and human interventions, will geographic information systems and cartography rise to the foreground of public knowledge? Will people understand that knowing the nature of places and their relationships to one another is important from a very practical standpoint?
 
One more anecdote. Obviously, many people now associate certain places with Covid-19 cases. As one of my relatives drove west on I-70, he saw four cars with NY license plates pass him. They were headed west. Now that might be just one of those coincidences that, as so many coincidences prove to be, is meaningless, but I can’t help but think that four cars at night aren’t carrying people to Wheeling for a visit with relatives or a stopover at the local, now closed, casino hotel. In a useless gamble, I’d wager that those cars contained people fleeing a place where a concentration of cases meant a serious threat of death. The passengers in those cars probably followed a map to safety or relative safety, since West Virginia was the last among the states to record cases of the disease.
 
You might be thinking that all this is irrelevant. Why bother checking an interactive map that contains at this time more bad news than good? Isn’t that the action of a pessimist? Of a sick mind? In answer, I go back to those place name changes. The character of place changes as people change, and one change that alters the nature of a place is a plague. It alters the social ecology. Sure, the houses remain, but as in natural settings when one species exits, so in  human settlements another individual or group eventually fills the niche left empty. That will apply to the map of businesses, as well. The mental maps of many Americans—of many people around the world—will change: People will for at least a while map social distances differently from their previous mapping. People will for at least a while map places differently. New York City will not immediately return as the center of tourism it has been. Disney World will be seen as much for the dangers it presents in thousands of people gathered together as it has been seen for entertainment worth standing in shoulder-to-shoulder lines.
 
All maps are about to change temporarily, and some will change permanently. We might not rename places, but we will re-map them. Now that I think of it, because of the pandemic just about everyone will be forced to consider information that maps convey.  

On Good Friday, Christians mark the sufferings of Christ. This Good Friday morning, I sat in front of a blank computer screen thinking, “The computer died overnight. This is a dark time. Maybe it’s temporary. Push the ‘on’ switch, Donald. Okay, maybe it needs to be held in a bit longer. Shoot, still no screen. Wait, is it brightening? Yes, it’s coming back to life. What would I do if my only functioning computer died? Apple is closed for business, so going to the mall is out of the question during these quarantine days. Ah! There’s that little line with the slow light-sabre that shows resurrection. It’s back on. I’m bathed in the glow of my screen.”
 
And then I thought, “How foolishly petty I must be,” as I realized what day it was. And from that, I thought of those thousands who in the course of just a few recent weeks went from health to death, from light to darkness, and to the families who lost loved ones forever. Unlike my computer and the story of Christ, this contemporary story has no tangible resurrection for the victims of the pandemic, no 'on' button for loved ones to push. No, there’s a permanence here, and life has changed for the survivors.
 
One doesn’t have to be a Christian (I am, by the way) to learn a lesson about life from the sufferings of Christ and the Covid-19 victims. This is not your practice life, dear Reader. As you sit in front of your computer, recognize that the screen you use could at some time be infected by a virus, and the life you live could be similarly affected, the latter infection far worse than the former. That you currently have both a computer that works and a life to live should bring you some joy. Among your fellow seven billion humans are those who have neither a working monitor nor the health to use one that functions. If you can empathize with them, you might experience joy in what you have, not merely in your access to a computer—a device no one had not too long ago—but also in your access to consciousness, potential, and human interaction in some form.
 
When you do undergo your eventual resurrection from the tomb of quarantine, look with wonder on those others around you given the gift of rising into a new life. Look, too, with pity on those who will emerge into the world with bitterness because in their self-centered perspectives and in their egocentrism, they will not note that some never rose from the graves dug by a pandemic to enjoy the world again and to fulfill their potential.
 
If you undergo small sufferings and find yourself complaining, short-tempered, or mean-spirited, step back for a moment to see your life not in comparison with what it was but rather in light of what it can be in fulfilling your potential for good. Unless you are under dire threat, you aren’t in your quarantine being crucified. You aren’t suffering as much as your impatience wants you to believe. Will the post-pandemic world be different from the pre-pandemic world? Yes, of course, but it will be a world of your making. If my computer had become a permanently dark screen this morning, I would be temporarily cut off from posting a blog, but I could still put pencil to paper if I felt the need to write. The mechanism of communication would change, but the ability to communicate in alternative ways would remain. I could take joy in whatever endures. Small sufferings can heighten the joy in what we do have, in what we have not lost, and in the potential to adapt.
 
Christians live in the hope of their Resurrection, their personal Easter, but anyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, can also hope for and work toward a bright emergence from a dark time.  

Remember that oft-quoted passage from Dickens: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”? All times are times of contrast. Today is no exception. Weigh this contrast:
 
1.General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, Commander of NORAD and USNORTHCOM, said this morning that the US military intercepted Russian planes wandering near American airspace. Obviously, the Russians, who tried something similar a few weeks ago with the same result, were trying out American response capabilities and timing in a process reminiscent of the Cold War. O’Shaughnessy, a capable leader with an entire country’s defense on the line, has the military ready for such emergencies. Simultaneously, he has the responsibility of overseeing the disastrous consequence of the pandemic, especially in his having to move medical resources rapidly in response to critical needs. He reported that when one NY hospital had trouble with its oxygen equipment, the military responded as rapidly as they did during the Russian plane intercept, sending doctors and vehicles to move patients in dire need to other facilities.
 
2.Unnamed. Anonymous. Who cares, anyway? Someone who complains because life as it was known and practiced pre-pandemic isn’t what it once was: Celebrities locked in mansions and millennials locked out of bars and restaurants? Complainers and fault-finders of all sorts? Scapegoaters with political agendas? Remember "Get over It" by the Eagles?  
 
When we look back, will we write, "They were the best of people; they were the worst of people"? The contrast: One guy acting fast to protect both Alaska and NY with an encompassing perspective that takes in a whole continent in contrast with another with a perspective limited by a mind that thinks an apartment, luxury condo, home, mansion, or neighborhood is the entire world. It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. 

Maps don’t show all of Earth’s details. They don’t show the all the details of anything. If they did, they would have scales like “one inch equals one inch.” Steven Wright has a joke about that. Maps with such scales would be the same size as the surfaces they portray; globes would be eight thousand miles in diameter.
 
No, maps give details germane to their purposes: Road maps, for example, show roads and the names of towns through which or by which they pass. Large scale maps give more details than small scale maps, with the former used for smaller areas than the latter. An architect's floor plan with proposed furniture emplacement in an apartment is a large scale map. In contrast, the smaller scale city map doesn't show apartment sinks, and an even smaller scale state map doesn't show city streets. Ironically, we use “large scale” and “small scale” to mean just the opposite when we speak of human activities and psychological perspectives.
 
As a center proposition of this website runs, people can use mental maps to understand and control their lives. Those numerous mental maps you hold dear are, like actual maps, also detail deficient. One reason is false memories. Another is imagination or embellishment. And yet another is forgetfulness. Test: Quick, recall all the details of your first bedroom, your first neighborhood, or your first trip. We don’t need all those details over the long term, so our brains selectively drop many of them.* No big deal. We retain what we believe will help us in “going back” mentally or physically. 
 
As we leave the crib and expand our world, we increase the number of maps and thus add more details to either recall or delete. And as we become more imaginative, we can even map fictional places, anticipated places, and analogous places. Expanding the number of cognitive maps is indicative of expanding experiences, including, of course, the maps of more numerous relationships that come with interactions.
 
In a time of worldwide quarantine, the personal world we map has shrunken in one way and expanded in another. On the one hand, our details are limited in large part to the small areas that we call homes and even mansions can become the cribs of the present. On the other hand, our details are limited by the number of pixels on our TVs, smart devices, and monitors. We can, of course, add books and other print media. Recall Emily Dickinson’s line, “There is no frigate like a book.” The point here is that the focus of mental mapping has changed in the midst of a pandemic. The large and small scales between which we bounce are different today from what they were yesterday. We can find ourselves seeing details in our homes, yards, or neighborhoods that we ignored or forgot under pre-pandemic conditions. We can also find ourselves adding virtual maps to our memories, implanting them in our brain’s place cells.
 
Itching to go out and re-explore and re-map the world you once freely traveled? Itching to find in retracing previous explorations those details of place and person you forgot? When the pandemic passes, you will have a new world to explore and map. That’s an exciting thought. In the next go-round, in your next emergence from the life of the crib, you will have the advantage of knowing how to explore. This time out you might find yourself with a heightened sense of detail. Sure, eventually they, like the details of your past explorations, will fade as you switch from large scale to small scale in your mental maps, but at the outset, all newly discovered or re-discovered details will elicit in you a revitalized sense of wonder that you experienced when you first left a crib to explore a world.

*Ever play a sport? A third basemen is aware of divots in the grass infield that might deflect a ground ball. An outfielder might be aware of mushy spots where drainage problems prevent sure footing. Both map those details for the duration of a game. The fan in the stands is usually unaware of those details unless a player gets a bad bounce or slips on a muddy surface. 

I’ll admit it—and you don’t have to. I have spent a little more time in front of my computer during the Great Isolation. And having done so, I’ve read what I ordinarily wouldn’t bother to read, the comment sections of a few reports. Usually, they are replete with bickering political opponents’ bantering, some malicious as you know. But this morning I saw a comment that called to mind an old problem. The comment centered on education, and the writer said that the education system teaches students what to think rather than how to think (for themselves).
 
Now, the commenter blames the Left for such a policy, but I believe one could make an argument that Left, Right, and even Center all adopt it at least in part. The problem isn’t new. Heraclitus has a similar thought in one of his Fragments: One can’t have knowledge without understanding, and one can’t have understanding without knowledge. Dilemma: Teach facts and ideas, or teach experimenting and thinking. You’ve heard it at least once in school, in either that algebra class or geometry class, when the teacher said the key reason to learn the subject is that it teaches how think. Of course, you couldn’t really learn how to think unless you memorized those axioms that high school texts accept as facts.
 
Knowing what to think is a part of human culture. If you want to live in a particular culture or subculture, you have to know the components, the “axioms” underlying the group’s thinking. That entails learning the what, and then all “how” stems from the “what.” And with so many subcultures on the planet’s surface, you can guess that most, if not all, of us are somehow involved in promulgating the “what” we learned to accept as truths. All of us can be blissfully happy in our subculture because everyone accepts the what. It’s only when we run up against another subculture that we might find our axioms wanting and our postulates erroneous.
 
The commenter whose comment caught my attention was responding to another’s question about people jumping on board cruise ships and traveling from sundry places to visit China at a time when at least some stories had leaked about the initial stages of the pandemic. One person, after saying people shouldn’t be boarding a cruise ship “right now” asked, “Why are people so stupid?” The comment about learning what to think vs. how to think followed.
 
Thinking for oneself isn’t easy. I suppose we could all cite models like the Buddha, Jesus, da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein and a host of others whose thinking subsequently became the axiomatic thinking of subcultures. On a scale less than earthshaking lie simple examples of people who really don’t think for themselves, like people who would gather in crowds in a time when a virus is killing thousands or those who in their youth-is-bliss ignorance would go to party on spring break.
 
But a pandemic, however instructive it is about the weaknesses in our ability to think, isn’t a forever kind of thing. Eventually, survivors will resume life as usual, including education as usual. And that raises the larger question: Is it really possible to teach people “how” to think? Won’t we resume teaching what? And once educated in this or that subculture, won’t we continue to think within a framework of axioms. They are “real” truths we think. They are for those in any subculture “self-evident.” Once adopted as the basis for thinking, axioms inevitably lead to postulates and conclusions. This is not just a matter of politics; it’s a way of life issue.
 
I’ll go back to Einstein as an example. After Newton, the subculture of physicists could think of gravity in only one way, the Newtonian way. But Einstein challenged the Newtonian axiom. Is there anything comparable in your personal history? Have you looked at the “what” of your thinking and overlooked the “how” of your thinking? These are two questions each of us should ask. And we shouldn’t just ask them in the context of whether or not we might board a ship or plane or chance a Covid-19 party. These questions should persist beyond the pandemic. If we don’t ask ourselves about the what and the how of thinking, we can only be practitioners of the former.
 
Learning “how” to think is a lifetime challenge, and as an example I’ll also use Einstein. Having shaped modern physics and introduced a key concept of quantum mechanics, Einstein remained largely in the “what” of his own devising. He could not, for example, accept the weirdness of the quantum world and kept trying to find a way to defend his position on the deterministic nature of the world. Quanta didn’t fall under his primary axiom. That even novel minds get trapped into the “whats” of their own making demonstrates to me that all of us have a potential intellectual struggle between justifying on the basis of a subculture of thought or learning about the world from a unique perspective.
 
Yes, some people boarded cruise ships and planes to sail off or fly off to exotic destinations even after the first ship was denied a port of call because of the coronavirus. Yes, days after the turmoil on 9-11, people boarded airplanes and resumed their travel plans as though nothing potentially threatened their own safety. But this isn’t a practice life. Risks are real. If people can’t think enough to at least temporarily alter their plans under a potential or largely unknown threat, then chances are they will continue to think as they have thought in the manner they have been taught when no ostensible threat manifests itself.   

“I don’t know whether or not you are aware, but there are people who study why we make decisions.”
 
“Didn’t know, but how earth-shaking is that? Really, don’t we just make decisions on either the basis of necessity or the basis of desire?”
 
“Well, that’s not a bad summary. I really hadn’t reduced it to something that simple, but I guess you nailed it, except for what some guys recently discovered about the Pavlovian side of the process, hinting at both the why of decision-making and also the how.”
 
“You mean the guy with the dog?”
 
“Yeah. But first let me get past the word guys. ‘Gals,’ too. Okay, interesting distraction here. If I say either, do I offend any? Offend all? End of distraction; I really don’t care because I don’t mean anything other than a colloquial expression, like the musical Guys and Dolls. Another distraction here. Do you see what supersensitivity does to the flow of language? Why did I have to stop to explain before I got to my main points? In the olden days… Oh! well, these days aren’t those days, so now that I distracted you from what I was going to say, I have to repeat the topic.”
 
“Go on.”
 
“So, Ashleigh K. Morse, Beatrice K. Leung, Emily Heath, Jesus Bertran-Gonzalez, Elise Papin, Billy C. Cheng, Bernard W. Balleine, and Vincent Laurent, writing in Neuron ran some experiments to discover pathways in the brain that lead to our making decisions. Now, they begin by acknowledging something you already know, that memory plays a role in decision-making.
 
“Real fast; here’s an example. Some long-lasting companies have advertised enough that you have grown accustomed to their commercials and have become a customer. That instills a favorable attitude because you saw the stimulus and got the reward, both of which are now part of your memory system. That memory system will probably shape similar decisions. For example, I remember my dad saying that he was a “Ford man,” and recently I heard a former Congressman-turned-commentator say the same thing on TV. And, of course, there are people who are similarly attached to other car makes, “a Chevy man” also being common. And you keep going back to the same products when you walk down the aisles of grocery stores perusing the multicolored packages and cans. Seems that Morse et al. have discovered the pathway between memory and decision begins in the basolateral amygdala. Right? That’s the well-known center of the flight-freeze-flight reaction, the deep emotional brain.
 
“Ashleigh (I don’t know her personally, and she might be offended by my presumptive use of her first name—another distraction) and colleagues say from the basolateral amygdala, the pathway leads through the nucleus accumbens, kind of a transition zone in the brain or maybe a train station where the process connects to the motor action section. Now, from there, the pathway gets a bit too much for any discussion, so I’ll reduce it, and if you want, you can read a summary of their work at medicalxpress.com.* Anyway, as I was saying, they discovered the pathway to run from delta opioid receptors in the nucleus accumbens through cholinergic interneurons. Those delta opioid receptors activate cellular responses, one of which is the infamous one that gets people addicted and the other of which is the prediction of a reward, kind of like getting that new Ford or Chevy. Those delta opioid receptors are part of a system or family called the G protein-coupled receptors that activate cellular responses. The authors shorten that to the ‘GPCR-based memory process.’
 
“Where are we goin’ with this? My flight response is kicking in.”
 
“The group explored how GPCR receptors encode psychological processes. So, we make decisions through specific pathways in the brain that are fundamentally Pavlovian, you know, the old stimulus-and-response stuff you read about in Psych 101. These “guys” tie that process to memory, what I call the “I’m a Ford/Chevy man” process that controls the decision-making on the new car lot. Been rewarded? Continue to seek the same reward through the next decision. I suppose the practical side of that is known by most of us and especially by people who want to build brand loyalty.
 
“But now, and this is the BIG NOW, all of us, and that’s the BIG ALL because it involves the WHOLE WORLD, are making memories through the GPCR receptors that will help to fashion our future decisions. Yeah! You are currently making memories as your brain deals with the Covid-19 pandemic. You can’t deny that you are responding in part from your amygdalae, can you?
And you are having to make decisions that aren’t just based on past stimuli and rewards. You are building that new pathway.
 
“I see.”
 
“Yes, so knowing there’s a process going on that involves your future in a very personal way, how are you going to handle the stimuli you are now receiving? There’s a very narrow path on which you are walking toward your future. Under intense stimuli that involve repeated rewards of one kind or another, you are establishing memories that will control or influence your decisions a year from now, ten years from now, or maybe throughout your life. All of us are now part of a big experiment on how the present shapes our personal futures.”
 
* https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-newly-memory-decision-making.html

Sitting in the line of cars at the bank drive-thru is now a “normal,” a “new normal,” to use the current expression. Gone for probably a year or so, or until a vaccine protects us from Covid-19, is that cherished personal contact humans have long considered “normal.”  Not that I have any more personal contact with Judy Bank-Teller other than her dropping change into my hand and then counting out some cash as fast as a party magician and exchanging a perfunctory, “Have a nice day,” and “Thank you,” but, sans physical touch, not too long ago I was able to get to within a teller’s counter width of another person who was neither friend nor relative. Now, my only exchange with a stranger is through a pneumatic tube and a squawk box speaker at the drive-thru, where a be-gloved teller sits behind a wall of glass.
 
Forty-five minutes. That’s how long the wait was as I inched my Ram toward the carport-like structure of the drive-thru, and that was in a small town and during a time when people have very few places to spend any money. But, then, there were the advantages of sitting in a slowly moving line of vehicles instead of standing in a line standing, of not having to make the person in front of you think you are trying to see the nature of her bank transaction, and, of course, of listening to satellite radio stations or a burgeoning library of downloaded songs on my iPhone. I could even make phone calls. Hey, I guess the trip to the bank wasn’t so bad an experience. Time in my man-room-truck, all the comforts of a Barca Lounger, and a cup of coffee cooling just as the Second Law of Thermodynamics says it should cool! Wait! This is getting even better. Did I just get an idea for this blog? Is my muse sitting in the truck with me? Are the people in front and behind me feverishly jotting down on old Starbucks receipts some notes for their next novels as they also wait? Is the linear world of vehicles filled not with mere drivers but rather with drivers of society and culture? Is there a physicist behind me who finally understands while sitting in a string of cars that string theory has been a waste of time because there will never be a way in her time, however beautiful the math, to demonstrate it through clever experimentation?
 
You know, this sitting in the drive-thru experience isn’t so bad. Unfortunately, since there’s nowhere to spend the money I withdrew, I really don’t have to make another trip to the bank until the quarantine ends. I could, of course, sit in my truck in the driveway and pretend, could even run the engine, though that would eventually mean a trip to the gas station, where I would have to use disinfectant wipes on the nozzle handle and the key pad while wearing the closest thing I have to latex gloves, the rubber-coated garden gloves from the garage that then I have to clean with alcohol.
 
And maybe there’s a lesson in having to use the drive-thru, the lesson that life itself is a drive-thru. And yes, sometimes it means inching forward and having to endure the feeling that life itself sometimes seems to be at a standstill. But the feeling is just imposed by impatient minds. The line does move even though intermittently. Then, upon reaching the teller and finishing a transaction, each driver emerges from the carport and accelerates briefly until…
 
Until one enters the next line and intermittent movement toward reaching the next goal. But isn’t that why life is like baseball and war: Nothing really happens until everything happens at once. You inch toward the teller, and then you frantically reach for the pneumatic tube’s cylinder, fumble to put the money in or take it out, know that there’s someone immediately behind you wanting to take your place and knowing, also, that you have to get to the next phase of your life toward which you briefly accelerate before, once again, slowing down to an ostensible stop. Speed up; slow down; speed up again, like ellipsis marks separated by a string of commas…,…,…,…,…,…,…,…. But think of the alternative. You don’t want to arrive at that final punctuation mark, do you? Enjoy the stop-start-stop-start life you have in life’s drive-thru.

“You know that expression, ‘I recognize your face, but the name escapes me’ we use when we meet someone from our deep past? Well, now we have a new problem. With everyone walking around wearing surgical masks, we might not even have a face to name. What’s a brain with a fading memory to do? What’s going to come out of the mouth? ‘I’m sorry, I recognize your body, but I can’t recall either your name or your face.’”
 
“Oh! Things aren’t that bad.”
 
“No, they are. And the only way we’ll see faces is on some electronic device. We’ll continue to see people on venues like FaceTime and SnapChat, but we’ll lack that three-dimensionality we were so used to. Holy cow! I just realized it. We’ve all become Flatlanders, as in Edwin A. Abbott’s nineteenth-century novel Flatland. All the people we know are going to be two-dimensional images on our smart phones, tablets, and computer screens.”
 
“I see what you mean. Hadn’t thought of that. Guess we are becoming somewhat two-dimensional nowadays. But it isn’t as though we hadn’t been preparing for this day. For years we’ve been walking around next to three-dimensional beings while we paid increasing attention to our two-dimensional world of images and texts on smart devices. I think this is the culmination, the way we finally become one with the screen. It’s Zen. From the time of Homo erectus, now known to be two million years ago, through all those other hominins, this, apparently, is what we’ve been evolving toward. We’ve been extricating ourselves from that third dimension, that one we call depth. Talk about ‘shallow people’; that’s what we’ve become, and we started the process even before a pandemic forced us into screen relationships. Somebody’s got to do something like invent an affordable three-dimensional iPad so that we can reclaim what we once were—less the actual touching, of course. Otherwise, we’re headed into Flatland.”  
 
“And that can’t be good news.”