Regardless of all its dangers, Earth is a great place. I'm glad I chose this planet. 

As a kid, I was fascinated by the idea of space travel. Sure, the science fiction films I saw and comic books I read revealed a universe filled with monsters and just plain evil beings. Certainly, of all the places to visit, the planet Mongo wasn’t a great place to visit, what with Ming the Merciless in charge. In such a universe, one had to rely on the protective companionship of a Flash Gordon or the safety of rockets that seem to have sparklers for drive systems. *
 
I no longer want to travel through outer space. It isn’t safe. It’s foolishly risky, in my opinion. Yes, it’s nice to know what the surface of Mars looks like and is composed of. Those HD images taken by the rovers give me a good idea. Yes, I’m a bit curious whether or not Mars houses or once housed life to see whether the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite’s fossil is actually a fossil bacterium. And, yes, I am curious whether or not Titan, Europa, or some other distant Solar System body has “figured out” what early Earth seems to have done 3.5 or more billion years ago, that organic molecules can be encapsulated into a self-replicating organism. But, as I wrote above, I don’t want to be the explorer who finds extraterrestrial life. It’s just too, too dangerous.
 
According to a study by Willian A. da Silveira and others (2020), mitochondria become “dysfunctional” in microgravity and under exposure to radiation. ** Dysfunctional mitochondria! Sometimes I’m dragging with the mitochondria I have. I certainly wouldn’t want less effective cell energizers. Sure, I know that Christina Koch, Peggy Whitson, and Anne McClain all seem to be doing well after spending two thirds to almost a full year in space, but their long missions don’t really compare to traveling to, say, Mars. The trip to Mars takes roughly the same amount of time as those astronauts spent in total in space. Then there’s the return trip. Another two-thirds of a year under ideal conditions. What? Tell me that people are going all the way to Mars to not land and walk around for a bit? That’s more time exposed to lower gravity and excess radiation. No thanks, Elon.
 
I prefer the virtual space travel of science fiction. True, I have to suspend my disbelief when I see spacecraft whizzing around galaxies at the speed of light or faster and people communicating over vast distances as though the laws of physics don’t apply, as though messaging is as near-instantaneous as it is from cell phone to cell phone on Earth. Heck, even a message from Neil Armstrong took over a second to reach Earth, and the moon is a pebble’s throw from Earth by comparison with the more than 30 million miles to Mars. But communicating between two stars? And then there’s that twin paradox. One leaves on a light-speed flight to planet Mongo, some light years away, and then returns only slightly aged to find the other twin not only aged more, but actually died of old age. Ah! Fiction. In Star Wars, Star Trek, and every other space story, people get to travel great distances and then return to find the people left behind aged at the same rate as the travelers, travelers unaffected by cosmic rays.  
 
But, I suppose, Musk will have his Martian crew from many who will apply without realizing the danger such a trip will impose upon their mitochondria. And once there on that distant, barren planet, what will they discover? We already have ample evidence that Mars had abundant water. There are abandoned river channels, sedimentary layers, imbricate patterns in stones on the surface, and Curiosity’s discovery of a “megaflood.” Astronauts won’t find Mingo the Merciless, but maybe a bacterium that might pose a new threat, another pandemic if brought back to Earth, that is, if the astronauts survive the flight to Mars, the stay on Mars, and the return flight to Earth. And what will they take to Mars? Earth bacteria that might in a couple of billion years produce a terra-forming atmosphere on a planet without a protective magnetic field to ward off the Solar Wind while allowing in sterilizing UV light?  
 
This is a great planet. Aren’t you glad you chose this one? I know I am. I like it so much, I plan to stay here.
 
 
*For Mingo, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVIp0m86nZ0 .  For the sparkler-driven rocket, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US8FpRUBKb4
 
**Summary at http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/spaceflight-mitochondrial-function-09092.html  Study: Da Silveira, Willian A., Hossein Fazelinia, Sara Brin Frosenthal, Christopher E. Mason, Sylvain V. Costes, and Afshin Beheshti. Comprehensive Multi-omics analysis Reveals Mitochrondrial Stress as a Central Biological Hub for Spaceflight Impact. Cell. Vol. 183, issue 5, pp. 1185-1201. 25 Nov 2020. Online at https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31461-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420314616%3Fshowall%3Dtrue Accessed November 27, 2020.

So, I guess just as the US has become a leading exporter of fossil fuels and independent of foreign sources and just as America is on the cusp of driving windmill cars to save the planet, the Russian petroleum company Rosneft announced the opening of a giant oil field in the Arctic. * Russia, with an estimated 80 billion barrels of known petroleum reserves and potentially more in as yet unknown reserves under Siberia and the submerged continental shelf, currently has more than twice the reserves as the United States. But, take heart, Americans, because windmill cars won’t use petroleum products, not even for lubrication, so American reserves will last centuries, whereas the Russians will probably burn through their oil in, well, centuries.
 
Ah! That Paris thing, “Accord,” “Agreement,” whatever. Weren’t the Russians among the many signees? I know the Chinese and Indians were. Wonderful news: Didn’t the Chinese just announce they would stop making coal-fired energy plants and go green by the end of a few decades? What, pray tell, was the motivation for the announcement? Could it be altruism? Or stifling pollution from unrestricted burning of coal without scrubbers on the smokestacks? And India? So, remember that India signed the “agreement” with a caveat, that it would “go green” only if other countries pitched in financially and if “going green” would not interfere with its economic growth?
 
But Americans will drive windmill cars and lubricate them with avocado oil, or butter, or olive oil.
 
Just had a thought! Why not produce cars with square wheels? True, such vehicles might be good only on icy roads, but, then, global warming is supposed to generate worse winters according to some climate-change experts. And bigger, fiercer storms. That means more powerful winds to drive windmill cars, as long as one wants to travel in the direction of the prevailing winds. Of course, if the windmills provide sufficient power, cars could move magnetically over steel rails. Maglevs for all! We could call lines of such cars “trains.”
 
But what if the Prevailing Westerlies become so strong that all the cars and trucks with square wheels get pushed to the East Coast every winter with no return winds? What if all the people get pushed eastward and end up on the coast just as the rising seas inundate the coastal plain states, putting, for example, most of Delaware under water? Isn’t sea level supposed to rise to the height of Mt. Ararat?
 
Boats! Sailboats! They can use winds, and don’t require much lubrication, maybe a little bacon fat on the rigging connections to the masts. And with a good jib sail, they can even move on calmer days, though calmer days ahead without petroleum might send the US into the economic doldrums.
 
But I’m growing fond of that idea of cars with square wheels. With everyone pushed eastward, the West will become the Wild West again, the bison will proliferate, the grizzlies and elk will roam freely, and the sage brush will sweep over the high plains like brooms to clean off the last vestiges of intrusive, environment-destroying humanity. Yep. Square wheels.
But—and you know there’s always a “but”—what about heating homes during those cold global-warming winters that blast the burgeoning eastern population? Solar panels? Nah. All that increased storminess will have blocking cloud cover. No doubt, windmills will suffice for home energy needs if the turning blades don’t need lubricants.
 
Anyway, even without sufficient energy for heating from fossil fuels, there are always turkey-feather blankets. We ought to have an excess of turkey feathers, given our annual consumption of the bird that spikes during Thanksgiving. Turkey-feather blankets? Hey, don’t laugh. Apparently, feathers are an ancient solution to cold nights. According to William D. Lipe and others, feather blankets were used at least for a couple of millennia. Lipe and others have one from the thirteenth century. Doesn’t take too many turkeys to make one, either. Maybe ten turkeys. All one needs is some yucca fiber and 11,000 feathers.**
 
And why not turkey feather upholstery in the square-wheeled cars? Not exactly vegan, but certainly saves the skin of lots of cattle, skin they will need during their prolonged lives under cold winds. Hey, I think I’m onto something here. We can save the planet—except for the turkeys—and lower our cholesterol simultaneously. We’ll do away with plastic bags and, in fact, all plastics made from fossil carbon. We’ll make our windmills from wood and turkey-feather cloth. We’ll use turkey-feather sails on our boats as we sail over an inundated coast.
 
And the beauty of it all is that we can do all this in record time. We can replace fields of cotton with fields of yucca to produce the cordage we need to bind the feathers into blankets and upholstery. No more need to crop dust with poisonous, anti-boll weevil insecticides. There’s a cascading effect here. Soon, Earth will be the pristine paradise it was before there was any consciousness to recognize that it was a pristine paradise. And the change will start with those square wheels and turkey-feather blankets.
 
*https://phys.org/news/2020-11-russian-oil-giant-vast-arctic.html.    Accessed Thanksgiving, 2020.
 
**https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X20303953?via%3Dihub. Accessed Thanksgiving, 2020.

“Remember Milton’s Paradise Lost?”

“Gosh! Takes me back to college English lit class. I struggled with that one. It’s a long poem, isn’t it?”
 
“Like about 11,000 lines. Goes on like the Cosmos. That is forever for the student trying to get the thing read before the test or paper due date. (No wonder Spark has become a publishing success; they make a sale to everyone who doesn’t have a smart English major friend to explain the poem) For college students, Milton should have named it Go Ahead, See if You Can Read This before the Test. Anyway, he has that famous line, ‘The Mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’ Well, with a little modern information from cosmology and neuroscience, he might have written, ‘The brain is a place much like the Heavens.’”
 
“Why?”
 
“Think of images you have seen of neurons, their dendrites and axons that make many connections. Looks like a bunch of octopuses got together in Chicago, where railroad tracks spread like tentacles into the continent--if I can borrow an image from Frank Norris—all reaching to touch other octopuses where more tracks bifurcate like tentacles reaching toward other train stations and further ‘tentaclization’ that makes up the neuronal network.”
 
“Frank who?...Nevermind, didn’t pay attention in English class because of that redhead in the short skirt…Network?”
 
“Yes…And, wait! You’re not saying you had a thing for Suzy Mitchkins? I didn’t realize…So, as I was saying, the network of neurons inside the head seems to mimic the network of matter spread throughout the Cosmos itself, with galaxies and galaxy clusters serving as the ‘train stations’ or hubs or octopus heads. The brain might not make Hell into Heaven, but it sure can imitate the structure of the heavens. That’s what some recent modeling seems to say. Drs. Franco Vazza and Alberto Feletti compared the neuronal network and the Cosmic Octopuses, finding a remarkable similarity, though on vastly different scales. The brain’s network occurs on scales of a single micrometer to a tenth of a millimeter. The scale of the Cosmos is larger, ranging from five to 500 million light-years. Nevertheless, images of the brain’s neurons and cosmic models seem to parallel each other. The astronomers don’t use octopuses for their models, but rather spider webs, so they speak of the Cosmic Web.” *
 
“You’re saying the inside of my head looks like a mini Cosmos?”
 
“Not me, Vazza and Feletti. They point out a remarkable similarity of structure. I wonder whether or not similar structures can be found. I think of deciduous trees in a forest, their trunks serving as neurons or galaxies with branches reaching out to touch nearby branches, all serving as axons or cosmic webs of matter (see pic below). What if, just what if, it isn’t something like a Fibonacci sequence or some Golden Ratio that connects All That Is, but rather a mirror image of the Cosmic Fabric? What if the secret code of the universe is octopuses and tentacles, networks like the axons and dendrites?”
 
“Sorry, what? I was thinking of Suzy. Oh! Yeah. I get it. On the scale of little things like people’s brains, there’s a reflection of a larger order or, if not order, then similar scattered arrangement.”
 
​“Precisely, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm of which it is a part. And that seems to apply to many comparable structures, a family, for example, as a reflection of society as a whole. A group of people reflecting ideas as a whole and the way to pursue the future. Think of seminal works of philosophy, political, and social movements, or think of sacred texts that serve as macrocosms that envelope human microcosms who exist within those philosophies, politics, societies, and religions.”​
 
“That doesn’t inspire much confidence in the importance of the individual, in MY importance or significance.”
 
“No, not if you think you are an insignificant or small part of something larger, some little sucker on the tentacle of a octopus, but then, there’s much to credit that individual sucker. Some neuroscientists think that the brain of an octopus might be a little different from our brains, that the critter’s brain is kind of spread out, all the tentacles taking part in the system and without which the system is less effective, though it is still capable. Every sucker is a little brain, so to speak. Hey, you lose some axons and dendrites, you lose some memories or functions. The macrocosm is different with different microcosms. You serve a purpose, after all. You, among all the branches of the forest, among all the Cosmic tentacles or webs, you have a role to play. You don’t have to be a passive sucker. You can sense what’s around you, see the connections, feel, and decide. Sure, you can’t get outside your specific tentacle, but that tentacle depends on you, all the other suckers and the head depend on you and your contributions. Milton’s ‘mind’ doesn’t just make heaven of hell; it is the heavens.
 
“But then…But then I could be wrong. We have a tendency…We tend to see patterns where no patterns exist. That helps us in some instances, like seeing part of a person and recognizing that that is THE person. We impose patterns because patterns make us feel secure, I suppose. If we ‘know’ what we see, then there’s no cause for insecurity. All’s right with the world. We can relax. And maybe seeing a pattern in the human brain that matches the Cosmic Pattern makes us feel not only that ‘we belong,’ but also that we are an actual member of Something Bigger. In Star Wars, it’s the Force that supposedly permeates the universe. For Heraclitus, it was the Pyr Aeizoon, the Eternal Fire, the ‘god’ that goes to sleep for us to exist and into which we return upon waking when we die. We’re part of that cyclic pattern according to Heraclitus. Or maybe it’s seeing patterns that lies behind all religions, Catholics, for example, Christians in general, believing they are part of the Church, the ‘Body’ of Christ. Are Christians told ‘to see Christ in everyone’? And I don’t know much about Hinduism, but isn’t Vishnu, who has avatars, the ‘Pervader’? Am I to interpret that name to mean Vishnu pervades? Pervades the world? The Universe? Those who worship? Is any avatar of Vishnu an analog of Christ, God in the World, The Creator become Part of the Creation?
 
“Just thinking. We tend to look like our parents, don’t we? We carry their DNA. Think of the Cosmos as the Ultimate Parent. What’s the saying about being ‘made in the image of God’? Makes me think of the opening lines of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and Nothing was made that was not made through the Word.” I think that Augustine of Hippo centered his philosophy that all the world bore the stamp of the Creator through that passage. But, hey, I know so little about beliefs through time and throughout geography, that I shouldn’t speak other than to pose questions. But I still believe I might find an association of human patterns and universal or Divine Patterns in every religion. So, I suppose seeing the physical brain as patterned after the entire Cosmos isn’t an off-the-chart wild speculation. Maybe we owe some kudos to Vazza and Feletti for pointing out the similarity between Cosmic and Human patterns, for showing us we carry the DNA of the Cosmos.”
 
“Uh…Sorry, I was drifting off. Where do you think Susy is now?”
 
“I think I’m going to reread Paradise Lost.”
 
*SciNews. Human Brain’s Neuronal network Has Similarities to Cosmic Web, Study Claims. 18 Nov 2020. Online at http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/human-brain-cosmic-web-similarities-09066.html   Published in Frontiers of Physics. F. Vazza & A. Feletti. The Quantitative Comparison Between the Neuronal Network and the Cosmic Web. Front. Phys, published online November 16, 2020; doi: 10.3389/fphy.2020.525731

Sigh. What a year. Wait! What? Did you just say those favored by sycophantic media are now receiving awards and praise? Let me get this straight. The NY governor, who instituted a policy—once published on the state’s website, but since removed—to put elderly with COVID-19 back into poorly equipped nursing homes, where, though the “official” number now stands at about 6,700 dead, the actual number is much higher (who knows, since the figures for COVID deaths have been manipulated for various political reasons—has written a self-aggrandizing book on his handling of the pandemic, has missed more than a dozen meetings (some on the vaccines) to which he was invited by the White House, has held press conferences with few challenges (a recent one got the reporter berated by the Gov), and has gone on book tours while shutting down the schools against the advice of “scientists”—depends on who’s labeled thus, I guess. Are the sycophantic press people analogs of all those who, before a nineteenth-century experiment disproving its existence, sought the aether, these modern analogs wishing to fill vacuums in their lives and perspectives?
 
Remember the aether? It was the supposed substance that filled all space, the stuff through which light traveled and “waved,” the universal background of something because no one before Michelson and Morley’s experiment could comprehend emptiness, that is, nothing. Of course, we still can’t really comprehend nothing. For us, everything is something because nothing is nothing. We have to give the nineteenth-century experimenters credit for demonstrating that the aether was as real as flying unicorns. They looked and found “nothing.” They demonstrated that light could move through the vacuum of space; it needed no medium to propagate. There truly was no “there” there. It existed only in the minds of those who imagined it.*
 
We haven’t given up on looking for what might not exist. We think there are “strings” underlying the stuff of the universe, but we don’t have any way of demonstrating that they truly exist other than our mathematical descriptions. They make sense, even contribute to the Standard Model; yet, we can’t run an experiment to demonstrate they exist. And we have a similar desire to look for something else that might not exist: The axions of Dark Matter. Haven’t found them yet. Assuming they are there, scientists are trying hard to demonstrate they exist, most recently through the use of the giant (football-field diameter) radio telescope in West Virginia.** Maybe they do exist.
 
Not that the invisible can’t show up on our machines. We can use an ordinary radio “to see” radio waves and microwaves. That static between AM channels is the famous Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the Echo of the Big Bang. So, yes, some “things” that are invisible can be “seen” with the right instrumentation. But those strings and Dark Matter axions are troubling indeed. Should we spend time and money “to see” them?
 
The aether doesn’t exist. We know that. The 1887 experiment to demonstrate its fictional nature cost very little money. Tabletop stuff compared with the Large Hadron Collider. But the experiments to find Dark Matter axions and strings are costly, for the latter, prohibitively costly because such attempts would require making the LHC more powerful. But what if we’re wrong about the nature of Dark Matter, that the as yet unseen axions exist. After all, “axions” are just a guess, maybe a good guess, but a guess nevertheless. However, I suppose one could say, “Just because we haven’t yet seen the axions, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. You know the old saying that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Besides, what else can affect the rotation of galaxies other than invisible Dark Matter?”
 
We humans spend lots of time looking for things that might or might not exist. I think of those “ghost” TV reality shows, replete with some electromagnetic sensors of some kind. I know we humans are electrical beings, but do we really retain all those positive and negative charges in spirit? You know that old expression about not being able to “take it with you.” I’m guessing, but since there’s really no way to prove my hypothesis, that I’m going out on the proverbial galactic arm to say that spirit isn’t electrical. Yet, those reality shows have fans who await the results of a prerecorded episode seemingly unaware that if someone really and undisputedly found and videoed a “real” ghost, that the newspapers, TV, and internet sources would be awash in the coverage of the story. “Let’s wait through the season’s episodes,” the fan says. I ask, “Will the last episode of the season reveal whether or not someone shook hands with Big Foot in his forest lair?”
 
We humans want mystery to be real, and yet, we want a comprehensible universe. But we are fascinated by all that we merely suspect. Aliens, for example. We write and read and watch fiction, earthbound and otherworldly. We want “to see” all the universe’s components, even those that are invisible. We want to pin down that which doesn’t lend itself to pricking by real pins.
 
Anecdote: Looking for a channel that carried a particular football game, I stumbled upon a program in which a woman, dressed in scuba gear, was going diving with others in search of some underwater hiding place aliens use to conceal their spaceships. I didn’t stay on the program for more than a minute, but why would anyone watch. If she had discovered spaceships under the water, wouldn’t the world know within minutes. “Here’s the video.” Watch it on any one of a number of social media platforms.  
 
But, hold on! Surely, I’m not suggesting that there is no room for discovery, that, for example, Dark Matter doesn’t exist. Look at how the galaxies move. There’s something definitely there; something at work to keep them from rotating as expected.  This Dark Matter stuff appears to have a gravitational effect on aggregations of hundreds of billions to trillions of stars. That’s evidence that it exists, right? Yes, but… But “seeing it” is a different kind of knowing. You can tell me that a house is haunted, but I want to “see “the “ghost” that I know isn’t photoshopped or otherwise manufactured. I want to hold a Dark Matter axion. I want to see a “string” the way I see highly magnified viruses. We know viruses by more than their effects. We have the pics!
 
But we might never be able to identify the exact nature of “things” that are invisible, not just to the naked eye, but also to instruments like that giant Green Bank Radio Telescope. What if we are relegated to knowing things only by their effect without knowing their nature. What if we never fully understand Dark Energy. Do Dark Matter axions exist? Who knows? Maybe they do. There are some very bright people looking for them with some very expensive equipment. And there are some equally bright people looking for strings. It’s just that they really don’t know whether the looking will bear any fruit. We can praise them, I guess, for persistent looking, though there might be more practical ways to spend one’s time, like finding ways to improve the human condition. Whoa! That sounds anti-theoretical science. Hold on. Lots of Good and goods have come from purely theoretical searches made practical by later scientists and engineers. Flying machines, for example. Wouldn’t Leonardo be amazed to see a helicopter? Thank you, Sikorsky, for all those life-flight rescues.
 
But didn’t I start all this with a complaint about the governor of New York? Is this a political thing? Am I one of the disgruntled? What’s all this science stuff have to do with Cuomo?
 
Actually, the lesson applies to all of us, regardless of our political or social perspectives. We  tend to latch onto that which we believe “is there,” regardless of our lack of proof or of “negative hypotheses.” For everyone before Michelson and Morley, the aether might just as well have been real. It worked in their minds by satisfying a need that all was right with the world as they saw it, that the world worked the way it “should” work. For the sycophants who ask no challenging questions and who fail to pursue the possibility that the received isn’t necessarily the acceptable, the governor’s explanations of how his world works for all, or how it is the “best of all possible worlds,” to use Voltaire’s satirical phrase, have been acceptable. He provided the "best of all possible pandemic worlds"; 'nough said. No more questions. 
 
And, of course, a media leaning to one side easily sees the aether of any claim by that side as a reality, that “Russian Collusion” stuff, for example. It wasn’t there, but it worked to explain the world they wanted, the world as it “should” be.
 
We will never rid ourselves of “aethers.” It appears to be in our nature to see them even when we can’t really see them. If they work for us and explain the world we want, we will be satisfied until some Michelson-Morley experiment proves irrefutably otherwise.
 
What are the “aethers” in your worldview?
 
 
*There’s nothing (had to use that word) new here: Darling of the 1960s press, Kennedy had to answer no questions about infidelity; Darling of the 1990s, Clinton had to answer no questions about sexual abuse until abused women spoke up; Darling of the 2000s, Obama received the Nobel for, as he asked, “For what?” and had to answer few if any questions about obviously questionable actions like Fast and Furious and election interference; and Darling of this decade, Biden has had few questions about his family’s rise to wealth seemingly associated with his vice presidency—although I did see one reporter ask him what kind of ice cream he had chosen. Sigh. And Darling of 2020, Cuomo has not been persistently challenged on his pandemic policy—but he did get a book deal and press coverage that "earned" him an Emmy.
 
**Fadelli, Ingrid. Searching for axion dark matter conversion signals in the magnetic fields around neutron stars. Phys.org. 20 Nov 2020.  Online at https://phys.org/news/2020-11-axion-dark-conversion-magnetic-fields.html Accessed November 22, 2020.

Am I wrong for making Jeff Bezos richer? Am I like the addict who can’t stop buying from his supplier?
 
Or am I just taking advantage of easy ways to shop, staying mindless of my role in making Jeff richer? Should I fault him for giving me what I want: Seemingly unlimited choices with rapid, free delivery to my door? Should the poor (or poorer) fault the rich who provide them with what they want? Shouldn’t Jeff, who has provided jobs directly and indirectly to enough people to fill a small city, be given his due? As one of my late relatives once said, “When’s the last time a poor guy wrote you a check?” Jeff writes lots of checks, pays lots of people. I don't live in the same financial universe as someone who pays 800,000 employees.  
 
But then there’s that envy thing that’s been around since forever. Someone has more stuff? Envy. And there’s the related emotion, jealousy, that emerges when a friend or loved one has given attention to or gotten attention from another. No wonder the planet is so green. It’s the common color of the envious and jealous that Iago describes as a monster. *
 
I don’t care that Jeff is rich. I don’t envy him. Would I like to be as rich as Croesus? Sure. But I’m not, and that I don’t have more wealth isn’t someone else’s fault. I didn’t come up with Jeff’s idea. And unlike Sam Walton, I didn’t expand a little Arkansas store into a giant big box retailer with about 2,000 stores and hundreds of thousands of employees, either. Why should I fault the founders of Amazon and Walmart for their successes? In a free market, I’m free to do what they did. And among the things I did was to purchase from Amazon and Walmart. Envy is a waste of energy. Follow Yoda’s advice here: “Do or do not.” Pretty simple, but an effective dismissal of envy.**
 
And yet, we’ll never rid ourselves of envy. Some will complain incessantly, wishing to be what others are and faulting them for being what they are. There’s a close parallel in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy.” ** In Miniver’s case, the envy is over the lives of knights in shining armor and the rich Medici. He believes he is born in a time when no one can have, as he calls it, “mediaeval grace.” Those who envy Jeff Bezos and the Waltons might think they were born too late to form successful companies and make inordinate wealth just as Miniver believes he was born too late to experience the heroism and grandeur of knights and the wealth of the Medici.

Just keep in mind those words of Yoda: "Do, or do not."
 
*There is a distinction between envy and jealousy that lies in the object: Typically, we associate envy with others’ possessions, talents, or status, whereas we associate jealousy with unfaithful lovers or with the attention given by those from whom we seek attention, as in the case of sibling rivalries. No doubt, you can think of other examples of jealousy. In Othello, Shakespeare has Iago say, "Beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster...."

**Is it a coincidence that Yoda, who displays no envy or jealousy, is green?

***Here’s the poem by Robinson:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
 
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
 
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.
 
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
 
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
 
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.
 
Miniver scorned the gold he sought
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
 
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

First, an introduction: I’ve long been fascinated with etymology because I believe language captures the history of understanding, not education, mind you, but understanding. The origin of English teacher, for example, lies in Old English’s tacn (or taecan), Proto-Germanic taikijan, both words related by meaning: “To show, declare, warn, persuade” and “To show,” in noun form Old English’s “sign, mark,” maybe even “guide” or “guidepost.” For me that has always meant a teacher is a guide, someone who points another in a certain direction, hopefully “the right direction.” No doubt in my many years of teaching, I wasn’t at times the best guide or guidepost, but I might have been so in other times. Guideposts are passive objects; guides are active people. As everyone knows, a teacher isn’t very good if a student refuses to acquire a lesson. As a guidepost, teachers fail all the time; as a guide, they often succeed. Want an analogy: “Keep off the Grass” signs work for a few days, then they don’t. “Wear a Mask” signs worked for a few months in early 2020, then they didn’t. Looking back, I hope I was more guide than guidepost.
 
Second: Take the last paragraph as a way of discussing the etymology of another word, this one vitriol. These seem to be vitriolic times, don’t they? Not everywhere, of course, but certainly in places like Portland, Oregon, elsewhere in the USA, in Hong Kong, and in a number of European cities, where the citizenry is upset by restrictions imposed by their governments. Lots of vitriol. Maybe the word’s origin can help us understand our own times.
 
In the late 1300s, a century-old French word became vitriol, meaning the “sulfate of iron,” not the pills one can buy at Walgreen’s or Walmart, but rather, Iron (II) sulfate, which is also called ferrous sulfate, typically a combination of iron, sulfur, and oxygen bound to a number of water molecules (hydrated). The “water-form” is the stuff of those pills that help reduce iron deficiency (8 million prescriptions per year in the US). In medieval times, ferrous sulfate was not used as a medicine for iron deficiency. It was used to make ink (iron gall ink), and it was known to produce a very corrosive and at that time not understood substance upon heating: Sulfuric acid.
 
Corrosive sulfuric acid. That’s how we eventually got to our English vitriol. But there was an intermediate step. Because some sulfate minerals look glassy and vitreus in Latin means “glassy,” our modern word derived from a word unrelated to feelings. By the mid-18th century, English vitriol had come to mean “bitter or corrosive feelings,” “caustic feelings.” (But now we’re all over the etymological map because “caustic” is associated with bases and not with acids. Ah! One can just go on and on etymologically; caustic derives from Greek kaustikos and Latin causticus, “burning”) So, our vitriolic times are chemically akin to sulfuric acid’s effects (and if one sees videos of the fires set by vitriolic, anarchic protestors in Portland and elsewhere, akin to the effect of “burning” buildings and attempted murders by arson).
 
Anyway, we’re in vitriolic times. And the most vitriolic among us appear to have no agenda other than burning down buildings and people. And those who won’t risk actual confrontations have turned to online vitriol. Now, is there a neutralization process for the online acid similar to putting baking soda on vinegar, that is putting a base on an acid? Sure.
 
All reactions, such as the neutralization process, involve an exchange of energy. If I correctly remember my chemistry (this is questionable), the neutralization of an acid is an exothermic process. That seems to be what we need in these times, a neutralization that gets rid of heat, in this case, the heat of vitriol. I suppose the best way to eliminate the heat of online vitriol is by robbing it of its energy, that is, by not responding, even by turning off the computer, smart phone, or tablet.
 
Of course, vitriol has outlets other than www and rioting. In. times past, newspapers—and even the pamphlets of colonial days—served up vitriol. I remember living in Miami in 1980 before the riots and reading daily the Miami Herald. In the spring, I told my family that the editors of the paper seem to want civil unrest, exhibited by their slant and coverage. Sure enough, the vitriol built up, and people rioted (and, of course, looted, because looting solves all problems). Now, I shouldn’t blame the Miami Herald specifically. It was, however, an acidic component, lending its news-protons to the process, just as some of the major media today lend their own news-protons to the slightest vitriol. Tiny, those protons can cause some big reactions. And when major news outlets reach millions of people to the exclusion of potential neutralizing news bases, they produce a strong acid, an “oil of vitriol” as sulfuric acid was once commonly called.
 
Acids are not made less acidic by pouring acids on them. Maybe those in the news media and social media need a simple lesson in chemistry. Or maybe they had a course in chemistry, but their teachers were guideposts and not guides.

Even a cursory review of history reveals an underlying anger in every age that manifests itself in cruelties, murders, and wars. Find me, I challenge you, an Age of Peace, a time when life was a placid lake of love and harmony. Let me save you some effort: No such quiet has ever existed. If a general peace occurs, it always overlies individual episodes of ire. Those who pursue peace must always undergo a trial by ire. Peace is a narrow path through the fire of ire. Today, that path is often a cyber path, a virtual road through the Internet.   
 
An angry world might stop to consider the etymology of the English word ire. Word historians find an obvious connection between ire and its Latin cognate ira, which covers a range of meanings from “anger” through “wrath” to “rage.”* Etymologists also point out that ira can also mean “passion.” Certainly every age has its share of passionately angry people, so English ire appears to be appropriately derived from the Latin ira.
 
Latin ira has its own beginnings in a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Language root eis-, possibly through the Greek hieros. That Greek word conveys the meaning “filled with the divine” and “holy.” Greek oistros, which reflects that PIE root eis-, means “a gadfly,” but originally was “a thing that causes madness.” The Online Etymology Dictionary** lists some related words, such as the Sanskrit esati (“drives on”) and yasati (“boils”), the Avestan aesma (“anger”), and the Lithuanian aistra (“violent passion”), all having a visual and phonetic relationship to the PIE root. Obviously, languages have had to incorporate what has been an integral part of human existence, a kind of continuing story of Cain.
 
There are other connections between modern ire and older words, such as those that derive from Old Saxon and Old High German, from Gothic airzeis, and even from the Latin verb errare. All these roots and words capture the reason that ire continues from age to age. Ire “drives on” people. Their emotions “boil.” Their “madness” breeds “madness,” the one a loss of sanity and cool logic and the other a straying from the narrow path of peace. And in that Latin errare lies the idea of “wandering,” which is also correlative of Old English irre.*** The irate wander as passion takes them, usually off the path to peace.
 
Is this an angrier age? Probably not. Are there more angry people? Well, there are more people, so, probably, yes. There are also more outlets for anger. Every age has had likeminded angry people whose ire goes unabated for a generation. Sometimes that ire reaches many other generations, as it seems to have done so in the Middle East. This age makes facilitates connections among likeminded angry people. Their likemindedness expands logarithmically through social media.
 
Life is not all wrath and rage though at times it seems that ire alone dominates the human condition. In seeking peace in an angry world, you are not alone as you undergo your trial by ire. As many have contended with the irate in times past, so many of your contemporaries contend with the irate today. As the irate have the ability to spread ire logarithmically, so you also have a similar ability to spread peace. 
 
*As in the famous dirge “Dies Irae,” the Requiem Mass’s “That Day of Wrath,” that Mozart and Berlioz used so effectively in their musical compositions and that many a film director has incorporated into ominous scenes.
 
**https://www.etymonline.com/word/ire
 
***Think “knight errant,” the wandering knight, or consider “glacial erratic,” a boulder carried from its source rock to wherever the glacier melts and drops it.

Chilean sea bass. Maybe you’ve bought some at the local fish market or had a dish of it at a fine restaurant. Not my favorite, but then, there’s no accounting for tastes. The fish is a member of the Nototheniidae, a family that includes the Longfin icedevil. Now, would you be inclined to eat a Longfin icedevil? What about an Antarctic toothfish?
 
Chilean sea bass is the marketing name for Antarctic toothfish. The name dates to 1977, when Lee Lantz, a wholesaler, sought a more marketable English name for the fish. In other languages the fish goes by various names.
 
That names determine attitudes is worth remembering as those who would impose sweeping governmental controls seem to understand. Find a palatable name, find a new restaurant item. Find a euphemism for a societal change, find a switch in an economy or social structure.
 
I won’t point out the specifics for our times. I’ll leave that for you to discover, hopefully not before your personal freedoms are limited to ordering from a political or social or economic menu of renamed, but failed restaurant choices. A rose by any name might smell as sweet. But calling anything a rose doesn't make it a rose. *

*Shakespeare's Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet." Act II, Sc. II.

Trying times, these, what with the pandemic and worldwide turmoil. What’s a person like you to do? Get angry. Go into limp apathy? Turn to chemical solutions? Become a hermit? Or…
 
Back in the 1950s on a very hot and humid day one summer Sunday, I was dressed in my “Sunday-go-to-meeting” clothes standing at the back of the small Catholic neighborhood church sweating in long sleeve shirt and tie. It was a bit more formal back then; the women and girls had to wear some kind of head covering. Men wore suits and ties. Anyway, there was a visiting priest from a nearby monastery, a Benedictine monk who gave what I think is the best homily I have ever heard or read—and I read those by the brilliant John Donne (1572-1631) in a literature course in college. The little priest addressed the parish, saying, “If you’re not a saint, you ought to be one.” That was it. 
 
Short, right? To the point. What more is there to say. Heck, I’ve read those complex and long John Donne sermons. I’ve read those by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the congregationalist leader of the First Great Awakening, who told his congregation they were hanging over a fire on a spider’s web. But to what point are all sermons, from Donne’s to Edwards’s? What’s the fundamental message for those of us who have to deal with pandemics and social problems?
 
Even humanists who reject any specific religion can adopt an ethics that points in the same direction as those who follow some religion, becoming, say, a “secular saint,” someone who goes out of his or her way to help others or to make the world “better,” if only temporarily so.
 
So, in a time of death and unrest, of sickness and dissatisfaction, you have a choice: You can let the times get you down or you can lift the times. Those who lift are saints, religious or otherwise. If you’re not a saint, you ought to be one.

In mid-November, 2020, I advise Americans to read Marc Antony’s words about Brutus and Caesar.**
 

​*Latin for “Note well.”
 
**Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Act III, Sc. 2. Online at https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=juliuscaesar&Act=3&Scene=2&Scope=scene Accessed November 14, 2020. This site contains the entire scene and includes Brutus’ words.