Recently, a drone crashed into a tern nesting site. The birds fled, no doubt in fear of this strange predator. As a result, the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve lost a generation of terns, their abandoned eggs sitting on the beach. The terns did not return. * 
 
That humans have always altered landscapes is a given. From our nomadic days 200 hundred thousand years ago through our city-building beginning under 10,000 years ago, we used as we desired or needed, often without a sense that our actions often bred consequences for other life-forms. Desires and needs: The former driven by hormones and culture; the latter, by body and mind working sometimes separately and sometimes together for self-preservation.
 
Both desire and need drive individuals and groups to act without considering complex ramifications. But that is understandable. Regardless of how we try to anticipate the consequences of living, we cannot see the complexities of our future. The first drone pilots, having fun with the invention and thrilled by its potential for both entertainment and practical use, probably did not anticipate that so small an object could by its failure wipe out an entire generation of terns. And as in so many previous incidents involving failed technology, the drone’s crash, and not its successful flight, initiated the small disaster. We have a history in Chernobyl and Fukushima of technological failures, two relatively recent events that like the drone’s crash, caused immediate dire consequences. And we have a history of filling needs that have altered the planet initially to our advantage and then to our disadvantage, like irrigating soils in arid lands that subsequently become more saline and less productive or like robbing water reserves, such as the Aral Sea, a body of water that went from being an inland sea to being a puddle in just a few decades.
 
Desire and need. Would you say that both are never more closely related than they are in the context of peace? We desire peace, don’t we? We need peace, don’t we?
 
Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Second in importance after physiological needs is the need for peace (security and safety). Calls for peace echo through history. Calls for peace echo through diplomacy. Calls for peace echo from temples, churches, and mosques. Peace. Given peace, we can live harmoniously in communities; given peace diverse communities can coexist; peace eliminates most anxieties.
 
But again, what we desire and what we need can negatively affect other life-forms, and ironically, that applies to peace. Being human and living human always seems to disturb non-human existence. Even peaceful living.
 
Take this headline as an example: “Peace accord in Colombia has increased deforestation of biologically-diverse rainforest.” ** Imagine: Peaceful living can ironically bring about destruction and death. The study by Oregon State University on the effects of the 2016 peace agreement that ended the six-decade civil war in the Andes-Amazon region shows a “40% increase in conversion from forest to agriculture.” The negotiators of the 300-page peace agreement failed to consider the landscape of the conflict. No one thought about the consequences to the diverse life-forms and their rainforest habitat. 
 
But what could be so bad? Didn’t the people of Colombia gain peace and food production, two of the most fundamental human needs? Isn’t that a good result? Sure, but in the process people did what our species has always done, they set in motion an alteration of landscape that negatively impacts other life-forms.
 
Desire and need. Seems that we’re trapped in the irony of human life on a complex planet. Should we change the name of our world to Planet Irony? Maybe not. Irony implies humor, and a lost generation of seabirds or a lost Ukrainian or Japanese city seem to be serious matters. So, what about changing the name to Planet Paradox? We invent. Our inventions destroy. We advance technologically. Other life-forms succumb to our intrusions into their way of life.
 
It is possible that the terns might return to breed again next year. Disrupted flocks elsewhere have returned. But unless bird populations learn that drones aren’t predators, through an educational process that seems unlikely in both the short and long term, the next crashing drone—or overflying one—will disrupt the cycle of their lives. Even when our intentions are driven by seemingly harmless desires and innocent needs, we can alter the status quo of any natural or artificial phenomenon. And there’s no guarantee that those who dedicate their lives to protecting the life in a public reserve can stop every drone pilot from scaring off the terns. 
 
The future holds no change in the processes of pursuing desires and fulfilling needs that ultimately change the world, sometimes temporarily for our good, sometimes temporarily for the good of other life-forms, but often to the detriment of both us and the other critters that share the planet. 
 
According to David M. Raup in Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? terns will have their turn at going extinct. We will also have our turn. Raup estimates that only about “one in a thousand species” [that ever existed] is still alive.*** Count up today’s living species if you want. No one knows the exact number, but estimates run as high as forty million. If terns—and humans—make up only two of the current unknown number of living species, neither species has, in terms of Earth history, long to live. The number of extinct organisms might lie between five and fifty billion. Imagine. If today’s species number five million, that means billions of species have come and gone, and all our current neighbor species will, like the terns and us, have their turn at extinction. 
 
Extinction is inevitable for many reasons, disease, comet or asteroid strike, extensive volcanic eruptions, changing climates, and nowadays, nuclear war. The crash of a single toy drone shows how easily the scale of survival can be tipped unfavorably for any species. In 2020, the world braced for a devastating pandemic. Fortunately, we had the wherewithal to provide medical care and vaccines. Seems that we can handle disease—at least we handled this one enough to reduce the loss of life. But the next one…Ah! That’s another story, one that we might not be around to tell.
 
Our hubris takes a humbling blow when we consider the dire consequences of crashing a drone in the midst of a tern nesting ground. But the living often have only short term memories. We don’t remember the demise of the graptolites, those floating animal colonies that thrived between the Cambrian and Mississippian periods. They’re gone. So what? That was hundreds of millions of years ago. But what of those who now walk through Times Square? Do they remember that in 2020 and early 2021, it was an empty set of sidewalks? Do they remember that like the tern nesting ground, it was vacated? During the last three-quarters of 2020, according to a CBS report, some 330,000 people left New York City.**** Human terns? The flock was decimated when something far smaller than a drone hit the city. And having found new nesting places, will they return? 
 
Life adapts when it can, sometimes by abandoning one ecological niche for another and other times by mutating to forms more resistant to extinction threats. Speciation preserves a genus when extinction threatens a member species. As one species says goodbye, another says hello and eventually fills the trophic and ecological niche it left; at least that appears to have been the pattern over the past six or seven hundred million years for multicellular organisms, and maybe, for single-cell organisms, going back maybe 3.5 to 3.8 billion years. Apparently, like tables at a restaurant, when one party leaves, another is ready to sit for its reservation. Turns reserved. But look at where we humans are in that process. When our species first appeared, other human species existed. The first Homo sapiens shared the planet with Homo floresiensis, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo erectus soloensis, and others. They’re gone, leaving us as, in Jonathan Edwards’s frightening words, like a spider held on a thread over a fire, ***** not the fire of Hell, but rather the fire of extinction. 
 
Think. There are a dozen genera of terns right now; that species on the beach where the drone crashed belonged to Thalasseus elegans. Elegance. It’s a term associated with urbanity, dignity, grace, rich design, and sophistication. Probably many New Yorkers consider themselves to be elegant in one or more of those meanings. But nothing says “inelegant” more than fleeing and abandoning a generation of tern eggs or a city of offices and restaurants because of a tiny drone or an even tinier virus. And now many buildings in New York City lie as empty as the beach at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Terns and humans. Beaches and restaurant tables temporarily empty. Are they reserved for returning birds and people or for a future species? All life forms, billions in the past that have come and gone, have resided and fled, and millions in the present that reside and flee today, all living under a constant threat. And the irony, the paradox, lies in our elegant technology, the drone an invention of high tech and the virus apparently an invention of biotech. Elegant in their design, both crashed and frightened species—elegant humans and elegant terns—away from their habitats.    
 
 
Notes:
*Wigglesworth, Alex. 8 June 2021. A generation of seabirds was wiped out by a drone at a reserve. Now, scientists fear for their future. Los Angeles Times. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-seabirds-drone-reserve-scientists-future.html   Accessed June 9, 2021.
 
**Klampe, Michelle. 2 June 2021. Phys.org. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2021-06-peace-accord-colombia-deforestation-biologically-diverse.html   Accessed June 9, 2021.
 
***Raup, David M. 1991. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. The title of Raup’s first chapter is “Almost All Species Are Extinct.”
 
****DeAngelis, Jenna. 8 Jan 2021. Over 333,000 New Yorkers Have Left City Since COVID Pandemic Began In March. CBSNewYork. Online at https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/08/moving-out-of-nyc/  Accessed June 10, 2021.
 
*****Jonathan Edwards. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards, if you forget your American history, was a prime mover in the movement called the First Great Awakening that was a religious revival between 1730 and 1755. The Northampton, MA, theologian was more doom and gloom than glorious salvation. His idea was to frighten his charges into moral living. If you’re having a really good day (see a previous blog on that) and want a downturn, you can read this famous sermon online at http://www.jonathan-edwards.org/Sinners.pdf  Accessed June 10, 2021.

Preface: 
 
Dear Reader, 
 
If you have read through some of the approximately 1,500 little essays on this site, you know that in some posts I employ verse and dialogue instead of prose. Not that I think I’m Plato, but I do find that through dialogue, I wend my way over the obstacles of objections and counterpoints to what I have to say. For the sake of brevity in the fast-paced world of tweeted aphorisms, I keep the conversations to a few minutes’ read. I might offer longer dialogues if I think the topic is multifaceted and rambling as coffee-shop, breakfast-at-the-diner-with-cronies, or talk-at-the-local-bar conversations usually run.
 
What I hope to do in the dialogues is to get you to involve yourself in the topic. I know I don’t have direct access to your thoughts and your counterpoints, but by guessing a hypothetical conversation with you, a total stranger, I try to anticipate what you might say to refute, or at least, to challenge me. No doubt I probably fail to achieve that goal, but since the purpose of this website is to provide points of departure for your insights, I endeavor by stepping into your role to get your mental juices flowing. 
            
I realize, also, that some of these dialogues take up more of your time than some direct, well organized treatise. But a rambling conversation sometimes serves a purpose. It allows the mind to wander and wonder. Thoughts you might not have in a direct essay might occur to you in a conversation. 
            
Sorry that I don’t hear those thoughts of yours directly. I realize I could turn on the comment box and even ask for comments, but I also realize that there are those out there who would use a chat not for making a point and correcting me politely, but rather for spewing some pent-up stuff and for ad hominem attacks. I hope to allow you to ponder or reject what I have had to say in your own way without the noise engendered by agenda. Although political views have always pervaded public conversations, nowadays they seem to dominate, probably, I think, because of their 24/7 broadcasting on social media and on those round-the-clock pundit shows on TV.
 
Anyway, today I offer a little longer conversation and one that brings to the reader’s attention a problem that has long nagged me, that is, the problem of bureaucratic minds influenced by intellectual, social, and economic fads du jour. In this dialogue, you might easily fault me for a reductionist viewpoint as I take on a notion that generalizes a population of individuals who are ultimately responsible for their own actions, regardless of social or economic circumstances. As I often do, I do not identify, script-writer style, the speaker. And as so many of us do after we end a conversation, I look back and say, “Oh! I should have mentioned….”  
 
Very truly yours,
Don Conte
 
 
Dialogue of the Day: Critical Stupidity Theory: Is Stupidity Systemic in Art and Politics?
 
“Does systemic stupidity run through the art world? I’m thinking of Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting Suprematist Composition: White on White.”
 
“Let me guess. You’re upset because you think the painting really isn’t a painting, because it’s an off-white tilted square on a white canvas. But Malevich was avant-garde in the early twentieth century. People were going through lots of turmoil, the First World War and the Spanish Flu; millions died. Existentialists of the day were challenging every traditional philosophy, physicists were talking about an unseen world of quanta, and Communism and Socialism were rising political and social movements. And in the art world there were attempts to mimic the confusion of life and to get away from mere representation. It was also a time of experimentation in film and literature. Three years before White on White, D. W. Griffiths revealed underlying cruelty in The Birth of a Nation and Kafka published The Metamorphosis; one year after the painting, the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari revealed the mind of a madman, and four years later T. S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ with its intertwining of birth and death. I could mention other influences and influencers of the times if you want.”
 
“Yeah. What you said; that’s what I always expect to hear when I ask about so-called avant-garde works. It’s still a matter of someone selling an idea and a product to the gullible. Look at that painting. It’s a roughly drawn square.”
 
“But it’s what it symbolizes.”
 
“Here we go. Esoteric gobbledygook.”
 
“You know, I could never put my finger on it, but now I know your intellectual weakness, or maybe your main intellectual weakness. At heart, you’re a Philistine. Deep down inside all that surety lies a cultural vacuum. There’s just no subtlety, no sophistication. You’re the ultimate reductionist. The ultimate simpleton. Where did you grow up, in one of those fly-over states where people are not capable of a Manhattan or L.A. perspective?”
 
“Okay, so it’s all right for you to make fun of me but not all right for me to make fun of a painting a doodler might scribble at a boring meeting or a kindergarten kid might do when he uses a ruler for the first time as he learns how to draw geometric figures.”
 
“Again, your philistinism is showing through your curtain of certainty. Look, here’s what the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA to those of us who aren’t Philistines, says about Malevich and White on White. It’s ‘a white square floating weightlessly.’ The MoMA blurb also says Malevich was fascinated by airplanes.” *
 
“Whoa. You art aficionados buy into every thought foisted on you as erudite explanation. First of all, planes aren’t weightless; they stay up because of physical forces like thrust and the Bernoulli Principle. They struggle to stay in the air. And you elitist coastal people who fly over those fly-over states think you’re sophisticated, but most of you probably don’t know why the plane stays up over farmland air. Second, I thought you art and literature experts believed that art and literature could be appreciated without knowledge of the author’s biographical details.“
 
“Well, there are critics who take a biographical approach to explain a work. That’s a legit aesthetic.”
 
“Look, you can’t apply bio stuff to works written or painted by anonymous sources. Lit and art should stand on their own. I’ve written books, reports, and blogs that are ‘out there,’ but I’m not out there. If I said something unintelligible, it's my uncorrectable fault once it's 'out there.' I’m not around for a discussion to clarify what I might have meant or why I said it. If I wrote an ambiguous line, the reader is on his or her own to interpret it. I can’t ask Homer what he meant or how his life affected his epics. White on White has to stand on its own, I guess in the artist’s mind, weightlessly, if that was Malevich’s intention. Can I even trust that an artist sees all that’s on the canvas? Doesn’t everyone take to a viewing a set of biases and beliefs? Or should I say regardless of Malevich’s intention or life experiences, the aficionado sees and interprets from a different perspective? Anyway, what about the relatively common idea that ‘books write themselves’ or that paintings ‘paint themselves,’ taking the writer or artist wherever the pen or brush stroke says the creator should go?”
 
“Oh! So, you are aware of the roll of an artist’s muse. But artists often set out to capture some reality, and not all realities are physical phenomena. What if someone wants to paint a mood?”
 
“Yes, I get your point, but I’m more concerned with an art aficionado’s viewing muse, the inspiration to assume meaning where no meaning exists. White on White. Baloney. Tell you want to do. Go to the MoMA blurb and read about the painting. It says that Malevich thought white was the color of infinity. It also says he wanted a picture to have ‘nothing in common with nature.’ I’m turned off by meaningless gobbledygook that poses as profundity.”
 
“You just don’t get it.”
 
“Really? Okay, defend this one. A guy just sold an invisible sculpture for $18,000. ** I’m not talking about a sculpture in glass, plexiglass, muscovite mica, or quartz crystals. The invisible sculpture is invisible because it’s sculpted out of nothing. Nada, zilch, emptiness. Now tell me that the art world doesn’t suffer from systemic stupidity.”
 
“I haven’t seen the work, but…”
 
“Haven’t seen it? You can’t see what isn’t there. Some guy does virtually nothing, and garners attention and money. Nice job. Wish I had thought of it. Maybe I should become an artist. Or should I say artiste? The ultimate con perpetrated on those who claim sophistication and intellectual superiority is selling nothing to them, the bitcoin of sculptures. When I hear that someone bought nothing for $18,000, I think that being cultured is not a state of being as much as it is the product of fermentation like cultured milk. Yeah. This Salvatore Garau sculptor guy, the sculptor who made $18,000 for nothing, is the ultimate con artist. I don’t want to generalize too much, but I think that if we keep you art appreciation guys in a room full of paintings and sculptures, you’ll all agree that if you don’t say something erudite-sounding and esoteric, the rest of the world will recognize the subjectivity and fawning praise in your analyses. Garau is a better con man than Malevich was. He didn’t need to buy materials and spend time on his ‘immaterial sculpture.’ The news article on the sale says Garau calls the sculpture Io Sono, which means ‘I Am.’ Yeah, that’s profound. Sorry for the sarcasm. It’s not profound. You know that story about the emperor’s new clothes? Remember that the emperor was a fool, and remember that all his sycophants said the nonexistent clothes were magnificent. Yeah. That’s that Io Sono sculpture and Garau eliciting bids for its auction. Call me the babe, but out of my mouth I’ll say it: There’s no sculpture there! An idiot just spent money on nothing. And you hung in a so-called prestigious art museum a painting by Malevich that was a tilted off-white square on a white canvas.”
 
“Okay, I don’t know that story about the sculpture; it does sound a bit like a scam, but with painting, you’re wrong. When we see a painting, we examine parameters like brush strokes. The MoMA blurb on the painting refers to the ‘texture’ of the painting and to the “subtle variations of the whites.”
 
“Again I’ll ask. Really? If you look at my kitchen wall, you also can see subtle variations of the whites, especially where splashes from stove or sink did their subtle work or where kids put their hands on the wall to round a corner as they ran through the house. Guess there’s no need to paint the kitchen. I can tell friends I’m an artist with subtle whites. Maybe I’ll take visitors outside to show them a patch of yard I didn’t cut and tell them that it represents an abandoned yard, that it’s my garden sculpture, or that it’s a cut lawn that they just can’t see, like undisturbed ground waiting to be a hole. Wait! Maybe I’ll say that the uncut lawn reveals the unfulfilled desire for a mowed lawn that is like the unfulfilled desire for peace in the world. I’ll probably get a head shaker to bobble in agreement. But what can I expect in these times when people make up whatever enters their heads and pitch it as reality? And what else can I expect but bobble-headed agreement?  
 
“I just heard a congresswoman say we should do away with prisons because they don’t stop shootings in the community. Well, she’s partially right, but totally stupid. New criminals are born every day. She’s right when she says putting shooters in the prisons doesn’t stop shooting back in the neighborhood; the guys in prison adapt and use shivs to kill one another. But she’s totally stupid when she wants to put something invisible in place of the jails. She says social programs with reformed violent offenders have reduced violence in her district. Tell that to the family of this week’s 15-year-old victim and the 13 people wounded in New York City over the Memorial Day weekend. Tell that to the people who suffered an 86% increase in shootings this past year because they are now defended by a police department that, through defunding, is becoming as real as Io Sono. Sorry for the digression, but that Malevich painting and Garau ‘sculpture’ make me think that there’s systemic stupidity in government as well as in art. I guess some believe that an invisible police force, a nonexistent police force will protect.”
 
“Wow. Where did that come from? Here’s my counter. If we had more people contemplating art, we would have fewer shootings. If we had more mental health workers, there would be less violence. People would gain insights about life that would take them out of the daily pettiness and the anger that results in shootings. Art elevates. And maybe the congresswoman is right in wanting to build more hospitals and mental health facilities.”
 
“Sorry. I can see man’s need for beauty and for symbolism and for mental health professionals, but you assume that outsiders can cover all the emotional and mental needs of 330 million Americans in the world’s third largest population. You assume that they can fill the roles responsible parents and guardians need to play. But sociologists and psychotherapists can’t respond to an active shooter with a malevolent intent. The work they do to alter violent tendencies and impulsive actions takes months to years to accomplish. And with regard to eliminating police departments, note that I can’t see what I can’t see. A sculpture made of nothing is nothing, nothing more. A city without a police department and a prison is a city without both protection AND justice. Criminals with criminal intent don’t sit around contemplating the weightlessness of White on White or the vacuum of Io Sono. I suppose what bothers me more than a looney congresswoman’s unrealistic rantings about the evils of police departments and prisons is that standing behind her while she made her comments to the Press were some middle-aged men shaking their heads in agreement. Keep in mind those sycophants in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. And why, oh why, is the Press so compliant? No one in the Press corps present had the guts to ask what she would do with pathological killers, with career con men, with people who rob, injure, and kill without compunction. And where are all those politicians who are mostly lawyers when someone among their number says nothing is better than something, that no police force is better than a dedicated police force? Geez, lawyers, officers of the court, representatives who make laws to keep the unruly in check and chaos at bay.” 
 
“Now we’ve gone from a painting to a police force. You just have a different opinion that you think is irrefutable reasoning. You have your own agenda. You don’t want to accept that crime is a social phenomenon brought on by poverty and mental disease.”
 
“And you want to believe that society is to blame for an individual’s actions. You see criminals as victims. They just need to be reformed. Someone just needs to explain to them the error of their ways. Tell me something. Did you ever take a paperclip or pen from work? What about a pen from the check-writing table at a bank? Did you return it? No? Why not. Do you think a sociologist could have kept you from taking the paperclip or pen? Or, if there was one hired by the bank or office staff, that he could be present for every check-writer or cubicle-sitter?”
 
“That’s silly. What’s a paperclip worth? Offices have thousands of them.”
 
“But you decided that there was no law, no rule, no restriction that prevented you from stealing. You think that you perceive the rules just the way the purchaser perceived that Io Sono was real or that MoMA bought and hung White on White. Is the value of a paperclip just a matter of interpretation? Was there no actual cost in its acquisition by the office?”
 
“You’re mixing apples and oranges, art and crime, the making of rules and laws and their enforcement and the subtle variations of interpretations of values. A paperclip doesn’t have much value.”
 
“No, it doesn’t. But it does have some monetary value. It was your decision to take it from the office supplies without permission. It was a slight wrong in your mind, but it was a wrong. And you got away with the theft because there wasn’t a paperclip cop to prevent you. When you begin to use subjective judgments, you can justify anything, from art to crime. For the pathological killer, there is no reality save his or her own. They see an invisible sculpture; they see a meaning in subtle variations in whites. They can ascribe any explanation they want to any phenomena they choose or to no phenomena at all. And sycophants and unquestioning people just accept the explanations. Eliminate police forces in favor of therapists: That’s an interpretation of reality that will get therapists killed in domestic violence incidents and during incidents involving criminal intent. Do you think anyone on those planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11 could have dissuaded the terrorists? Bobble-head agreement can have dire consequences, ramifications far more serious than buying White on White or Io Sono. Eliminate jail time for violent offenders? Send unreformed rapists and murderers back onto the streets? That congresswoman and the head-shaking men standing in agreement need to attend some funerals in the inner cities where there are daily murders or visit sobbing and life-shattered victims of rape. Sure, there are many people imprisoned for minor offenses, probably some for offenses not much more severe than taking that proverbial paperclip. But there are others…”
 
“Okay. Okay. I get it. I can see the argument with regard to shootings in inner cities, but artists and painters aren’t committing the crimes simply because they experiment.”
 
“Granted. No one needs to arrest Garau for fraud. No one needs to put White on White in storage in the museum’s attic. Of course, if whoever purchased Io Sono gets tired of the invisible sculpture, he wouldn’t know where to pick it up to move it, anyway. Wait! Get those guys who carry large panes of glass to move it. Get a mime. Whoa! Just had another thought. What if a mime can see Io Sono? White face makeup around eyes staring at nothing. White face makeup around eyes staring at White on White.  And, while I’m thinking about it, why not police mimes arresting nonexistent criminals and placing them in nonexistent jails? Can’t you envision the mime closing the cell door and locking it with a pretend key?”
 
“Funny, but you’re still a Philistine when it comes to art.”
 
“What am I when it comes to a rationally organized society that relies on police and prison systems to protect the general population from the actions of those with criminal intentions? I have an idea. We should incorporate Critical Stupidity Theory in our public education systems and TV pundit shows, but no, that would require teacher unions, school boards, politicians, and networks to add another level of wokeness. That would require people to see that the emperors really aren’t wearing anything, that White on White is silly, and that Io Sono doesn’t exist.”
 
Notes: 
 
*MoMA. Online at https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385   Accessed June 5, 2021. 
 
**Davoe, Taylor. 3 June 2021. An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing. artnet news. Online at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-off-invisible-sculpture-18300-literally-made-nothing-1976181   Accessed June 6, 2021. 

A Good Day, a Bad Day. Let’s Ask Winnie. 
 
“Have a good day” is a frequently uttered American wish with similar expressions in at least 100 languages. You might have wished for “a good day” numerous times for others and even for yourself. I hope you haven’t wished its opposite on others—or on yourself. But there might have been those angry moments…
 
So, with worldwide use, the expression “Have a good day” deserves a little socio-psycho-philosophical inspection. Is there something in the nature of humans that drives them to say the expression in almost every culture? Is there such an entity as “a good day.” 
 
Let’s start with the concept of its antithesis, that is, the notion of “a bad day.” Certainly, you have heard—if not said—“I’m having a bad day.” That anyone thinks a day can be bad can imply a philosophy and psychology of fate. “Bad days” appear to occur to others or to oneself. They arrive unannounced, thrown upon the hapless by some force of Nature or Deity. For the ancient Greeks that force lay in the actions of the Three Fates. Whatever the modern counterpart of the Fates might be, it lies in the minds of those who believe there are controls on life external to the actions of the individual. One might begin a day with good intentions, high energy, purpose, and the wherewithal to carry out that purpose, but Fate, Nature, the gods, or God intervenes, throws the proverbial monkey wrench into the machinery of life, and imposes a “bad day” on what began with hope and promise. Yes, for those who think blind Fate plays a role, “bad days” seem to occur regardless of human energy or free will. It is naïve to think that anyone can live without encountering at least occasionally the “bad day” just as one can’t avoid bugs hitting the windshield in summer as car and bug attempt to occupy the same spot at the same time, an impossibility in the universe of Pauli’s Exclusion Principle. Yes, bad days are bugs crossing the highways of life, intersecting an individual’s worldline. Apparently, the only way to keep one’s windshield clean is by keeping the car in the garage—or in not having a car at all. But that’s hardly a realistic choice. Why then, have a car? Anyway, everyone knows that the garage itself might lie in the path of a flood, a tornado or hurricane, earthquake tremors, or even a meteorite. In 1938 the Benld Meteorite crashed through Ben McCain’s garage, through the roof of the car, and the passenger seat. “Bad day in Benld?” “Bad day in the McCain house?” “Bad day for the McCains?” Or what of the Chevy Malibu owned by Michelle Knapp? The Peerskill Meteorite that struck her car on October 9, 1992, crushed the back of the vehicle. “Bad day for Michelle?” 
 
Or “good day for Michelle?” A meteorite enthusiast bought her car for $10,000. It had a value of $300 before the impact. And then she sold the meteorite for $69,000 to a group of meteorite collectors. Is it possible for a day to be both “good” and “bad”? Keep that question in mind.
 
There’s also the matter of defining “bad day” and “good day.” They appear to be relative terms, don’t they? And they also appear to be mutually exclusive until one takes Michelle Knapp’s experience into account. In retrospect, Michelle’s October 9, 1992, experience indicates that both kinds of days can coexist as closely as bosons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate, possibly in defiance of Pauli’s Exclusion Principle.  
 
Does a bad day imply some immorality or amorality? It can, but then doesn’t the psychological reality lie not in the passage of time—i.e., the day itself—but rather in the evil or apathy of an individual or group? Is “Bad Day” just a synonym for encounters with “Bad People” or “Indifferent People”? 
 
Days are indifferent entities without purpose, call them motiveless unaware passages of events dilated by human concerns. People, by contrast, determine the nature of each day on the bases of cultural values and personal well being. Bad days are not entities independent of human consciousness but are the products of individual decisions and the outcome of willful or careless behavior. Are good days similar? People can be good, and their actions can precipitate a rain of at least temporary good fortune and well being on themselves and others. Should we replace “Have a good day” with “I hope you encounter good people today”?
 
Are both good and bad days merely the product of attitude, the half empty, half full glass perspectives we associate with pessimists and optimists? If both kinds of days are the products of perception, then in the midst of what seems to be bad for one person another person sees some good. Take Winnie the Pooh as an example.
 
In Pooh’s Best Day: A Book about Weather, the narrator asks Pooh about the kind of day that he likes. The toddler’s cardboard-stock booklet of ten baby-proof colorful pages capable of withstanding chewing by a mouth full of baby teeth, progresses through different kinds of weather, showing Pooh and gang enjoying activities associated with snow, rain, and sunshine. The last two pages show Pooh having a picnic with the lines, “Pooh’s best day may be hot or cold, with rain, wind, or even snow/Because the very best day for Pooh is a day with friends, and honey, too!” * That message for toddlers tells them that as long as they are surrounded by those they love and that love them in return, any day, any weather, any meteorite impact that hits the car is just one incident among many incident that occur in every day. 
 
Of course, it would be naïve to think that the appellation “bad day” isn’t sometimes appropriate. The people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, London, Dresden, Stalingrad, and many other cities certainly experienced undeniable “badness” during World War II, a badness foisted on them by outside forces. The people who lost loved ones during the 2020 pandemic also experienced “bad days,” the memory of which infuses ensuing days with “badness.” Even in the twenty-first century we rue those 2,194 days of World War II. Yet, when we look back, say through a 1940s newspaper’s articles, we find that while more than 50 million people were losing their lives during those days of terror, other people were going to movies, to dances, and to parties; babies were born, and toddlers heard Winnie the Pooh stories.  
 
Are we foolish in reading a book to toddlers that suggests one take an optimistic view of life regardless of the nature of days? Is that an acceptable and healthful child, or even human, psychology? Are we giving them false hopes that we can, like Pooh and Friends, weather any storm? Are we like Dr. Pangloss in Candide, arguing that this is the “best of all possible worlds” regardless of events like earthquakes and wars that disrupt and take lives? 
 
Should we, instead, read toddlers A. E. Housman’s poem “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” which contains the lines:
 
            “Therefore, since the world has still
            Much good, but much less good than ill,
            And while the sun and moon endure
            Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
            I’d face it as a wise man would,
            And train for ill and not for good.” **
 
The pressure falls on every generation as it welcomes the next generation. What do we teach those who know nothing of bad days about bad days? What do we offer them by telling them about good days? The lesson in Pooh’s Best Day seems to be that phenomena that originate outside the individual should have little or no effect on the social-psychological-philosophical perspective of the individual. Each of us has days with dual natures. It’s up to us to dissociate who we are from what happens to us. 
 
Maybe there is an easy takeaway from this. Even on days when you focus on failure, there are successes. Even on “bad days” good things happen, or should we say, good things are made to happen through human control.
 
Notes: 
*Mexico. Groiler [Press]. Disney Enterprises, Inc. 10 pages. No copyright date shown. The first publication date of a Winnie the Pooh book by Milne and Shepard was 1926. 
 
**Opening of third stanza.

Turbidity currents are underwater flows of sediments (muds, silts, sands) that begin as a slope fails. You’ve seen an analog in the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, when the side of the mountain failed and the turbulent pyroclastic flow cascaded down the volcano’s flank. Eventually, the turbulence ceases under gravity’s pull and friction with the surface over which the flow runs. The sediments (or ash in the case of the volcano) settle in a fan-shaped deposit with the larger particles (boulders) closer to the base of the slope and the progressively smaller particles (clasts) farther away where they make the edge of the “fan.” If you’ve flown over Nevada, you have seen from the air similar fan-shaped deposit called alluvial fans—though they originate from erosion mostly, rather than from catastrophic slope failure.
 
Turbidity currents have triggers. One is the movement of denser water into less dense water, a process Forel observed in the nineteenth century as Rhone water entered Lake Geneva. In 1929 the Grand Banks Earthquake triggered a turbidity flow that broke transatlantic undersea cables in sequence, those breaks giving researchers an idea of the flows speed and extent (60 mph and 400 mi). Slope failure caused by an overloading of sediments on an inclined surface is yet another kind of trigger. And turbidity currents have occurred almost everywhere on the planet as tectonic plate movements have created a bathymetry (undersea topography) for them. A half billion years ago a series of turbidity flows in what is now C anada’s Yoho National Park in  British Columbia. The turbidites of those flows buried animals of the Cambrian Period’s “explosion” of life-forms. Their forms and lifestyles preserved by rapid burials, the Burgess Shale fossils give us a look at what life looked like before turbidity flows overwhelmed and destroyed it.
 
And so, as I always do, I look for a human analog. 
 
Because the future is hidden until it becomes the present, we only rarely know what today’s actions will engender, much like that proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon Basin causing a tornado on the Great Plains. We can through the efforts of historians sifting through the debris of the human past discover part of a way of life that some turbulent events destroyed, the burial sediments serving as the base for an ensuing but different mix of life. We don’t have prognosticators or soothsayers upon whom we can rely for a look into what is to come. 
 
Take a seemingly innocent butterfly wing flap called E=mc^2 that triggered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; those blasts changed the relationships among adversarial nations and changed a previous non-nuclear way of life with a threat of nuclear annihilation anywhere and anytime. You don’t live the same way as people did prior to those atomic attacks that wiped out general security just as the turbidity flows wiped out life now found fossilized in the Burgess Shale. We live on the turbidites of those nuclear bombs, with some, like the residents of those Japanese cities, closer to the point where a previous way of life collapsed, the effects of them larger and more proximal, like the boulders in turbidite deposits, whereas the rest of the world lies on the edge of the fan, aware, but not intensely so because of their distal location, that in a moment a cascade of debris can destroy everything in its path. 
 
In a human analog, there’s another kind of turbulent flow, one that buries ways of thinking under a cascade of popular movements or insidious propaganda. 
 
Should I be specific? I know you want me to be so, however, I prefer to ask you to look around. Life and ways of life are always on a slope with a potential for failure. Turbulence and turbidity flows interrupt the calm, with the triggers the slides unaware of inescapable consequences. The animals in the Burgess Shale—a turbidity mud deposit once underwater but now raised tectonically to the Canadian Rockies—could not have known that the Earth today is different from the Earth they knew.  
 
Okay, since you asked, let me offer a few generalities: Media, political parties, groups, bureaucracies, religious leaders, and even individuals with an agenda initiate the self-propagating slides that like avalanches of snow are unstoppable and that result in burial of all in their paths. And when the accumulations of Big Government sit at the tops of slopes, the inevitable slide awaits the trigger that usually comes when political parties acquire unchallenged dominance. Just note that once a slide begins, nothing save friction and gravity can stop it. Think cascades of governmental regulations under which so much of free society lies buried and on which current society resides. Think of the world prior to Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, all of which covered vast swaths as they flowed over the human landscape. Think also, that like the turbidites that lie at the bases of continental slopes, those religions were not the products of single events, but rather of multiple events of varying intensities and masses. And like the turbidity flow of the Grand Banks earthquake, all the aforementioned flows cut the communication cables that had been laid down by a previous generation. 
 
Not much to advise here. Simply this. Ask yourself where you are relative to a slope. Are you part of an accumulating pile of sediments at the top of a slope that will yield to a trgger event? Are you lying at the base of the slope looking at a mass with a potential to bury you as the slope fails? Or are you in the midst of a turbulent flow that is distributing downslope particles of varying sizes, the larger ones settling out first and the smaller ones settling out far from the site of disturbance? Finally, ask whether or not in this last case that the turbulent flow in which you find yourself is, in fact, a single event or instead a merging of multiple flows caused by several trigger events. 

Note: Image from Conte, Thompson, Moses. Earth Science: An Integrated Perspective. William C. Brown Publishers. 1997, p. 358. The turbidity deposit is shown in yellow as a "sedimentary fan deposit."