The recent finding that the genetics of Canadian grizzlies parallels the human language families of coastal British Columbia is a remarkable demonstration of the Power of Place. *


Here it is, August 18, 2021. Summer in western Pennsylvania. Thought I’d do some outside work—the woods that surround me encroach if I don’t exert some defensive control on undergrowth. But I’m currently in Fred’s path; flash flood warnings accompany the rainy forecast. Think I’ll stay inside rather than get drenched by heavy rains. I left Florida three days before the tropical storm hit, but I knew that my home would likely lie in its northeastward path, as the Westerlies and the Coriolis bent it into a curve over the Ohio Valley. Yep. Here it is. A friend driving on I-70 just called from the car to say she couldn’t see (an obvious overstatement) as she drove among trucks and other cars at 35 mph.


Where I live—where you live—presents us with weather patterns we grow to know. Sure, there are anomalies. Sometimes the jet stream dips south of you; sometimes, north. Depends on your location. But even the anomalous weather patterns become rather familiar phenomena. We become acclimated. We might complain during the extreme events, those exceptionally hot or cold days, but we usually continue to live where we live.


Why?


Place has shaped us.


How much? I invite anyone to take a drive from the coast of North Carolina to the state’s mountains. Notice the cultural differences, the dialect differences, the architectural differences from sea to mountain. Drive from Coastal Plain, to Upper Coastal Plain, to Piedmont, to Blue Ridge and note how people live in each of those physiographic provinces.


And now we see that grizzlies in three regions have genetic identities indigenous to the region in which they live. And their ranges coincide with language families. The resources of the regions include salmon, food for both humans and bears. With adequate local resources, there was little reason for either bears or humans to be nomads. That stay-at-home lifestyle unified language and bear genetics.


How has your place shaped you? How has it marked you with identifiable characteristics—physical, cultural, linguistic?   




*Fritts, Rachel. 13 Aug 2021. ‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families. Science. Online at doi:10.1126/science.abl9306.   Accessed August 18, 2021.

In Act I, Scene 1 of Coriolanus, Meninius Agrippa tells a rioting mob of hungry Plebeians that the Patricians are like the belly. The food controlled by the aristocracy is best distributed by that class for the good of the people, just as the stomach gathers in the food from which it sends nutrients through the body. Menenius has the belly say to the body,


    'True is it, my incorporate friends…
That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live: and though that all at once
You, my good friends’


The passage is and is not an allegory, depending on one’s definition of allegory. Its subject has been a matter of debate both in Roman times and in ours. Should the Plebeians depend on the people in power, the Patricians, to control the distribution of food—or anything? What of information, also.

I suppose the social and pundit-driven media are also “bellies,” distributing information to the masses—for their own good. And recently, we see that with regard to information, there are those in the military and in other government agencies that control the information for which we hunger. So, as in the case of the Vietnam War, now we see that the military chooses to send faulty information to the “seat o’ the brain,” specifically, to your Plebeian brain and mine. An upset stomach reveals that the Afghan food we’ve been served isn’t as healthful as we were told. We know because we see it in the regurgitations of a collapsed government. And another tummy ache reveals that we can’t fully trust the food provided by the CDC, health “officials,” and reigning politicians, those Patricians who pick the menu and the quantity we are allowed to eat and digest. In fact, the belly of nanny government does the digesting for us, sending whatever nutrients it deems necessary into our veins.

Now, we have governors and mayors--our Patricians-- dictating COVID restrictions, including the wearing of obligatory masks that might or might not have any real effect save making people breathe in bacteria accumulating on the inside of the mask. We’re all on a restricted diet, the belly choosing the food according to its ideological appetite.

I find restraint difficult in the context of current humanitarian crises linked to purposeful actions by American leaders. I have to comment.


In the second half of the nineteenth century, Prussia (Germany) passed a series of laws designed to limit the influence of religion, specifically Catholicism. Bismarck’s government engaged people in a culture war that resulted in the expulsion of Jesuits and sundry religious organizations, including groups of nuns. Forced out of the country by an intolerant government, five Franciscan nuns boarded the SS Deutschland in 1875 and perished when the ship wrecked.


To paraphrase Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote about that shipwreck in “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” I’ll say that on August 16, 2021, as it did on that December day in 1875, hope has grown gray hairs. In Afghanistan, a panicked crowd attempted to board an Air Force plane in an attempt to escape the sinking ship of the Afghani state in a different version of the Bismarck government’s anti-religious laws. This time it was a group of extreme fundamentalists that, in imposing a theocracy, forced the exile. This time the departing ship was not an ocean-going vessel, but an US Air Force troop transport plane. The world watched as Afghanis tried to board the enormous plane as it taxied on the tarmac, some clinging to its belly until they fell to their deaths as the massive plane climbed. They risked and lost their lives in anticipation of implacable dire consequences of remaining in Afghanistan with no American protection.


Does it bother you that the people “in charge” often acquire a sense of entitlement born from a retinue of “yes-men” and ideologues? Does it bother you that those in charge sometimes think they can impose a wishful reality on actual reality? Are Americans being led by a generation of gamers whose developmental reality was Tron in an affluent nanny society? Has a culture in which even  many of the poor have more luxuries or conveniences than the rich had a century ago shaped a generation of dreamers out of touch with the harsh realities of a world outside an Xbox or PlayStation console? Take the current Administration’s comments for what they imply about its level of wisdom. Essentially, spokespersons for the Administration said they didn’t expect the fall would happen as fast as it did. What? “As fast as” implies that the Administration knew the fall was inevitable. If the Administration knew the Afghan government was likely to fall, why did it not evacuate those Afghan allies and NGOs from the country to avoid a Vietnam-style panic.


The disaster in Afghanistan comes upon us in the context of social engineering, a movement that dominated the airwaves for the last two or three years. And that disaster piggybacks the one on the American southern border, where over 1.2 million people, including unaccompanied minors and people sick with COVID, have crossed into the country since January 20, 2021.


The Kulturkampf of the current milieu is one between the forces of common sense and those of failed ideologies like socialism. The current American administration decided that it is important to fight a culture war against those who disagree with its “new morality” concerning social issues, such as the use of public restrooms, transgender women on women’s sports teams, use of gender-appropriate pronouns, and unrestricted abortions paid for by tax dollars. The Administration’s perceived enemies are those who would protect the country’s borders against the intrusions of drug and human traffickers. Under its supposed empathy for humanity, the current Administration has caused humanitarian crises at home and abroad. And, as in all culture wars, this Administration has the support of compliant and willing propagandists: In Bismarck’s day, the newspapers; today, the social, network, and cable media.


There will always be culture wars. Some of those wars, like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, result in persecution, reductions in human freedom, humanitarian crises, and even deaths. Are we now witnessing the modern analog of the wreck of the SS. Deutschland?


What will be the consequences of the current Kulturkampf at home and abroad? More innocents forced to flee and perish on ships doomed to wreck?

Phil: “Have you noticed how a chief concern is naming? In fact, it appears to have been one of our earliest concerns if not the earliest.”

Bill: “So?”

Phil: “Look, here’s what I find in Genesis. It indicates that the authors of the text thought naming was important”:

    ‘And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And Adam named one of the beasts “Virus +,” but that was only after much debate.’

Bill: “You made that last line up. It isn’t in Genesis. I can explain the reason that Genesis has that passage on naming. Thousands of years ago people looked for explanations for why things were the way they were just as we do today. They didn’t have linguists, philologists, and etymologists researching documents. Heck, they didn’t have many documents, maybe some scrolls. I don’t blame them for trying to figure out why humans had language or how it originated. Language is ‘organic’; or, at least, it was organic. Now, just like your fictional last line, we have added words by conscious invention. Lots of words are the product of debate as much as they are of organic development. Take Tyrannosaurus rex as an example. Big meat eater, king of the dinosaurs, the ‘terrible lizards.’ Paleontologists are great at naming; so are botanists. They love to use Latin and Greek words.”

Phil: “Facetiousness aside, I’m guessing that Adam had to debate Eve on what to call anything. Facetiousness included, I have to note what Mark Twain had Adam say about naming things in his The Diaries of Adam & Eve:

    ‘Been examining the great waterfall. It is the finest thing on the estate, I think. The new creature calls it Niagara Falls-why, I am sure I do not know. Says it LOOKS like Niagara Falls. That is not a reason, it is mere waywardness and imbecility. I get no chance to name anything myself. The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest. And always that same pretext is offered -- it LOOKS like the thing. There is a dodo, for instance. Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it "looks like a dodo." It will have to keep that name, no doubt. It wearies me to fret about it, and it does no good, anyway. Dodo! It looks no more like a dodo than I do.’

Bill: “No doubt you have some point to make. So, what is it?”

Phil: “In June, 2021, Maharashtra State officials announced a new COVID variant, at the time of this writing named Delta Plus. So, from “Wuhan virus” to “China virus,” to Greek-letter virus, to proposed Zodiac or constellation-virus, the COVID names have mutated only slightly slower than the virus itself. Remember the fuss about the name in the spring and summer of 2020? Remember how people who referred to the virus by its point of origin were vilified? Remember the focus on the name?

“Apparently, we’re not good at killing viruses that can harm us, but we can kill their names. We seem to have done the actual job killing only Small Pox and maybe another virus, that cow virus I can’t think of, Rinder or Reindeer or something. By the way, we really don’t know if that job is complete because governments keep Small Pox on hand, maybe for remaking and redistributing vaccines, maybe for biological warfare.

“Now we have another mutating virus, one that has put the world in a panic. And it’s doing what viruses do—indeed, what all bio-entities do —they mutate. That is a bit scary, but maybe the current threat of COVID viruses will do what some past viruses have done—mutate themselves into relative harmlessness or extinction. Of course, Nature isn't the only controlling entity as it was in all past pandemics. There are those lab people who think it’s a good idea to alter viruses not for their extinction, but rather for their military use. So, we’re probably stuck with variations of coronaviruses for an indefinite period. And some will be very deadly, and some won't be very deadly. And with every reincarnation of the virus, we will feel obligated to give it a name, an ‘appropriate name,’ at first some Linnaean-type designation, but now in our current culture, a name ‘appropriately inoffensive to one group or another’ according to the dictates of those who find offense in any term they choose to find offensive.

“What I find interesting is that at the outset of this current pandemic, some Americans got themselves into emotional extra-small Spandex over calling the virus "Chinese" or "Wuhan" because the names were perceived to be offensive and "racist."  We’re all about naming, all about words. Remember the sing-song sentence of childhood “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Seems we were wrong.

“Apparently, words do hurt some of us in this touchy-feely age. So, here’s a story my dad told me. One of his relatives, a cousin, I believe, moved to the Midwest in the 1940s and into a town with no one of Italian descent. At a gathering of some kind (the story was not filled with details), one of the Midwesterners said to the relative, ‘You know what a Wop is?’ The relative, unfazed by the attempt to provoke him, said, ‘Yes, it’s the sound you make when you slap two cow patties together.’ Having taken the comment lightly, he turned a potentially ugly encounter into a disarming one. He soon gained acceptance in the community and never received another slur. 

“The problem we seem to have on steroids is that so many Americans have lost a sense of self-deprecating humor and a sense of reality. Perspective is shaped by the decorum of the ‘ruling class.’ And that perspective is centered on words those in charge find acceptable or offensive. I'm not advocating offending, but I am advocating a change in perspective based on the following:

“Consider that today as I write this, the Afghan government just collapsed. Women and girls are under the threat of enslavement, and men are under the threat of murder. Thousands are trying to flee the country, to board departing cargo planes and helicopters before the murdering and enslaving begins. Today, as I write this, Haiti is recovering from its second devastating earthquake in eleven years—with a tropical storm threatening the survivors. I wonder whether or not the Afghanis or the Haitians are concerned about names at this time the way we were as a deadly virus wreaked havoc on the American economy and on American lives.

“Sorry to speak sarcastically, Bill, but I suppose if the Afghanis and Haitians were touchy-feely Americans, that is all they would be thinking about.”

Monitors can breathe while they run. Other lizards can’t. You can see the benefits of the former and the disadvantages of the latter, can’t you? The lizards run and stop, run and stop, run and stop. Fast, true, but only for a short distance. The monitors keep running. They’re the wolves and dogs of the reptilian world.


Political parties and their agenda are lizards. When they get into power, they run full speed, but they do so anaerobically. They run fast and abruptly stop when the other party comes to power. Then the process repeats with the new lizards, that is, the new people in power.


Problems, both political and social, are monitors. They run aerobically. The result is that regardless of a party’s desire to solve problems, it runs out of air, giving the problems a chance to overrun an agenda. And even when one party or one person takes total control, as for example, a Caligula, aTamerlane, a Stalin, Hitler—many others—the finite nature of life robs them of oxygen. The Roman Empire lasted a millennium; the Eastern Roman Empire lasted a millennium; the Holy Roman Empire lasted a millennium. Only the Shang and Qing dynasties among many other Chinese dynasties persisted into their fourth century.


All those in power, even the most confident, are anaerobic. They run out of air, if not by political process, then by death. And the problems they perceive they can solve? Well, they’re the monitors.


All analogies limp, as they say, and this one is no exception. While political parties are in power trying to solve perceived and actual problems, they give birth to monitors. Yes, strange evolution: One species giving birth to another. Lizards beget monitors—too many monitors to monitor. Lizards engender a new generation of aerobic problems that outrun and outlast them.


So-called solutions engender new problems. Remember Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society? The effort reduced the percentage of people living in poverty, but it created programs requiring mandatory government spending that now exceeds 60% of the federal budget. The debt born in previous “dynasties” now exceeds $80,000 per person. That per person includes you. Now you and any newly installed political power are the lizards being chased by the indefatigable monitors created in previous administrations.


Every solution appears to create another monitor, and every monitor seems to run with ample air. It appears to be our nature to demonstrate in politics our ancient evolutionary heritage, our reptilian limitations of running fast for a short distance.

Prologue
​
Have you traveled much lately? By “lately,” I mean in the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. I confess to not having ventured far between the springs of COVID, what with all the restrictions and requirements that began in March, 2020. But fully “Pfizered” and packin’ a mask in case I encounter a mandate of some sort, I now venture about almost as freely as I did in those blissful pre-pandemic years.

The pandemic shut down our primitive nomadic heritage. We were from the start wanderers driven by wondering: What else is there? Where else is there? Traveling, we left Africa and spread around the planet and now spread, also, off the planet, soon, maybe even to wander around Mars and definitely to re-wander the moon.

Oh! Sure, we could do our wandering via technology. We’re on Mars that way as I write, roving about and even helicoptering over the Red Planet. And we’ve even traveled to the ocean depths in semi-autonomous robots, our wired avatars. But as various writers, beginning with Thomas à Kempis in the nineteenth century and in sundry renditions by others in the twentieth century, have said, “Wherever you go, there you are” From place to place, we find ourselves: “find” in the sense of self-discovery and in the sense of “a continuum of Self.” We can change the place and still find the one constant: Who we are.

Plus, there’s nothing like being there. Nothing like being everywhere or having been almost everywhere. To label someone “well-traveled” is to acknowledge his or her “cosmopolitanism.” And now with excess wealth and multiple conveyances, we have transformed travel from need into a manifestation of will. We don’t need to move about in search of food and shelter as our ancient nomadic ancestors did. We travel for the sake of travel.

Travelogue

I-77 is a north-south river of cement that in West Virginia overlies the Appalachian Plateau before cutting through the Valley and Ridge’s folded mountains and running over the ancient and metamorphosed rocks of the Blue Ridge in Virginia. On the southeastern side of that billion-year-old mountain ridge in Virginia, the highway cascades toward North Carolina and affords a scenic eastward view of the adjacent Piedmont and distant Upper Coastal Plain.

Seemingly fixed immovably in place, the rocks that make up the Blue Ridge were themselves once ancient travelers whose origins lay in a long-gone Iapetus Ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. As they moved on the conveyor belt of a spreading seafloor, they eventually collided with juvenile North America, today’s East Coast a South Coast at the time, the baby continent lying on its side. Both juvenile North America and the Blue Ridge met as travelers, once strangers to each other, but since their meeting, long-term traveling companions now riding on the North American Plate.

The Blue Ridge is an allochthonous terrane, or allochthon, a section of Earth’s crust displaced and subsequently emplaced by the planet’s active tectonics. Crustal collisions during emplacement generated both heat and pressure sufficient to change its rocks, just as our meeting strangers changes us, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes radically, but always crystallizing something from the encounter. Thus, in melding with the young continent, those much older original rocks of the Blue Ridge underwent metamorphosis. That cascade of I-77 falls over such metamorphic rocks, crystalline enough to offer morning travelers a second visual treat opposite the eastward view. The morning sun reflects off dewey crystals in the road cut on the northwestern side of the highway—that is, when upslope fogs do not shroud the mountain.

As a traveler, I have both driven along and crossed the ridge many times, often stopping to sample rocks and local culture. On my latest “pandemic” trip on I-77, my spouse and l did what many, if not all travelers do: stopped at rest stops along the way to stretch legs and use public facilities. Resuming our journey after one stop, she mentioned a conversation she heard in the women’s restroom between a mother and her young daughter.

Dialogue

Mother: “When we get home, we’re going to schedule that hair appointment. What style do you want to get?” Was the comment made so that others could hear the level of sophistication the child had attained?

The little girl, maybe five, responded by holding some of her hair at her shoulder, saying: “I want this,” presumably meaning the length she wanted. Precocious child, indeed, already aware of fashion and already taking charge of her life. Except…

And then my wife said: “The little girl was in bare feet. Bare feet in a public restroom at any time isn’t a good idea, but in a time of pandemic, in a time when most people in the American South are running a bit scared of the Delta variant the government says is spreading rapidly, that’s about as far from prudent parenting as one can get. Why wasn’t that part of the girl’s intellectual development? If we teach invisible tooth fairies and haute couture, can’t we also teach invisible bacteria and viruses?”

Monologue

I’m wondering whether our concerns were unnecessary. Maybe she and I were over-reacting. It is possible that the little girl suffered no ill effects from walking barefoot in a women’s restroom. Of course, it is also possible that she carried millions of bacteria back to her car, where she might have touched her feet as she rode and then stuck her fingers in her mouth or nostril or handled some food. Yuck. My thinking, however, is probably influenced by a year-plus barrage of messages about sanitizing everything and standing six feet from other feet—especially bare feet that have traipsed across a public bathroom floor. It is also possible that any bacteria the girl might have put on her body made her sick temporarily and allowed her to build up immunity that is lost in mandated isolation. If so, then maybe a walk barefoot through a public bathroom might be good for everyone. But I don’t think so.


Nevertheless, when I think of what I have seen in other countries, I recognize that although I would almost certainly succumb to Montezuma’s revenge or to any other water-borne microorganism currently alien to my body, I would likely develop some level of immunity through exposure as long as that organism wasn’t inescapably lethal. Truly deadly organisms and viruses do, in fact, pose a threat if they latch onto a little girl whose body might not have the time to develop defenses.

When we travel, even on our home planet, we risk running into organisms both large and small that can jeopardize our safety. No doubt in peopling the planet, millions of our forebears—or “fore-bares”— died by “walking barefoot,” that is, unprotected in strange places where we were ill-prepared alien intruders, succumbing like H. G. Wells’s Martians to invisible native organisms.
Gosh, living and traveling is a risky business, really risky. Wear your shoes, and watch where you step.

Analog(ue)

At times, all of us step in “it.” As evidenced by our having this little chat, however, you and I have survived by avoiding or protecting ourselves from ostensible and invisible threats. Our survival is remarkable in the context of the latter. All those unseen critters make living very much like walking barefoot through an unlighted public restroom.

One wonders, then, why anyone would purposefully make a microorganism, even an “inert” one, that might wander the planet on the bodies of human travelers to infect humans everywhere. What possible gain is there in biological warfare, since the inventors are themselves human and thus susceptible to an infection of their own making? Can you imagine being one of those early humans set to leave Africa saying, “You know, we don’t really know what’s out there, maybe unknown beings that can harm us. ‘There be dragons,’ I’ve heard. But, hey, here’s an idea, in case the world isn’t dangerous enough, why don’t we make a new dangerous critter to increase our risk? I think that’s a good idea. What do you think? It isn’t inevitable that ‘what goes around, comes around.’ We can avoid our self-made risks.”

Didn’t some of the World War I German soldiers say that about poison gas right before the wind shifted? Did the people of Wuhan utter the same confidence about their lab and their “gain-of-function” research on bat viruses?
Even traveling rocks are subject to change and destruction. The Blue Ridge survived, however, by hardship, by being tested during ineluctable convergence as it was welded onto nascent North America in a process that involved earthquakes, faulting, crushing, warping, overthrusting, and superheating that baked them into crystalline stone; other terranes weren’t so lucky, undergoing not just deformation, but destructive subduction. They, like our ancient traveling ancestors and our 2020-2021 traveling companions, now lie buried.

Being a stranger in a strange land comes with no guarantees. Every journey comes with risks.

Epilogue

Who am I to judge a mother who lets her five-year-old walk barefoot in a restroom? But the juxtaposition of a traveling young girl walking barefoot in a crowded public restroom along I-77 and the enduring ancient traveling rocks of the Blue Ridge hardened against the onslaught of destructive natural forces over a billion years seems to beg a comment of some sort, if not in judgment, then in philosophical musing.

There’s as much risk in staying put as there is in wandering because we share a planet with accidental and purposeful travelers inimical to our health whose paths cross ours. That we choose to add moveable new risks like COVID to those already in the inventory of dangers indicates that regardless of our claims on wisdom, we’re not really wise. Risk comes our way whether we’re stationary or mobile.

​And so, again I mention that this is not our practice life. Now, if I could just convince that mother that her little girl requires guidance and protection, knowledge and understanding, and prudence, her daughter might live a long life regardless of the strangers and strange organisms she might encounter. Or if I could just convince those who devote their lives to inventing new dangers for the sake of some government’s military leaders that all future little girls depend on those in charge to oversee their safety by protecting them from unnecessary risks, then only the naturally occurring risks would be the focus of our concerns. Like the collision between the ancient Blue Ridge and developing North America, natural risks are ineluctable. And like those melded crustal units, people have and will continue survive collisions with strangers, albeit in altered form. As a species, we have already crystallized our defenses against many threats, but crystals take time to grow. The Blue Ridge’s rocks had tens of millions of years to crystallize through metamorphosis. How much time does a little girl have? How much time do you have?

Back to that climate debate, two people sit down to argue.
 
Alex: “You carnivores are ruining the planet. Do you realize how much methane a cow produces?”
 
Zander: “Don’t care.”
 
Alex: “But if we changed our diets to include less meat, we would help change climate and probably even reduce poverty and starvation.”
 
Zander: “How so?”
 
Alex: “Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research…”
 
Zander: “Climate impact research? Here we go. I’m going to preempt here. People who live in the American Southwest have a climate that is often hot and dry, especially on the leeside of the mountains. People who live along the Gulf Coast have a climate that is often warm and moist. People who live in the interior of continents in mid-latitudes have drier air than those living in the equatorial continental interiors. Who needs to study that? It is what it is. Climates affect life. They impact it. Non-human terrestrial life is where it is because of climate controls, climate impacts. Humans have chosen to go into places where climate imposes harshness. Do the Inuit have to live in the Far North? Do the Bushmen have to live in the Namib? Do Americans have to live in Tornado Alley, the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic Seaboard, all places where storms can do millions to billions of dollars in damage potentially every year? Give me a break, climate impact research.”
 
Alex: “Typical carnivore response. Typical reductionism. We’re talking about the impact of climate change.”
 
Zander: “Enlighten me.”
 
Alex: “As I was saying the Potsdam scientists and the German Development Institute scientists collaborated on a study to determine how the world can reach the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, agreed upon by signers of the Paris Agreement in 2015. One of their representatives, Isabelle Weindl, says that changing our dietary habits by consuming less animal protein would achieve the ‘Planetary Health’ diet. * She argues that food production would then require less land and produce fewer greenhouse gases.”
 
Zander: “Really? I suppose she has run the numbers. But let’s take this to the end. So, I guess that cows wandering over the landscape munching on grasses do take up lots of land. And they consume the plants so that we get the nutrition by eating the eaters, one step more removed from chewing on sunlight. But don’t we have to consume lots of veggies and grains to make up for the concentrated proteins in the animals? Wouldn’t that entail using up more arable land and by changing the native species, making the albedo different? And what about the nutrients the plants need to grow? Are we going to throw more phosphates onto the land so that they can wash into streams and lakes and oceans?" 
 
Alex: “You’re just seeing what you want to see so you can continue your meat-eating. And yet you know that eating too much red meat has bad consequences, heart attacks, cancer, and maybe even dementia. Maybe that’s why you can’t see my side of the argument. You’re already on the path to mental debilitation. Besides, you’re probably unaware that there’s such a thing as a ‘Planetary Health’ diet that allows, as Weindl says, ‘modest amounts of animal-source food.’ You just can’t have a diet heavy in meat or dairy. Weindl’s group wants everyone to couple carbon policies with sustainable diets that reduce energy demand.”
 
Zander: “Carbon policies? Let me guess. You want to tax my carbon footprint.”
 
Alex: “That’s part of the plan.”
 
Zander: “Okay. But who taxes the taxers?”
 
Alex: “What?”
 
Zander: “Every time I hear this carbon tax argument, I hear it from the rich and famous, the ones who can afford to fly around in private jets, drive expensive cars, have save-the-planet parties that put to shame anything the Great Gatsby could throw, and hypocritically eat whatever they want as long as it’s accompanied by some ‘sustainable organic food,’ prepared, by the way, under the supervision of a chef flown in for the occasion. Give me a break. As soon as you save-the-planet, preserve-the-climate people are out of sight, you go on doing what you preach the rest of us shouldn’t do.”
 
Alex: “That’s no argument against changing world habits. That’s just an indictment of hypocritical individuals.”
 
Zander: “You’re right. My argument isn’t germane to your point, but it isn’t far off the periphery of what you are saying. But my argument has its basis in human nature. Given the chance to have a fine wine and Wagyu beef or some tofu beef substitute, which do you think most people would choose? Which do the very rich choose? It’s the problem every society faces: Give someone authority, and you give someone a mentality of superiority, of being above the law. You see it in politicians all the time. You think that turning over your wealth via carbon taxes is going to engender that climate utopia you seek. In reality, you’re going to fund more corruption and make a segment of humanity richer with a more luxurious lifestyle that they will enjoy while you eat tofu and corn.
 
“And as for those farms that will replace grasslands used to feed the cows, will they have to be extended into the rainforests and the rest of the temperate forests? Who will control—since there’s little evidence that anyone has to this point controlled effectively—the slash-and-burn practice that changes the amount of carbon thrown into the atmosphere and that alters soils both in nutrients and albedo?”
 
Alex: “We’ll establish policies.”
 
Zander: “Who is the ‘we’ you seem to trust so unconditionally?”
 
Alex: “That’s why we need to follow the advice of people like those who did the recent study.”
 
Zander: “Wait a minute. Let me pull this up. Is this it?”
 
Alex: “Yes, ‘A sustainable development pathway for climate action within the UN 2030 Agenda.’ That’s the report.”
 
Zander: “Okay. Here’s what Elmar Kriegler, the co-author of the study says, ‘Our analysis presents a possible pathway towards a more sustainable future and shows that human well-being can be reconciled with planetary integrity. It is up to policymakers and society at large to turn this vision into tangible action.’ Pay attention, Alex, to that second sentence. Policymakers. Those are the very hypocritical I’m-better-than-you people we’ve had to contend with since people first entrusted others to govern them. Those are the same people who are known for the do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do governing that infuriates so many and makes individuals act like individuals with self-interest. You ascribe to them wisdom and integrity. Oh! Reminds me. What in the world is ‘climate integrity’? Is climate integrity the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warm Period? Is it the two-century long droughts that have hit the American Southwest during the past couple of millennia? And ‘tangible action? Does Kriegler mean ‘effective action’? 
 
“Just a side thought here, but do you trust the people who directed others during the 2020-21 pandemic to make wise decisions regarding your lifestyle? Let’s say they ban meat. Is that good? Aren’t we on the verge of a few controlling the masses? Isn’t this just going to result in more failed socialist policies? Look at this statement by a participant in the study: ‘Another intervention area includes global equity and poverty alleviation in the form of international climate finance and a pro-poor redistribution of carbon pricing revenues.’ ** Every time I read this stuff, I see the makings of wealth redistribution, and every time I see someone put it into action, I see the poor made poorer and the oligarchs made richer.”
 
Alex: “You just don’t have faith in humanity.”
 
Zander: “I can only say that my faith in humanity is under constant test. I’m going out for a burger. Care to join me? Look, as a concession, I’ll order a plant-based burger, though I don’t know what chemicals they add to make beans taste like meat.”
 
Notes:
 
*Soergel, Bjoern, et al. 2 August 2021. A sustainable development pathway for climate change action within the UN 2030 Agenda. Nature Climate Change 11, 656-664. (2021). Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01098-3    Accessed August 3, 2021.
 
**Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. 2 August 2021. New pathway to mitigate climate change and boost progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-08-pathway-mitigate-climate-boost-sustainable.html  Accessed August 3, 2021.

Education is a strange business. It’s been so since and maybe even before the Lyceum. It’s a very strange business today, especially in the realm of distance learning foisted upon schools by fear of a virus, that fear, by the way, embedded in the minds of “educators.” Most of the world’s children appear to have recently gone through a non-contact school year with the threat as of August, 2021, of their repeating the impersonal learning environment. It’s been a year that introduced every student to a new kind of math. 
 
Now, you might ask, “What choice do we have in closing schools?” In answering that, some suggest that no valid evidence exists that COVID variants negatively affect children the way the initial outbreak affected the elderly. As of this writing, CDC data indicate that 343,631 elderly over the age of 75 succumbed to the deadly pandemic, whereas 406 children up to age 18 succumbed. * The data also show that COVID appears to have killed 124,868 working-age adults (ages 19-64), a group that would encompass most, if not all, teachers’ ages. Obviously, the numbers favor caution and instill fear, as we have seen anecdotally by impassioned pleas for distance learning made by representatives of teachers’ unions.
 
Numbers are easy to manipulate, but those 406 pediatric deaths are hard to dismiss—if they are accurate. The numbers do not indicate those children who had co-morbidities. And the numbers do not put the deaths in the context of annual deaths by the flu. During the flu season in 2018-2019, for example, 179 children died from the flu according to the CDC. ** Here’s a CDC count for some twenty-first century years:
 
Number of Pediatric Flu Deaths in the U.S. from 2003 to 2016:
 
2003                152
2004                39
2005                61
2006                68
2007                88
2008                132
2009                282
2010                123
2011                37
2012                171
2013                111
2014                148
2015                85
2016                110
 
What should I say here? That a single death is tragic and that parents, relatives, and friends who lost those children suffered a great personal tragedy? Of course, they suffered. But we need to put COVID in the context of the flu to see whether or not educators are acting more in their own interest than in the interests of children and doing so with a new math. Among children ages 0-4, COVID has been blamed for 124 deaths. For school-age children (up to 18), the CDC says the disease has claimed 282 lives. 
 
Let’s assume that the data have not been fudged for political and economic purposes though there have been reports that hospitals might have in some instances reported any death in which the person had COVID as a COVID death. But that anecdotal information could be misinformation. Regardless, mistaken diagnoses are not beyond possibility, especially during the peak infections that overwhelmed hospital facilities and staff. But the focus here is on the educational system, supposedly run by the wisest of the wise, the highly educated, the people whom Aristotle would have been proud to teach.
 
At what number of deaths does one determine a school shut-down is necessary? Obviously, education officials didn’t believe that 282 pediatric flu deaths in 2009 warranted a shut-down. I’ll go redundant here and point out that COVID caused 282 pediatric deaths among school-age children, the same number of deaths caused by the flu in 2009. And if you look at the table above, you’ll note that other flu-fatality numbers over 100 did not cause educators to shut their schools for their concerns over children’s health. So, the question then arises about the purpose of all the shut-downs.
 
I suppose that the teachers had legitimate concerns about their own susceptibility to the virus. If so, then one has to ask a question begged by the flu data. If the data are correct and 124,868 working-age adults succumbed to COVID, what are we to do with the number of flu deaths estimated by the CDC for the pre-COVID years? For example, the CDC estimates that 51,000 flu-caused deaths occurred in 2014-2015 and 61,000 died in 2017-2018. And as for those flu-driven hospitalizations, 2017-2018 saw 810,000. *** Were these not numbers of concern?
 
Again, if any death is tragic, then 282 deaths of school-age children regardless of the name of the disease should be a significant cause of shut-down. And 61,000 adult deaths by flu should warrant a serious shut-down consideration. Is there a difference between “Miss So-n-So, the third-grade teacher, died of the flu today” and “Miss So-n-So, the third-grade teacher, died of COVID today”? Weren’t those flu deaths in 2017-2018 a matter of concern to the point of fear? Where were the education spokespeople? Where were the government officials? Where, oh where, were the media?
 
As I have said repeatedly, this is not a practice life. That fact should elicit in us an elimination of unnecessary risk on the negative side and an adoption of a goal-oriented life on the positive side. But this life occurs on a risky planet with organisms doing what they can to survive, organisms like bacteria and viruses. Life makes both conscious and unconscious efforts to continue as long as possible in a finite world even though the inevitability of its end comes for all the living. And in the world of conscious beings like us, balancing acceptable risks against goals is a task of reasoning in the absence of emotion. 
 
Education is a strange business indeed. Its underlying premise in the non-theocratic societies is the fulfillment of Homo sapiens sapiens self-designated description. Education purports to impart both knowledge that enhances wisdom, to exult the status of the individual and, thus, by extension, the populace. But so much of what educators do is merely arbitrary and emotional. So much is driven by ideology in the absence of fact or deductive reasoning. 
 
I guess I would simply ask educators to do the math—you know, the old fashioned math in which 282 equals 282.
 
Notes:
 
*CDC. Provisional COVID-19 Deaths: Focus on Ages 0-18 Years. Online at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-on-Ages-0-18-Yea/nr4s-juj3  Accessed August 2, 2021.
 
**Iannelli, Vincent. 5 February 2020. Annual Flu Deaths Among Adults and Children. Verywell online. Based on CDC.  https://www.verywellhealth.com/deaths-from-flu-2633829  Accessed August 2, 2021. 

At a party Art talks to Sam.
 
Art: “I almost clicked on a news outlet this morning.”
 
Sam: “So? I check the news daily. What’s the big deal.”

Art: “But is it news or just people talking about people talking about the news? What people responsible for reporting do is to…hmmn, how should I say it?—they look to irritate nerve endings, to rouse feelings, and to influence thinking.”
 
Sam: “Huh?”
 
Art: “Remember the old principles of journalism? The opening of a story should present the “who, what, when, where, and if possible, the why” of the incident. The ensuing part of the story is an elaboration of those details. We get some of that, true, but then we get the seemingly interminable comments that devolve into nothing about the original story. The devolution becomes a story about the story-tellers. Heck, I saw that one cable network even has a Sunday program devoted to how the news was handled by the media. The premise of that show is that the actual news is just a springboard that launches opinion into the pool of viewers and readers.”
 
Sam: “So, where should I go for news? I want to stay informed. I don’t want to be unaware. Ignorance might be bliss, but it is also dangerous. I’m not going to South Africa to rent a car where carjacking is common. I know that only because I watched the news.”
 
Art: “I have no advice. I can’t tell you where to click. I can only suggest that when you begin to read, you might consider clicking out if you don’t see those five Ws. Otherwise, you’ll get dragged into the quagmire of opinion, usually unsubstantiated opinion. And it’s not that this is a new problem. It was even one in the nineteenth century.”
 
Sam: “Go on.”
 
Art: “Ever hear the line ‘Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’?”
 
Sam: “Yeah, so?”

Art: “It was made by Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner, a nineteenth-century guy who actually, by the way, once collaborated with Twain to write The Gilded Age. Anyway, Warner, who made that remark about weather, wrote The American Newspaper, which I found online among the Gutenberg Project’s postings. * Warner wrote—here, let me get his exact words; hold on. Here they are: ‘Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.’ That was in the nineteenth century. 
 
“He also says something that applies to our stressful times in general and to online media and our addiction to our electronic gadgets that connect us to everyone everywhere instantaneously. Let me read a paragraph of his:
 
‘To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say, nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness.’
 
“Insightful, isn’t it? Almost Nostradamus-like though he could not have foreseen the Internet.”
 
Sam: “I’m beginning to see what you’re saying. Now I’m thinking that if a nineteenth-century guy can point out the psychological consequences of electrified news, we should be able to see similar consequences for our psyches because of our round-the-clock opinionated news coverage. I suppose you could also add that our twenty-first sensitiveness is nineteenth-century sensitiveness on steroids, all our nerve ends irritated far beyond what a primitive telegraph technology could inflame.”
 
Art: “You should read all of Warner’s little essay on the press. It’s free to read online at Project Gutenberg. When I read it, I asked myself an odd question.”
 
Sam: “What?”
 
Art: “How would Aristotle see the modern news media?”
 
Sam: “Yeah, that is odd. So, how would he?”
 
Art: “I don’t think he would favor it because of his philosophy of causes. He said we can understand something if we know why it is what it is and how it came to be what it is.” 
 
Sam: “Here we go, one of your deep dives into metaphysics.”
 
Art: “Not deep, but right on the surface of the Aristotle’s philosophical ocean. Anyway, Aristotle says there are four explanations for everything. He called the explanations ‘causes.’ The first is the stuff of the thing; he would have said the thing’s matter is like building materials. In the case of the news media, I think he would say the matter is composed of an incident as evident in the who, what, when, where, and why. Aristotle would have reporters use those parts to build the form. His second cause is that form, in the case of the news media might be the hard copy paper rendition of the five Ws, the TV news program, or the online news outlet’s website. His third cause was what he called the ‘efficient’ cause, but not in the sense of doing something well, but rather in the sense of the primary or immediate cause, say the editor, reporter or the anchor. The media has a plan to present the incident and presents it in the shape we see. That leads us to his fourth cause, which is the goal. And that’s where Aristotle would probably put down the paper and stop reading.”
 
Sam: “And why would he do that?”
 
Art: “Because he would see that the fourth cause in the media twists the first three causes to do the will of the media which is not to present the incident as a thing in itself but rather as an interpreted thing. They take the five Ws to build the form all right, but then in building the form they add their own purpose which is not a simple rendition of news, but an elaboration based on their interpretation. I’m fumbling here for an analogy, but if the news media were building a house, they would add much that has nothing to do with the structure and function of a house. At the very least their house would be the epitome of rococo architecture, you know, that late Baroque style that has so much ornamentation that it appears to be a style for the sake of the style, some elaborate ars gratia artis, with the original matter shaped and reshaped and overelaborated according to the ‘school’ of news, the news ‘artists’ and ‘architects’ who share a point of view and who have become the story instead of the actual story. Yeah, I think I’m onto something here. I think the modern presentation of the news is definitely a rebirth of the rococo.”
 
Sam: “Your mind never fails to wander around in the strangest ways. Talking to you is like reading a stream-of-consciousness novel by Joyce or listening to Don McClean’s “American Pie” and trying to figure out the meaning of his elliptic lyrics without some intensive background about him and Buddy Holly. But I think I get the point about the modern news.”
 
Art: “And…”
 
Sam: “Sorry, I have an appointment.”
 
*Warner, Charles Dudley. The American Newspaper. Online free at the Project Gutenberg EBook website at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3110/pg3110.html   I highly recommend this insightful little pamphlet. Warner addresses just about every concern that you might have about the way news is handled and about its effect on the American psyche. Already a nervous people fraught with concerns over how others view incidents and individuals, your contemporaries are daily subject to more emphasis on story tellers than on stories.