What will you include in your autobiography? Will it be the usual stuff about the people who influenced you, those special moments when you learned a life-lesson, and an account of where you were and how you reacted during some renowned incident? From the perspective of your autobiographic view, will you discuss the philosophy that underlies your understanding of the world, the psychology that underlies your understanding of others, and the theology or anti-theology that underlies your understanding of morality? You certainly have a complex task.
 
What if you start by framing your life as a consequence of place, of geography? 
 
I can see those brain wheels turning. “What’s he saying? Does he think I’ve played no conscious role in shaping who I have become? That I’m a creature born in the human zoo with my wild side contained in an artificial environment? Does he think that if I were reared in the recesses of Appalachia that my choices would be limited by the culture of ‘mountain folk’ and hills, or if in public housing, limited by a culture of anxiety born of crowding?”
 
Before I answer, let me note a comment by Michael Grant. “The history of the Greeks…is indissolubly linked with their geography, and remains incomprehensible if this is not constantly borne in mind” (xiv). * And this: If you are a North Carolinian, do you have much in common with other North Carolinians? What if you were reared on the Outer Banks, or the Coastal Plain, or the Upper Coastal Plain, the Piedmont, or the mountainous Blue Ridge? And even in any of those landscapes, would a North Carolinian from the valleys of say, the Blue Ridge, differ from a North Carolinian from the highlands? The questions apply to people from places other than North Carolina. Growing up in the Adirondacks is different from growing up in Manhattan. Outsiders recognize the mark of landscape on insiders even in an age of leveling and homogenizing globalism. Life within political boundaries is often life lived in diverse geographies. 
 
So, let me go back to your questions. You have played a conscious role in your development, but you have always done so in the context of place Before you had the ability to think rationally, the geography of your childhood left its mark on your perspectives, attitudes, values, and even on your speech. You do bear the mark of the geography you have occupied, and it is noticeable if not to you, then to others. 
 
Take your speech, for example. You have a distinguishing dialect even in an age when TV shows familiarize you with variations in your native tongue. American English-speakers have little difficulty in understanding British English-speakers, but they notice subtle differences in pronunciation, the Brits, for example, adding an extra syllable to aluminum (aluminium). In western Pennsylvania, for example, firemen are fairmen and iron is arn; in New England, some speak rhotically, whereas others, non-rhotically, that dropped or included “r” noticeable by non-New Englanders when they hear someone say “car” as “kah.” Within the geography of rhotic dialect, individuals find their pronunciation normal; outsiders note and label by such pronunciation. As a western Pennsylvanian by birth, I believe that I am distinguishable as such by those reared outside my region even though I have trained myself to say “iron,” “child,” and “fire” with long a long “i.”  And I can recognize and identify others born elsewhere, even those born on the other side of the Commonwealth, say in Lancaster (LANK’-kiss-ter to the locals, not Lan-CAS’-ter).   
 
But dialect born of location does not alone intrude into who we have become. The very nature of the landscape shapes our character and perspective by imposing limitations of various kinds. Driving the many two-lane meandering roads of a mountainous area differs from driving the straight roads of a coastal plain or a seemingly endless straight stretch from Boise to Guymon. Seeing an entire train in a glance as it speeds across the American West differs from watching one go car-by-car at a railroad crossing along a meandering river in West Virginia where hillsides are tree-covered view-blockers. The world is large and expansive for those living on mountaintops with unobstructed views and narrow and confining for those living in the valleys of city buildings.  
 
Because I have not explored all the ways geography has shaped you, you might disagree that place has greatly influenced your personal development, but I encourage you to consider its role in your life when you sit to write that autobiography. You might even consider observing the role place plays in your neighbors’ lives in case one asks you to write his or her biography. 
 
Note: 
*Grant, Michael. 2005. The Rise of the Greeks. New York. Barnes & Noble Books. Originally published in the UK by Phoenix Press (Orion Publishing Group Ltd.)  1987. 

Have you noticed that what you don’t see and haven’t seen, others see or have seen? You understand that question easily when I rephrase it: Have you noticed that what you see in others, they, themselves, cannot see? Well, that is, they can’t see what is obvious to you in the present moment. Isn’t that inability to see what is obvious in oneself the reason behind personal advice? 
 
Of course, given the perspective of personal history, many people come to see what was once obvious only to others. From the perspective of our future, we, the presently blind, look back with visual acuity to see what others now see. 
 
You realize, don’t you, that objective self-observation is difficult because the Egos of self-observers wear veils? All Egos dress in burkas. All wear hoodies. All, as we commonly say, wear masks. I suppose the Ego is, itself, a mask, a burka, a hoodie. The covering has one intended and one unintended effect. We intentionally hide from others that which we do not want them to see while presenting them with that which we want them to see. Unintentionally, we mask from ourselves what others do see in us; we wear cloaks of self-deceit.  
 
Is it possible that missing what is obvious to others is a defining human characteristic? Is the reason we don’t take advice readily related to our prideful inability to see the need for advice?  
 
The practical advice of “standing outside oneself” might be difficult to follow because in looking back, we see only the burka, the mask, the hoodie. We dress the Ego for others to see, and we dress the Ego for what we want to see in the mirror.
 
As both Shakespeare and Twain write, clothing not only makes the man, it also makes others “come runnin’/Just as fast as they can.” That’s a blend of what the two said coupled with the wisdom of ZZ Top. White suited Mark Twain said, “Clothing makes a man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” Shakespeare wrote, “Apparel oft proclaims the man.” ZZ Top combined them in “Sharp Dressed Man.” All Egos aspire to be some version of a “Sharp Dressed Man” because “They come runnin’ just as fast as they can/’Cause every girl crazy ‘bout a sharp-dressed man.” Not just girls, by the way. All of us. “Naked people have little or no influence on society.”  
 
And yet, isn’t such nudity what we constantly proclaim under the words integrity and honesty? Isn’t such nudity the basis for trust? Not to get too rock-n-rolly here, but Ringo Starr noted that with regard to trust, “It don’t come easy.” It’s difficult for many to trust because everyone knows that the veil, the burka, the hoodie, the sharp fashion, all conceal what lies beneath the apparent, beneath the apparel of the masked Ego. Yet, in spite of common knowledge that Egos wear masks and are masks, so many of us trust on the basis of their appearance. 
 
There’s another consequence of our seeming necessity to clothe the inner person. Normally clean-shaven drummer Frank Beard and his two bearded guitarists Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill sing, “Clean shirt, new shoes/And I don’t know where I am goin’ to.” Dressed for others to see, we wend our way through much of our lives without purpose beyond fashionable living, that is, we live public lives with our eyes focused on how we appear—to both others and to ourselves. I’ll reiterate: Is it possible that missing what is obvious to others is a defining human characteristic?   
 
If you see the official video of “Sharp Dressed Man” made in the 1980s, you’ll probably note from the perspective of the 2020s that it’s rather kitschy. * What would you expect? From the perspective of our present selves, the appearance of our past Egos always seems a bit kitschy. Don’t believe me? Take out those old photos and videos of you. Were you as “sharp-dressed” as you then thought you were? We're not talking clothing here.  

“Hey, I heard you scheduled a vacation along the coast this summer.”
 
“Yeah. Been going there off and on for decades. Thought we’d go to Beaufort this year. Popular spot for boaters. We’ll take ours.”
 
“Beaufort. Hmnn. I just heard something about that. Wait! Which Beaufort? Aren’t there two?”
 
“There’s one in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. Both neat little towns on the water. They don’t have beaches like Myrtle Beach or Hilton Head, but they are close to beaches if someone wants one. Quaint towns. We’re going to the one in North Carolina. It has a boardwalk.”
 
“Yep. That’s the one. I just read that it’s a hot spot for tunicates.”
 
“Tuni-whats?”
 
“Tunicates. Strange critters that attach themselves to hard surfaces in shallow water. They’re called ‘fouling organisms.’ You know, like barnacles, they attach to boats and piers.”
 
“So, aren’t those things common? Every time we pull the boat out of the water, we hose off the bottom as it sits on the trailer. Keeps it from accumulating those things. I didn’t realize that I had to do that at first. Usually, we boat on the lake. But after the first trip to the coast, we learned to clean before we leave.”
 
“Trouble in the waters of Beaufort, I read. Tunicates called Clavalena oblonga are taking over. They’re even trouble for other fouling organisms, crowding them out. And they don’t appear to have any natural predators. Invasive species. Probably because of their blood.”
 
“So, I’ll hose off the bottom of the boat as usual. Our boat isn’t like some craft kept in the water in some boat slip all year long. We’re in; we’re out. Vacation only. I don’t see a problem. Wait. What’s this about their blood?”
 
“Not a problem for you, but certainly one for those who do live in Beaufort and keep their boats in the water. But here’s the article I found online. * Let’s see. Look, it says that these tunicates disrupt the local ecology. They disrupt any recovery or natural succession of endemic life-forms. They dominate. They crowd out other species. They cut diversity. You know that their blood contains vanadium and sulfuric acid in vanadocytes, vacuoles in their blood cells? That’s probably why they don’t have predators. What critter wants to eat that? Small amounts of vanadium aren’t a problem, but tunicates like oblonga can concentrate it by millions of times over seawater solutions.”
 
“Bad for the locals, I assume. But, look, we’re just visitors. Nothing we can do. It’s a local problem.”
 
“See. That’s the problem with problems. Everyone thinks a local problem is a problem for locals. But what happens at Beaufort, North Carolina, will eventually happen at Beaufort, South Carolina. Same coast; same ecology; same kind of water, tourism, and same kind of boaters.”
 
“I guess so. But what’s your point? Am I not supposed to enjoy my vacation, knowing that as I plow through the waters of the coast, I’ll be spreading this oblonga critter to every pier or wharf?”
 
“No, you enjoy. Certainly, enjoy. But I guess now that I mentioned it, you’ll probably be thinking about the bottom of the boat as you wend your way through the Intercoastal Waterway. Sorry, I didn’t want to spoil the vacation, but I guess once we hear something, we can’t unhear it.”
 
“So, in this article, did you read about ways to get rid of this oblonga?”
 
“See, that’s the thing with any invasive group. They’re tough to eliminate once they get a foothold. This one travels by ships and boats to the entire western Atlantic seaboard, from Beaufort to Brazil. And getting rid of oblonga? Got to clean them away or figure how to introduce other organisms, but both are time-consuming and only partially effective. Anyway, it seems like a losing battle once fouling organisms get established. And what good is it to replace oblonga with other fouling organisms. They foul. They cover all the shallow water hard places. They’re like COVID in a way. Probably will always be with us in some form, attaching to humans wherever they get carried by other humans. For oblonga, it’s ships and boats and currents they ride from one place to another. People have been spreading problem organisms for as long as there have been people, and especially since we went from being nomads on the land to nomads on the sea.”
 
“Sounds like a losing cause for us.”
 
“Especially because we’re responsible for the spread of fouling organisms though we didn’t create oblonga. It’s not the same as the pandemic’s virus that some people suspect we created. It reminds me of the line Homer has Zeus say to the other gods who want to intervene in the Trojan War on one side or the other. Zeus says, ‘Man has only himself to blame if his miseries are worse than they ought to be.’ We’ve moved oblonga from Bermuda to Brazil by our activities, by our seagoing vessels. We’ve moved the viruses that cause pandemics. Heck, we might even have invented the viruses that we transport by land, air, and sea; remember those people on the cruise ships, stuck at sea after we learned some had disembarked on American shores.”
 
“I like that line you just said. What was it? Man has only himself to blame….‘”
 
“’Man has only himself to blame if his miseries are worse than they ought to be.’”
 
“Yeah. I can see that, but now I’m going to think about the bottom of my boat when we take it out at Beaufort. I’m going to spoil some of my fun by realizing I’m a ‘carrier’ so to speak, that I’m a spreader of misery without knowing it.”
 
“And consider that not only do we transport problems around the world, we concentrate them. We’re like those vanadocytes with high concentrations of vanadium, millions of times more abundant than the natural condition in seawater. Funny how we keep causing ourselves more problems, more complex problems, more problems we have greater trouble solving. Homer was right, and he didn’t even know that the very ships of the Achaeans were causing environmental problems or that when Odysseus plied the waves on a ten-year return to Ithaca, he was spreading tunicates. We ride the ship, unaware we carry the problem on the hull. There’s an underside to all, or to at least most, of our activities, and underside we don’t see unless we ‘take the boat out of the water’ of our daily limited focus.” 
 
“Oh! So, now I’m like those ancient Greeks, just because my wife wants us to vacation in Beaufort?”
 
“Isn’t your wife’s name, Helen? Pretty woman, if I remember. Beaufort is fine. Just don’t take her to Paris.”
 
Note:
*Christianson, Kayla A. and David B. Eggleston. 23 April 2021. Testing ecological theories in the Anthropocene: alteration of succession by an invasive marine species. Esa (Ecosphere: An ESA open access journal).  Online athttps://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.3471
https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3471

Yawns are not, it turns out, signs of boredom. They serve a real physiological need. Speakers, lecturers, sermonizers take heart. Your audience is paying attention. Well, maybe. 
 
Yawning. We do it rather more frequently than I reckoned before I read of a study conducted by Jorg J. M. Massen et al. * Yep.
​Y A W N N N N N N N N. I can see you opening your mouth now. Not to worry. Just shows you have a big brain with lots of cortical/pallial neurons. Massen and eleven friends related brain size to yawn duration. Took a dozen people to solve that ancient problem and frame it in the language of science: Yawning, they say, is “a thermoregulatory adaptation…conserved across amniotic evolution.” Yawning cools the brain. Longer yawns mean greater cooling. And metabolism doesn’t seem to be involved. That is, a bird with a very fast heart rate does not yawn as long as a similarly sized mammal. Bird brain, you know. What’s that they say? “Size matters.” Seems that the most lethargic couch potato yawns not because he’s a human blob, but rather because he has a big brain. Go ahead, yawn while you binge watch your favorite TV series, just don’t choke on the potato chips if you yawn while you munch.
 
Yawning birds? Sorry missed that over the course of my life, but then, I’m neither ornithologist nor birder. But I have seen birds. Heck, the local town boasts of being a “bird sanctuary,” and turkeys, turkey vultures, hawks, crows, woodpeckers, an occasional blue heron, sundry song birds, and hummingbirds visit the woods and stream on my property. I’d watch more closely, but I think I’d yawn. I’m not, as I just said, a birder. 
 
But in missing bird yawns, I demonstrate how little I have observed about the world. Caught up in the concerns of my “big brain,” I’ve missed details that might have made life even more interesting than I’ve discovered it to be. I’ve been fascinated, but I could have been more fascinated. I’ve tried to see “the big picture,” but in doing so, I’ve missed the very details that would give the big picture a better resolution. I’ve been looking in HD, but not in ultra-HD. And in missing the detail of yawning birds, I guess I missed seeing how related I am to so many other life-forms “across amniotic evolution.”
 
So, I’m not going to suggest that a dozen scientists wasted their time timing yawns. I’m happy I now know that my yawns and yours last longer than those of smaller-brained organisms. And the next time I see a dog yawn or a person yawn during a talk, I’ll see the yawn from a new perspective. Maybe we aren’t bored. Maybe we just have hot brains that need to be cooled. Maybe the next time I’m talking and someone yawns, I’ll not jump to the conclusion that the person is neither interested in what I have to say nor bored by my delivery, but rather is hot and that many cortical/pallial neurons need to be cooled. Y A W N N N N N N.
 
 
Note:
*Massen, J. M., Hartlieb, M., Martin, J.S. et al. Brain size and neuron numbers drive differences in yawn duration across mammals and birds. Commun Biol 4, 503 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02019-y

Delusions undo people. They can also undo entire nations. Historical case in point: Germany. Hypothetical case in point: The United States.
 
Near the end of World War II, Hitler, increasingly more paranoid and delusional, ordered a counterstrike against the Allies that has become known as the Battle of the Bulge. To supply Germany’s Western Front with men and material for a push to recapture Belgium and the Netherlands after Allied advances following D-Day, Hitler borrowed men and material from the Eastern Front, which was already a crumbling line of defense against advancing Russian troops. As in many instances of borrowing, this was the folly of someone without a grip on reality, on practicality. Shifting forces and resources, Hitler weakened Germany’s armies in the East without any permanent gain in the West. The Battle of the Bulge proved to be only a temporary advance against the Allies. For ten days, the Germans wreaked havoc on all that stood in their path, and then the eleventh day arrived. Borrowing, though often good in the short-term, often has negative consequences in the long-term. In ordering the surge into Belgium, Hitler envisioned a Blitzkrieg like that at the beginning of the war. But Germany in 1944 could not sustain the attack after years of fighting on its eastern, western, and southern fronts.    
 
As an American, I’m wondering whether there isn’t a parallel in the borrowing taking place in Washington, D. C. during 2021. Am I seeing a new form of the Battle of the Bulge? No, not an active military war, but rather a parallel economic one. The bulge to which I refer is an advance dependent on borrowed money and shorted fuel resources. It is the product of a delusion that begs a question: What will trillions of dollars in proposed and already enacted spending and a decrease in abundant energy supplies do to the American economy in the long-term? 
 
If a strategy is flawed, the outcome is usually flawed. 
 
The myth that a modern society, a twenty-first century society, can exist at the current level of affluence without fuel will in the long-term have negative consequences. Washington, D. C. seems be run by delusional people whose incessant and reckless borrowing is coupled with some belief that the world’s third largest population can run without oil, coal, and natural gas, the three fuel commodities that made the modern world possible. The use of fossil fuels is the reason that Americans, nay, all today’s civilized humans, have the lives of affluence on a scale no pre-Industrial Age population enjoyed. As Barbara Freese writes in Coal: A Human History, when in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries depleted forests forced people to seek new energy supplies, they turned to coal. “In this world of tight energy constraints, coal offered select societies the power of millions of years of solar income that had been stored away in a solar savings account of unimaginable size” (7).* One could say the same for oil and natural gas. 
 
When a strategy is flawed, the outcome is usually flawed. 
 
Just as in the first ten days of the Battle of the Bulge the borrowing temporarily strengthened one front and appeased a delusional leader and his generals with dreams of success, so in the first years the borrowing of trillions of dollars against future income and the diminution of fuel supplies will make D.C.’s delusional leaders happy, maybe even giddy. But those with commonsense know that “borrowing from Peter to pay Paul” isn’t an effective economic move. Sure, Paul temporarily benefits. Peter suffers long-term right from the get-go, and then Paul suffers similarly, and since in lending all that was available for lending, Peter has nothing left to give when Paul later asks for more. Deeper in debt and lacking the once-abundant fuels to drive the machinery of a twenty-first century economy, the nation eventually suffers. You might remember that from the time of the Battle of the Bulge on, Hitler spent his time satisfying his delusions from inside a bunker while his armies crumbled.  Those who knew better but said nothing out of fear or blind loyalty shielded him from the realities crushing his Reich.
 
When a strategy is flawed, the outcome is usually flawed.
 
In under two weeks, Hitler’s generals could not find the fuel to run many of their tanks. They continued, however, to follow the orders of der Führer, borrowing from resources that were depleted or under stress, accruing a debt of men and material they could never repay to the Eastern Front. One wonders whether or not Hitler, had he been concerned about global warming, would have asked his military engineers to develop tanks that were solar powered, or wind powered, or hydrologic-dam powered, or whether Hitler would have asked the generals to run their tanks without fuel or on energy from mythical energy sources. Thank the Allies that he is not around today to take up the cause of total green energy run on borrowed money. Remember Solyndra? Where is the half billion dollars the government gave to a green company that folded in under two years? Oh! Wait, I know where it is. It’s in the taxes your children will pay.
 
A strategy based on myth led to the downfall of the Third Reich. A strategy of borrowing weakened the operation of the Reich. That strategy depleted fuel supplies and resulted in tank crews abandoning their vehicles in the Ardennes and forcing them to retreat on foot. 
 
A flawed strategy often results in a flawed outcome. 
 
Right now, I am concerned about a flawed strategy in twenty-first century America. Right now, I see unbridled borrowing for projects that have little chance of providing long-term practical benefits for the country. Right now, I see the government wildly borrowing to rush men and material to an “Ardennes” where they will fight a losing battle to enemies in a very short time. Debt will increase, fuel supplies will dwindle, and the heat of battle will intensify, heat generated, by the way, by those who have developed and continue to develop adequate fuel supplies. 
 
What do you envision will occur as the United States devotes itself to green energy that cannot fill transportation needs? What, long-term, do you envision will result from closing down fossil fuels? And what, long-term, do you believe will occur to your descendants’ ability to live as you have lived in a land where even the poor have had access to abundant and relatively cheap fuel. 
 
 
Are the leaders in Washington, D. C. the reincarnations of a leader whose delusional strategies led to his country’s demise during World War II? 
 
In her account of coal’s history, Freese notes that after hearing complaints from his nobles about the obnoxious soot and odor of burning coal, King Edward I banned its use. Fortunately for ensuing generations and the eventual rise of the Industrial Revolution, he did so without force of law. People continued to use the convenient fuel. It provided, as Freese terms it, a “portable climate.” She writes, “Had the coal ban held up in the centuries that followed, human history would have been radically different” (2). You can understand that if you have ever switched on a light. 
 
The same can be said for oil. When you get in your car today to take that short trip to the store for bread, milk, and eggs, or for bananas imported from a foreign land, think of those German soldiers who took their tanks into the Ardennes and then had to abandon them because of fuel shortages. When you pay your taxes ten years hence to repay those trillions of dollars, think of those halcyon days of today, when you have a choice between expensive wind power and cheap abundant coal power, between abundant oil supplies and inadequate oil production, and between today’s freedoms and those future restrictions you’ll endure as you look back.    
. 
German success in the Battle of the Bulge depended on fuel supplies and borrowing. After just ten days of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s tanks ran out of fuel. No fuel, no fighting, or, at the very least, a lessening in the ability to sustain the fight. The Battle of the Bulge ultimately proved to be a disastrous military campaign for the Germans, probably shortening the life of the Reich to the benefit of Hitler’s enemies on both the eastern and western fronts. 
 
Fuel, it seems, is an important commodity in the running of a military machine. It is also, it seems, an important commodity in the running of an affluent industrial and technological nation. Those who believe otherwise are delusional. And when the delusional devise the strategy, failures are inevitable. America seems ready to enter the economic Ardennes, where its destiny is abandoned machinery it has no fuel to run and a debilitating debt it might take generations to repay. The Battle of the Bulge did not end well for Germany; today’s analog will most likely end the same way. 
 
*New York. Basic Books, 2003. Revised in 2016. 

Let’s start with an approximation: Last I looked, there were about 7.9 billion people. All the countries continue to procreate, that is, probably less the Vatican, though that might not be true, so let’s make it an even eight billion. Ten percent of eight billion is 800,000,000. Keep that in mind. 
 
I watched a two-part episode of the British Silent Witness in which one of the pathologists, Harry, gets involved in the life of a teenage boy whose life circumstances seem dire at best. * The boy’s single mother is a marginal addict with a baby that she leaves with the boy when she goes clubbing, and the three of them live in an apartment building in what the English call an “estate,” essentially the equivalent of American public housing projects and Russian Khrushchyovka. Certainly, not an “estate” in the American sense of big house on spacious grounds.
 
The main plot—there are usually two or more intertwined in Silent Witness episodes—is a drug war centered on a night club outside of which one gang eager for increased territory, does a drive-by shooting that results in deaths, thus warranting the examination by pathologists. The boy is peripherally involved as a drug distributor, bicycling them around the neighborhood for the gang responsible for the drive-by. The full plot sequence is not, however, my focus, but rather the discovery Harry in his innocent compassion makes at the end of the story. Suffice it for me to give the spoiler that at the end of the episode, the police prevent another violent confrontation between the two gangs. Ah! Yours truly, seeing that, thought, “Great, poetic justice. The world ends well. The bad guys are prevented from perpetrating a shooting incident. Peace reigns.” But the story does not end with butterflies and flowers. As Harry approaches the apartment building in an epilogue, maybe to see how the boy and his mother are faring, he witnesses from across the street and to his shock the boy dealing drugs. The innocent victim of circumstances is not really innocent as Harry had thought. He will grow to become a drug dealer and continue a lifestyle that the police quashed between the two gangs. What happened in a preceding generation will happen in an ensuing one. Evil will persist, jumping as it does from generation to generation, always the same evil, only incarnate in different bodies.
 
Do you think ancient Egyptians had to deal with continuing, call it generational, evil? Did they for thousands of years and during different dynasties discover that the forms of evil their parents and grandparents encountered persisted into the generation of their children? Sure, you do. You know that all the efforts to quash evil in ancestors of any era fail to affect, to diminish, evil’s presence among descendants. There’s another Nero out there, another ruthless Tamerlane, another Hitler. And that begs the question: “Is the good we do all for naught?”
 
I think of the recent release in the Florida Keys of genetically modified Aedes aegypti, the disease-carrying mosquito. The hypothesis behind the experimental release is that this new generation of mosquitoes will suppress the proliferation of their disease-carrying offspring with a gene that programs them for death. Maybe the experiment will work. Maybe it will, as the experimenters hope, reduce the mosquito population by as much as 90%. But then…
 
But then, that means 10% will survive to reproduce the next generation of disease carriers. It seems that disease, like evil, finds a way to continue through generations regardless of the effort each generation makes to quash its expression. “Certainly, there’s some room for optimism,” you say. “Ninety percent is better than what’s happening now. We’re saving people from Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, and yellow fever, aren’t we? We’re eliminating an evil in the Here and Now. That’s gotta count for something.”
 
Yes, you’re right. It does account for something, a temporary respite, a diminution, even a noticeable decrease in mosquitoes and the diseases aegypti carry. It’s not a total elimination strategy because there is no total elimination strategy. That one female mosquito that escapes the death-by-breeding scheme will have offspring that will do what mosquitoes have done, spread the old diseases and possibly spread new ones in a proliferating population. And yes, you’re right in thinking as you read this that such a pessimistic view can’t be good for the psyche and that you want something that fosters optimism. “Give me something, even something little to hold on to, something good,” you plead.
 
And that takes me back to Harry and the episode of Silent Witness. In the TV series, the silent witnesses are the victims the pathologists have to examine for clues, all, as we eventually discover, victims of crime, that is, of evil. But Harry, in silently witnessing the drug deal the boy makes, is a living witness. The story ends with Harry just watching as the boy, seeing that Harry has observed him, gives him an evil glance of ingratitude for his compassionate efforts. There is no poetic justice. The story doesn’t end with Harry enrolling the boy in some rehabilitation program. Recidivism prevails. Evil continues, wending its way from the older generation of drug dealers into the younger one. The episode ends with a silent and bewildered Harry just staring as the boy walks away.
 
From ancient Egyptians through Aedes aegypti, to today’s eight billion people, no generation has solved the problem of evil, and no one has adequately explained away its presence. It will follow us; it will persist. The best we can do is to quash the evil we see, saving the moment, others, and even ourselves from evil wherever we encounter it. We’ll have to let the next generation handle the evil they face. Maybe we can affect 90% of those in the next generation just as the experimenters hope to affect 90% percent of the mosquitoes, but there will always be that ten percent that for whatever unexplainable reason, choose evil over good. Ten percent of eight billion is 800,000,000. 
 
Sure, that’s pessimistic. I’ll admit it. Are there 800,000,000 bad people, evil people, living contemporaneously with us? Too high, I hope, way too high a number. Maybe only one percent are bad. That reduces the number to eight million. Eight million! Is that still an overestimate? Make it a half percent. Four million. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles. 
 
You now say, “Well, that isn’t too bad. There are 57 million square miles of land surface on the planet. Four million spreads that group out pretty thin, like only one bad guy for every 14 square miles of Earth’s land.”
 
Of course, you have a point. Maybe evil is spread sparsely, except, maybe no, it isn’t. It tends to concentrate because evil is a human characteristic. Those four million or more we include in the evil population walk among us—assuming that the “us” are “we who are good.” Or, even if they don’t walk among us, they find their ways into our lives through cybercrime. 
 
From Job’s wondering why bad things happen to good people to the ponderings of philosophers and theologians, no one has yet contrived a strategy for eliminating persistent evil except in local and immediate circumstances. But maybe we want an all-or-nothing strategy. Maybe we should aim for something in the 90-plus percentages, hopefully 99.5%. That would put one bad person on each 14 square-mile plot. We just have to figure where each of those plots should be located. You know, if we could transport all the bad guys to Antarctica, each of them would have more than a square mile. And except for a few dozens of scientists working there, they would have only themselves to bother. Of course, Britain tried that with Australia with little success. One could argue that the Brits merely exported evil to the indigenous Australians. 
 
Again, there’s always that problem of the next generation of mosquitoes and humans. I wish I could offer a solution, wish I could solve what no one yet seems to have solved, that is, the problem of evil’s persistence. But I can’t. You? 
 
I suppose we are all like Harry in that episode of Silent Witness. We witness but remain as powerless as the bodies that the pathologist examines for clues about their demise by evil. We can affect the living, but not all the living. Yet, like all those who tried before us to stop evil from persisting, we are compelled to try even in a world with more people than any of us can ever influence. We cannot for the sake of the living, stand as silent witnesses.  

Notes: 
*Season 9, Episode 3, Parts I and II.
Don't want to depress you, but in Washington, D.C. in the first five months of 2021, there have been more than 200 carjackings and dozens of juveniles arrested for the crime.

Emily Dickinson didn’t need a government to quarantine her during a pandemic. She self-quarantined in her house in Amherst, Massachusetts. She doesn’t appear to have seen much of Earth’s geography, spending a little time at nearby Mt. Holyoke’s school for women, but never graduating. She was articulate regardless of the level of her education, so much so that she influenced American poets and still stands as an icon of creativity. From one of her poems we can deduce that she was a reader and that through her books she traveled beyond the confines of Amherst. One of her poems begins with a now rather famous line, “There is no Frigate like a Book.”
 
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
 
Emily, God bless her, was only partially right. If she were alive now, she would have another frigate to sail, one called YouTube, the ship of both scholars and fools, a ship on which even the poor can book passage. YouTube, for whatever its varied content reveals about the inadequacies and the hopes of our species, does present the world “Without oppress of Toll,” that is, if one ignores the cost of computer, smartphone, or tablet, and the price one’s Internet provider charges—Oh! And let’s not forget the wireless router. What was I saying?
 
I took a trip to Karahan Tepe today. Boarded the YouTube frigate and sailed not only to a distant land but also to a distant time. In doing so, I wondered whether Emily would have quarantined herself even more, not even wandering into her garden because she was fascinated with “Lands away” that she could reach on, excuse her mixed metaphor, a “frugal” “Chariot/That bears the Human Soul,” that is, if Emily owned a computer. YouTube could transport her to an archaeological dig at a site deemed even older than Göbekli Tepe. Space and Time: Neither are for us what they were for her.
 
Karahan Tepe is in the early stages of excavation. I don’t know what the archaeologists might uncover. That they have to “uncover” it is in itself a bewildering fact. Why, like the people who constructed Göbekli Tepe, did the builders bury Karahan Tepe? I can understand building on top of older material for new construction. Heck, the Marina District in San Francisco is built largely on the debris of buildings broken by the 1906 earthquake. And there are Roman buildings on top older Roman buildings and similar build-overs in Jerusalem and other ancient cities. The most famous of buried settlements is the multilayered city Troy, its original Bronze Age structures buried under successively younger buildings. But Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe seem to have been purposefully buried without the intention to build anew. Why cover over what took a long time to build? Wouldn’t Emily be fascinated by the puzzle as I am puzzled? Wouldn’t she want to travel on the ship of YouTube to that site? Were she alive today, would she write something like this after learning about those ancient faraway sites?
 
            There is no Mystery like an Ancient One
            That takes us back to times quite old
            When we have only what we’re told
            By diggers guessing why what was done,
            That took years to build beneath the Sun,
            Was covered over and quite undone.
 
It is YouTube that recently took me to an even more distant place, the surface of Mars, where I not only traversed the red soil but also flew over it—all this from my desk chair. Emily, if you could see what I have seen! Emily! I’ve walked the surface of Mars and visited distant Pluto!
 
Vicarious travel has allowed us to see the world we could never visit. We could say such travel began with written language, with Emily’s book-frigates, but story-telling antedates writing. I’m wondering now whether or not the people who built those faraway and long-ago places at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe told stories while they chipped away at the rocks and carved animal figures. I’m wondering whether their carvings were their frigates to lands untraveled, lands described by visitors with stories of cultures never met. Apparently, they, like so many other people that built without the aid of wheels, had limited geographic experiences. Travel was made easy by the wheel, but it was never easy or easily accessible until there were book-frigates, or should I say, runes on clay tablets and papyrus scrolls laden with a cargo of tales in hieroglyphs and ancient scripts. Maybe in trade encounters, the ancient people exchanged stories with other nomadic people—neither Göbekli Tepe nor the older Karahan Tepe might have been places of permanent residence though that might be debatable. I’m not an archaeologist, and I have visited both those ancient places only by booking passage on the YouTube frigate and through accounts in archaeological and popular journals.
 
So, yes, I’m like Emily. Sure, I’ve traveled some, much more, in fact, than Emily ever did, but not as much as others. We all have our geographic limitations that time and money impose. Even those who walked on the moon never went to all earthly locales. And although I’ve seen some foreign lands, I have not traveled to all other places by, excuse the mixed metaphor as Emily writes, riding a “Chariot” pulled by “Coursers” that are “pages” of “prancing Poetry.”
 
Space and Time. I’ve traveled through both, reaching vicariously as far as Mars and farther back in time than either Göbekli Tepe or the arguably older Karahan Tepe. I’ve visited an older settlement, one called Meadowcroft, located in Avella, Pennsylvania, not far from where I live, the rock shelter with evidence of habitation going back 16,000 years. And in traveling backward through time as a professor teaching paleontology, I’ve dug for and found fossils that predate both those Mideast structures and Meadowcroft by not just thousands, but by millions of years. I’ve seen and walked on rocks that predate all humanity by billions of years, also. You, though you might never have studied paleontology or geology, have also traveled over ancient geography, and assuredly, like Emily, live in an area once radically different from today’s appearance, the poetess, too, having lived near the igneous mass of Mount Holyoke that stands above the more recently cut Connecticut River valley. Geology was a child when Emily lived in sight of that massive mound of ancient rock; otherwise, she might have written about traveling through time as well as through space. She lived where Native Americans had once built their shelters, also. She lived where once no humans traversed the land. An ancient world lay beneath her feet, beneath her home and garden, and if she had climbed Mount Holyoke, she could have looked down on her home built a distant 200 million years after the mountain had turned from magma to solid rock.
 
Emily, as I said, might have no incentive to leave her self-imposed quarantine were she alive today. I imagine her now as she lived then, a recluse traveling by book and today by YouTube as well, her life a virtual one; her experiences, vicarious ones. During a pandemic, many have become incarnations of Emily, missing in the process the actual feel of an outside world, relegating themselves to views chosen by the camera holder or videographer.
 
If you decide to take a trip to Göbekli Tepe or Karahan Tepe via YouTube or through a professional or popular journal article, recognize that the perspective you get of both time and space is someone else’s perspective. A view captured by a lens or in an article might miss what you could see in person. As much as a YouTube voyage enthralls, it also deprives because it really doesn’t substitute for being there. But, alas, we’ve become virtual travelers nowadays, and even before imposed quarantining shut down the travel industry, we relied on virtual reality for much of our travel.
 
 
We are endowed with neither omnipresence nor eternal life. We don’t have, as Andrew Marvell phrases it in “To His Coy Mistress,” “world enough and time.” So, we cheat both Time and Space through vicarious experience. We travel by book and YouTube. We sit to go. And we visit by those frigates more places than Emily could even have imagined. Emily! I’m telling you, I’ve been to Mars and flown over its surface on a machine that wasn’t even invented in your time. And Emily, I have traveled farther back in time than you knew time extended. I’ve seen images of the universe just after its birth 13.8 billion years ago. No, I haven’t stood on a distant world, but I have, nevertheless vicariously visited more than one of them. And I have held in my hand the remains of life-forms hundreds of millions of years old, allowing me to transcend the limitations of my finiteness and to reverse the flight of Time’s arrow. Come to think of it, I have conquered not only Space, but also Time. I have traveled both by traveling and by staying put. I might not be omnipresent throughout the universe, but I have been on frigates that sailed both seas and skies. Without getting wet, I have gone into the deepest parts of the ocean. Without getting cold, I have climbed Mt. Everest or wended my way across an Antarctic glacier.   
 
I’ve experienced on both real and virtual frigates more world and time than the poetess could have imagined. And I'm guessing that you have, too.

Right before COVID hit, food trucks were proliferating at an astonishing rate, maybe even an exponential one. According to one 2017 count, the U.S. had about 5,000 food trucks, generating over a billion dollars revenue. And for good reason: Why go to the food when the food can come to you? Why spend lunchtime waiting for the host to seat you, the waitress to find your table, take the order, return with drinks, return with food, return to refill the drinks, and return to collect the money, why go through all that on a busy workday, when the food truck is right outside, maybe by a local park near benches under shade trees. And the food? Well, competition keeps the quality up and the flavors in. Time and convenience are two commodities many of us cherish in a busy society. Then there are the delivery systems set up both by restaurants and companies like Uber. Delivered food, convenient and abundant and available very nearby or virtually on our office doorstep! Are we ancient pharaohs? Kings and queens? Maybe even the gods on Olympus? 
 
But we’re not the only organisms that like our food delivered. Sessile marine organisms like corals and sponges simply sit and wait. Food comes along, and in coral reefs like busy cities it comes along frequently and abundantly. The ocean runs its own food truck and delivery services. The discovery of heterotrophic bacteria in the deep ocean makes me think that life prefers the home delivery to going out foraging for restaurants ala our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors and contemporary ultra-rural denizens of the Namib or the deep Amazonian rainforest. 
 
Two strategies for getting food, one requiring little or no work and the other requiring if not incessant then multiple excursions into the local environment. Both are risky. The former strategy depends on chance drive-bys by the food trucks of nature and humanity. Waiting for the convenient delivery makes us children in summertime, playing outdoors and waiting for the ice cream truck’s maddeningly repetitive and loud tune that signals its arrival in the neighborhood. We’re at the mercy of a delivery system beyond our control; the ice cream truck shows up or it doesn’t. Hot days aren’t always mitigated by cold ice cream. And as in Nature’s production of food, there are seasonal shortages. Nuts, seeds, and fruits don’t fall to the local ground year-round. Delivery systems like winds and flowing water vary, also. But sessile organisms have flourished for millions of years, so the strategy does have its benefits. Consider brain corals. So-named because they look like human brains with crenulated surfaces, these corals have survived as a group for millions of years, so the sessile strategy works. But consider before heaping praise on these “brains” for their survival strategy that their only contribution is their continuation. Sure, they continue, but they do so stagnantly.  
 
That other strategy, you know, the one that has us out hunter-gatherer style searching desperately through grocery store aisles for just the right ingredients for a homemade gourmet meal or for ordinary bread, milk, and eggs, that strategy works relatively well, as long as the expenditure of energy to acquire the food doesn’t exceed the energy obtained in the food. Can’t run on an empty tank, can we? 
 
Are there analogs of food strategies in our consumption of ideas? Probably. How many of us consume ideas that simply come our way by virtue of a home-delivery system? How many of us go out foraging for new ideas? Like the food strategies, both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Take the latter strategy, the hunter-gatherer one. We can go out purposefully searching, but unless we have a plan, some sense that ideas are likely to be found in one place over another, through one source over another, discovery and acquisition rely on chance. One doesn’t find gold where no gold ores exist; one doesn’t find ideas where a bland landscape of accumulating sameness or derivatives simply add to layers, like sedimentary layers, of fragmented ideas, all compositionally the same like billions of quartz crystals cemented to make a sandstone. No, finding new ideas by foraging, though possibly successful through luck, is a matter of planning the search. One doesn’t find fish unless one goes to the water, one doesn’t find fruit trees on the upper slopes of the Andes. Foragers need to know the environments that produce the food they seek, and that goes for the search for ideas, also. 
 
Of course, we can rely on the food-delivery strategy, waiting for the ice cream truck, or the winds or waters to deliver either food or ideas. That sessile system has worked to keep the ordinary ordinary, to keep one generation in place until the environment changes and the delivery system fails like a shift in ocean current that bypasses the sessile eaters. During COVID the food truck business stopped for a while. In Nature, delivery systems can work for millennia, and then, for whatever reasons geologic, meteorologic, or oceanographic, those systems shift or fail, and the home-delivery system collapses. Sessile organisms have no foraging strategies. They are at the mercy of delivery systems. Brain corals are like that.
 
But I suppose even foragers are somewhat reliant on home delivery. Take news and ideas, for example. Home-delivered newspapers, while still part of an ongoing delivery business, have been replaced by news and ideas through the Web. The ideas flow on a stream of electrons and microwaves toward our sessile brains, and foraging for new ideas has taken us on oxymoronic sessile searches. We sit and browse. Sometimes with purpose, sometimes on random wanderings through a jungle of random ideas and information. Yes, many of us take part in this strange Era of Sessile Searching. We want to forage, and we do forage, but we do so seated in front of a computer, electronic tablet, or smartphone. Mostly, we allow the random delivery system to put ideas before us like plankton floating by coral polyps or detrital ocean “rain” of organic matter falling on seafloor’s newly discovered heterotrophic bacteria. The ice cream truck simply appears in the neighborhood—or it doesn’t.
 
What’s your strategy? Are you a brain coral or a forager? Is your only contribution like that of the sessile brain corals, that is, merely a continuation largely unchanged over millennia, a continuation reliant on that which is delivered to you? Surely, you want more than just a continuation; surely, you have grown beyond those childhood years of waiting to see whether or not the ice cream truck shows up in your neighborhood.  

 In the coffee shop, two talk.
 
“Says here that oceanographers caught a giant squid on camera.” *
 
“You and your science stuff. Okay, they videoed a squid. What’s the big deal?”
 
“Well, you know that that’s the model for the Kraken, the monster large enough to capsize a whale boat, fight with Jules Verne’s Nautilus, and deep-six pirates. You have to have seen the movies about the Kraken. At least, you have to know that giant squid swim deep down and that when a dead one shows up on a beach, people gather in amazement, marine biologists scurry over the sands to gather up the body to make measurements and do autopsies, and newspapers print the pictures, or now, I guess, people upload their videos onto YouTube with titles like ‘Unknown Monster Found on Beach’.”
 
“Okay, yes, I know big squid aren’t swimming with snorkeling tourists on the shallow reefs of the Dry Tortugas. And yes, I confess, I’ve seen that old 20,000 Leagues under the Sea with Kirk Douglas and the recent Pirates of the Caribbean one with the Kraken. And I know that giant squids are big, but not Hollywood big.”
 
“Yeah, but some are as long as an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer. And their eyes are supposed to be as big as basketballs. But then, I guess they live mostly in the dark 3,000 or more feet under or the semidark in the ocean’s twilight zone that starts about 600 feet down.”
 
“So, back to your science article. You say oceanographers filmed a giant squid alive.”
 
“Yep, and the reason that that’s an accomplishment is that the trick they used can be used to capture other giant squid on camera, maybe even capture a living squid and bring it to the surface for study.”
 
“I’ll bite. What was the trick?”
 
“Turned down the submersible’s lights, in fact, changed them to the red end of the spectrum. Those giant eyes evolved to see blue bioluminescent flashing, so in addition to using red light, the scientists used some flashing blue to mimic the jellyfish squid eat. I guess all those previous attempts to find and film the squid failed because the creatures saw the bright lights coming at them from those submersibles. The squid they videoed in the study tried to take the blue-flashing lights from the sub. Guess it was fooled. I suppose for the squid seeing in blue light makes evolutionary sense. You know, the ocean and the sky appear blue because the blue end of the spectrum gets scattered, whereas the red end gets absorbed. Squid supposedly have monochromatic eyes.”
 
“Now let me guess. You’re going to derive some lesson from this. Right?”
 
“You know me. I’d rather you drew one on your own; but since you asked, I have one to offer. It’s easier to get people to say yes to something when they can’t see part of what’s there. It’s the magician’s trick, the lawyer’s trick, the ideologue’s trick, the politician’s trick, the propagandist’s trick. Take advantage of a natural blindness while enticing one with an apparent truth or distraction, the flimsy wiggling jellyfish that isn’t really a jellyfish, but is rather just a mimicry. Any of us can be fooled at times. Any can be tricked into saying ‘Yes’ or ‘Aye’ because we don’t fully see what is in front of us, and that is coupled with seeing what the other person wants us to see and knows we can’t see. I think of the terrible bombing of Dresden in World War II. No one knows the exact number of people killed in the Allied air raids, maybe 6,000, but the German propaganda machine turned that into 60,000, a number that shocked the citizens in the Allied countries, even England. Amazing! The Germans were in the process of killing millions systematically; they had bombed numerous cities, including London most notably, with their bombers and their V-1 and V-2 rockets. Yet, somehow, people in the Allied countries were horrified by Dresden’s destruction. Selective vision, I guess, duped by the light from fires in Dresden while ignoring the fires from German bombs and Holocaust furnaces.”
 
“Ah! Your lesson. I knew you’d have one.”
 
“I could, of course, say more.”
 
“No doubt.”
 
“Well, since you ask, I would like to point out that there’s a lot of that going on right now in various countries, especially so in the United States and European countries.”
 
“What?”
 
“It’s a complex set of responses. People ignore what is visibly invisible.”
 
“That’s gobbledygook. You didn’t say ‘visibly invisible,’ I hope.”
 
“I don’t know how else to put it. I’m looking at this in two ways, from the perspective of the scientists who filmed the squid and from the perspective of the squid. Think about it. Giant squid are invisible ordinarily, but we’ve seen them. Giant squid see only monochromatically, so they don’t see the red light that shines on them. It’s plainly there, but they don’t see it.”
 
“There has to be some wire loose in that brain of yours. Oxymorons like ‘visibly invisible’ don’t really make sense. What are you getting at? 
 
“I’m thinking of how people often see through monochromatic eyes, eyes incapable of seeing the full spectrum. We don’t see everything mostly because we can’t. As you and I have said before in this same café, it’s the brain, and not the eyes, that see. Now, I’m saying that we can’t see what’s before us because we let preconceptions, distractions, and Ego blot out what is embarrassing to us personally and what is revealing to our enemies or even to our friends.”
 
“Revealing?”
 
“Yes, we don’t want to look at that which exposes us for our hypocrisies, our contradictions, or our errors.”
 
“Just had a thought. You mean like a professional sports league criticizing one group for alleged biases while saying nothing about a foreign country’s brutal treatment of a minority group.”
 
“Yes. Everyone in the world knows about the persecution authorized by a government, so it’s one of those visible invisible matters. Go back to World War II. People had at least some peripheral vision of the German atrocities. And now the NBA and he MLB go after a few flashing lights because they’ve recently evolved to see them, like the squid trying to take the blue lights from the submersible because they appear to be bioluminescent flashings of deep-water jellyfish. Meanwhile, the squid can’t see they are being illuminated in red light. That’s what happens to humans who see monochromatically, so to speak. They ignore the visibly invisible conditions around them and chase after the artificial flashings.” 
 
“I think I understand what you’re saying now. Just like using part of the spectrum to illuminate invisibly while using another part of the spectrum to attract the attention of the squid, people use the parts to distract from the whole. That’s part of this generalized popular cry of bias for anyone who takes a contrary stance. We’ve all be trained to see, or should I say we’ve all evolved socially to see only a part and not the whole in any complex social group. I remember reading years ago the story of a woman who in some southern state, maybe Louisana or Mississippi, found that on her official state documents she was listed as ‘Black.’ When she examined her geneology, she discovered that she had a 17% African-American heritage and that she was, therefore, 83% European Caucasian. Nevertheless, the state continued to list her as African-American or whatever the designation at that time might have been, maybe something like ‘Colored.’ So, is a person who is 17% Black actually Black? At what point do we see polychromatically? At what point do we draw the line. Is 90% Caucasian, Caucasian? Does one have to be 100% Caucasian to be Caucasian but only 17% Black to be African-American? What do we do, then, with the genetic fact that all humans derive from Africa, with ancestors that go back 60,000 to 80,000 years and ancestral mitochondrial Mom maybe 200,000 years ago? What if each of us is 1% African? Or 0.005% African? What do we do then? How do we see one another? Do we rank individuals by their percentage of belonging to a group? And if we do, at what percentage do we draw lines? Isn’t it ironic that a species like ours, a species that sees all the wavelengths from indigo to red, actually acts as though we see only monochromatically? What do we do with a President whose father was African and whose mother was Caucasian, a President reared by Caucasian grandparents? How is that President ‘African-American’? Does that mean 50% is the dividing line. That’s a strange teeter totter. Both sides hold equal weights, but one side tips up and the other tips down. Then what of that woman who was 83% Caucasian but who had to be listed by state law as Black because she was 17% African-American?” 
 
“Yep. I guess you’re onto drawing your own lessons. I guess also that we’re all like giant squid, swimming around in the dark or semidark, enticed by flashing lights that we can see while others observe us under the full illumination that we can’t see. Others see us for the monsters that we are, the Krakens that we’ve become, grasping for artificial constructs. We see little though we are bathed in the light they shine, and we take the bait of the artificial lights they use.”
 
Note:
 
*Specktor, Brandon. How scientists caught footage of ‘the kraken’ after centries of searching. Livescience. May 1, 2021. Online at  https://www.livescience.com/first-footage-giant-squid-jellyfish-lure.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=LVS_newsletter&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2816625&m_i=OguO3tMzbsJG%2Be42PoUWWSJ9JH6Fu2Gw5YMrDqA6mRcaCKF2Vcz_XGvae51wBm1PVLjOl_mX6hefSU%2BjLtsqY3h5PYWIT2QZszn9HGGOO3&lrh=00e6cecd00801376766145b60d8a6556273a450d68f177d27f8a81ef369584e1    Accessed May 2, 2021. Originally published in Live Science.