In the context of the American Congress struggling to name a Speaker in January, 2023, consider the following question:


Would you rather have a number of disagreeing, independent minds running the country, or a group of single-minded martinets strictly following party politics?

Did you do anything today? Several “things”?


Yes, you live in a fast-paced world. Such a world is nothing new. You can find complaints about the speed of life going back centuries. But, yes, the pace probably did pick up during the last 300 years, especially where industrialization, urbanization, and mobility ballooned—or took off, to use a common metaphor of these jet-paced times of multitasking (more like parallel or alternate tasking, as the neurologists tell us).  You find yourself in a field with a single plowshare trying to plow two, three, or even four furrows simultaneously.


Do you find yourself running short on patience because your life is fast-paced?


Patience ends when people perceive their burdens increase in a fast-paced world. The result is emotions that are both scalar and vector. The magnitude of emotional responses rises (scalar), and it often gets directed toward some malfunctioning object, someone else, or some group.


“Sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine.”


In “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that the overturned soil of a freshly plowed furrow can glisten in the sunlight. The dirt shines. The image in that poem draws to my mind a drive along W. Valley Road near Booneville, Pennsylvania, located in “Amish country.”


As I drove, I saw an Amish farmer plowing a field so large that it dwarfed him (see photo). His draft horses also dwarfed him. From my perspective and for a brief moment, I wondered how long it would take to plow such a large field without a tractor.


I was driving past, headed toward a place of stark contrast to his slow pace, Washington, D. C., so I didn’t stay to watch. I had a destination I needed to get to in a limited time. My thoughts and my vehicle were vectored, and the drive through that elongate valley in Pennsylvania, though scenic, was taking longer than I had expected.


As I continued the journey, however, I began to wonder about the Amish farmer’s emotions. I know he’s human; he has emotions. Is his patience inversely proportional to pressure from the world outside Amish life? He certainly can’t make his horses plow any faster; he can’t do more than wait for the rains; and other than throwing manure on the field, he can’t even rush the growth of his crops. Cars like mine whiz by the slow plowing, fertilizing, seeding, growing, and harvesting.


He’s in a giant field. The horses aren’t galloping. They steadily pull the plow, acre after acre after acre. What thoughts run through his head? What emotions surge from his inner brain? Are they scalar or vector?


Like the farmer in The Fall of Icarus to which W. H. Auden refers in Musée des Beaux-Arts , he probably paid no attention to my passing by, my vectored life of little concern to him. I could have been Icarus falling from the sky, the fall a result of an insignificant moment of irrational impatience just like the mythical character’s plummet. The farmer might have similarly paid no attention to planes passing overhead, their speed and direction a constant displacement of the hurried and harried. His one mph noticeable in contrast to my traveling at or above the posted speed limit.


Get your inner avatar to plow that field.


Enveloped as you are by computer-simulated environments, or virtual worlds, you might find respite in the farmer as your avatar. As the farmer, you then plow the seemingly endless furrows of your life one at a time. You ignore the rapid travelers vectored toward who knows where in who knows what timeframe; as modern Icaruses, many of them will fall unnoticed. Your avatar doesn’t whip the horses; their horse-brains are in no rush anyway. They pull the plow ignorant of their purpose. But you, as that Amish avatar with a purpose to grow a crop necessary for survival, look down as you go to see the furrow glisten beneath the slow plodding. Every moment glistens.


Those passersby on the highway might distract one another or even distract themselves with vectored emotions and thoughts, but your avatar focuses on the furrow you plow. They might rush here or there, but your avatar knows that without his sheer plodding, they will starve, and their rushing will come to a crashing end. His lifestyle demands patience and ensures survival of the hurried and harried. They might whiz past him, the isolated figure living in the moment in the middle of a big field, and they might think his life is strange and uninteresting. But without it, all hurrying and harrying stops.


Want to increase you patience? Plow one furrow at a time. Look at the glistening Earth beneath your feet.

Untwining the threads of succession in England is like unraveling the weave of a medieval tapestry—it is for me, certainly. All those cross-channel interrelationships! All those pretenders to the throne, and occasionally a couple of kings or queens simultaneously claiming that throne!  All those confusing ties between Danes, Normans, Celts, Scots, Welsh, Anglo-Saxons, and Brits. All those civil wars, including the one that ended with Henry II’s ascension to the throne. All the bribes, the promises of entitlements like lordships, and the “shared” or redistributed (but actually stolen) wealth!


Henry, twelfth-century ruler, was the Empress Matilda’s son. He married the widowed Eleanor of Aquitaine, famous for her association with the literature of chivalry and the Arthurian legend. It was a time before gunpowder altered war, a time when men in armor and on horseback fought pitched battles and laid siege to castles. Henry’s mother was no stranger to civil medieval skirmishes, sieges, promises, bribes, ransoms, and prisoner exchanges. Gosh, she was herself the victim of a siege at Oxford and as a “damsel” in distress dressed in white, had to escape over snowy ground and across a frozen Thames—the stuff of movies! Wizened by her experiences as the head of a military faction during civil unrest and political intrigue, Matilda, or Maude as she was also known, gave her son this advice:


“Show your friends and allies their reward, keep it dangling before their eyes, but remove the bait before they can seize it; thus you will keep them devoted and eager to serve.” *


Does that bit of twelfth-century advice sound familiar? It should. It underlies all the promises made by socialists and big-government politicians.


*Heer, Friedrich, The Medieval World: Europe, 1100-1350. Trans. By Janet Sondheimer. 1963. New York. A Mentor Book, p. 164.

Do we need Phil Collins to sing “Both Sides of the Story” to know that a single path to a solution, an understanding, or even fulfillment of a New Year’s Resolution often fails? We might reasonably argue that taking a single path succeeds more by luck than by science—but, and let’s get this out of the way at the outset: Yes, sometimes a single path does lead to either a solution or an understanding (Go figure, Phil!). While we’re making caveats, let’s acknowledge that some of us humans just don’t want to hear both sides of the story. *


Nevertheless and in spite of occasional single-path successes and almost universal, intractable obstinacy, Phil advises, “We always need to hear both sides of the story.” That’s really good advice that some take to heart. I thought I might use it as the basis of my New Year’s Resolution.


They Have Ears, but Do Not Hear


Ever read the Psalm 115?


They have ears, but cannot hear, and noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel, and feet, but cannot walk; they cannot make a sound.
May all who made them and who trust in them become like the idols they have made.


Sad to confess, but I have occasionally chosen a single path, but mostly during my youth. Yes, there were times when I knew “only one side of the story.” That last line in the Psalm is probably one reason for my self-imposed and youthful closed mindedness. Humans have probably put their contemporaries on pedestals long before the carving of the Löwenmensch figurine and the Venus of Hohle Fels that date to more than 35,000 years ago. Not only have we long idolized, but we have also long listened to idols we “have made.”  How else does one account for the frenzied accolades for people like Hitler? Certainly today, “living” idols people our societies, typified by the TV show American Idol, by “famous” pundits with large audiences, and by generally anyone called “one of the elite,” including those elevated to the status of Elite, such as actors and singers raised to British knighthood. The tabloids daily quote them, photograph them, idolize them. They are among the idols we have made, and they now include scientists or those who speak for science. (Accolades abound for alarmist Greta Thunberg and masked/unmasked/two masks Dr. Fauci; their fame stretches to the horizon——————————————————————————————)




Multiple Working Hypotheses and the Tale of Alfred Wegener


In the twentieth century, scientists began adopting a version of Phil’s advice in a process known as multiple working hypotheses. This approach to understanding was exemplified in the way Alfred Wegener’s “continental drift” evolved into the modern understanding of plate tectonics. Wegener, son-in-law of a climatologist, had studied astronomy, but eventually moved into other endeavors, including meteorology, climatology, paleontology, and geology. His personal intellectual journey is now mirrored in the holistic approach ** taken by earth scientists who realize that Earth is a system of systems. Trying to explain the entire system by focusing on just one part is folly though understanding the nature of each part, each subsystem, is an essential step on a path that can converge on other paths.


Two sides of a story? Multiple paths? Wegener faced derision when he proposed that the continents “had drifted,” even after he had accumulated rather convincing evidence from multiple discoveries like the widespread fossils of Glossopteris flora and the critter called Mesosaurus. He noted, also, that some rocks on either side of the Atlantic Ocean were identical, so his reconstructed Pangaea brought them together as Africa, Europe, and the Americas fit like puzzle pieces. But Wegener’s contemporaries, the geologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, already had an explanation for orogeny; they didn’t need a meteorologist/astronomer/amateur-paleontologist/amateur-geologist to tell them their hypothesis of simple isostasy was incorrect and that mountains formed, as Wegener proposed, because Earth’s continents had, before diverging, converged. Taking offense at the audacity of Wegener’s intrusion into their field of knowledge, his contemporaries mocked and ridiculed him. What else does one do when the very act of listening to an opponent is anathema among colleagues, friends, or neighbors?


A Modern Analog


We see a parallel circumstance today with regard to one of Wegener’s primary passions: Climate. Ridicule and personal attacks await those who doubt the coming of an inevitable climate crisis some of the alarmists are calling so catastrophic that the world will end in twelve years—it was eight years just a few years ago (How did we gain the extra time?).Under the vitriol associated with social media today, it seems almost impossible for anyone calling into question the climate alarmists’ one-explanation-suffices position and frantic alarm to escape a ruined reputation or public ridicule. You doubt, you’re out, just like Wegener. That detrimental effect affects those who simply ask whether there is irrefutable proof that a warmer atmosphere will really destroy a 4.5 billion-year-old planet that has maintained abundant life for hundreds of millions of years through swings in temperatures much greater than those now predicted in demonstrably flawed models.


Eight…Excuse me! Twelve years till Doomsday? Didn’t the sundry human species evolve and survive during some of the most radical shifts of temperatures in the planet’s history? Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo floresiensis, and Homo neanderthalensis lived during glacial and interglacial periods over the last 2.4 million years. Does anyone think climate has been steady during the past 200,000-plus years as Homo sapiens sapiens evolved and spread from Africa to Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas? *** Does anyone think there is a “normal climate”? Are so many unaware that climate cycles and fluctuations are more noticeable just because we notice them with insistence of many others? With our ability to communicate almost instantaneously across the planet, we learn about droughts in Ethiopia or the American Southwest, floods in China or Pakistan, tornadoes in the Kansas and Oklahoma, and snowfall at Tahoe or Buffalo. We are constantly primed to hear about weather not just where we live, but throughout the world. And we’re constantly told to conflate weather and climate. Has that not led to single mindedness, to a common interpretation of physical processes, and to a unified conclusion: Say it often enough, and people will reject a round world. Make it part of the canon of knowledge, and people will reject Galileo’s methods and conclusions.   


Because of our technology we have moved into deserts and piled into cities along coastlines that are subject to the whims of Nature. Primed as we are to take adverse weather events as “evidence of climate change,” we panic over weather anomalies and occasional swings away from“average” temperatures.      


Climate, like tectonics, is a holistic subject that requires a multiple working hypotheses approach. It requires not just “two sides,” but many sides. And the perfect model of this approach lay in how Wegener was vindicated by many scientists walking down paths different from those of Wegener’s contemporaries. The multiple working hypotheses that demonstrated that Wegener was in the main correct derived from combining the research of volcanologists, seismologists, paleontologists, marine geologists, cartographers, paleoclimatologists, mineralogists, petrologists, geophysicists, biologists, and chemists. Each worked on a specialization, but the discoveries of each added up to become plate tectonics. For example, sea floor spreading that breaks up and drives continents by moving the plates was affirmed by sonar readings, drilling, and studies of ocean floor magnetism and the ages of sea floor rocks and sediments.


Another Modern Analog


We can profit from multiple working hypotheses in more aspects of our lives than in our frenzy over climate. Take dietary advice as an analog: No fat, low fat, some fat, high fat, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, no meat, only meat, all carbs, no carbs, some sugar, absolutely no sugar, fasting, six meals a day, protein drinks, less protein, cured meats, uncured meats, an alphabet of vitamins, fewer vitamins, no vitamin supplements, vitamins from natural foods, red wine, no alcohol, gluten, gluten-free, soy, no soy, coconut milk, almond milk, cashew milk, real animal milk with whole, 2%, 1%, or zero fat, starches, no starches…You can probably throw in other dietary advice. The Pythagoreans, if you remember, were vegetarians, but they’re all dead in spite of their diet. And so are all the other human predecessors regardless of their diet. So, what’s a twenty-first century human to do about eating in an affluent world that offers more than 60,000 foods?


Do we take the specific advice of some diet guru who might have studied the eating habits of some old people living on Cyprus, on some other Mediterranean island or land, or in the Himalayas? In 1961, one of Time’s covers pictured physiologist Ancel Benjamin Keys, proponent of a diet that influences people even now. The acceptance of his findings eventually evolved into modern veganism and vegetarianism. It also heralded the beginning of a fatter America with more, not fewer, heart attacks and more cancers. The point here? When we take a singular approach, when we walk down a single path, we risk not ever knowing what we do not now know. In the shadow of Ancel Benjamin Keys’ popularization, U.S. government bureaucrats developed a food pyramid taught now for decades to be the basis of a healthful diet. Yet, like climate, the human body is complex. In fact, it’s more complex than climate; those who know that can see the difficulty in just trying to get to the truth about what constitutes a healthful diet.


I’ll repeat a personal story I’ve told elsewhere, one that has to do with diet. My parents died at ages 95 and 97. When they were in their late 80s, I heard my father ask my mother, “Do we have salami for lunch?” That processed, cured meat could often be found in their refrigerator. She replied, “No, this week we have balogna [aka baloney].” I heard this at a time when I was eating more salads. That they exceeded the average lifespan could be attributed to genetics, of course. But who knows for sure? I know he ate an apple every evening; I know that contrary to the advice about drinking eight glasses of water every day, I saw her drink water only once. Coffee was her drink of choice. Is there a single study that demonstrates irrefutably that those centenarians commonly encountered today avoided the detrimental diets identified by people like Ancel Keys?


Narrowing the Path vs. Widening the Path


We’re still stuck in many ways like those geologists who couldn’t accept Wegener’s multiple working hypotheses, but we can thank Wegener, the polymath, for broadening our approach to understanding through multiple approaches. All of us can ask whether or not we are taking as truth conclusions derived from single paths of inquiry and limited studies. In almost every aspect of our complex modern lives, we entertain ideas so derived. The process can be seen throughout society.


In 2023 we find ourselves walking the paths of educational philosophies that have turned schools and even the military into social engineering experiments, of economic policies thrust on populations, and of bureaucratic dictates thrust on industries, workers, and ultimately on consumers. Just as Ancel Benjamin Keys’ studies had limitations that were ignored in the proliferation of his ideas, so today we suffer the consequences of conclusions often derived from “one side of the story.”


Back to That Climate Stuff


One might argue that nutrition experts and climate alarmists do work through multiple hypotheses and that they are listening to many sides of a story. With regard to climate, we should acknowledge that there are, after all, people who work on coral reefs who say warmer oceans are killing corals, people who work on the spread of diseases who say warmer temperatures are spreading them, people who work on high latitude and high altitude ice who say that warmer temperatures are melting sea ice and glaciers, and people who operate satellites who say warmer temperatures are spreading vertically as well as horizontally. Some of these claims are a bit dubious, **** but it is relatively reasonable for people to believe they have reached a sound conclusion that the atmosphere is warming—though it does not necessarily portend an apocalyptic end. There are also some surface temperature data—though some are questionable—that indicate some warming occurred, especially between the 1980s and 1998. And the same goes for sea level data, some of it dubious because it’s hard to assess accurately against rising or sinking land. Undoubtedly, however, sea level has risen by at least a football field’s length since the last “low stand,” a eustatic change that occurred before humans entered the industrial age. All the preceding is just part of the tale. Note that the trend in warming paused for two decades after 1998, and note that warming, if driven by carbon dioxide, will mostly likely be neither geometric nor exponential, but rather logarithmic. *****


Has the warming resumed? If it’s a trend, then we need years to know—we can’t just rely on models that to this date have been untrustworthy. Nor can we believe measurements that have been fudged by people with an agenda. It is also possible to say that there might be atmospheric controls beyond greenhouse gas emissions, such as cloud type and cover, large circulation patterns, solar input, and some unknowns, including whether or not the current period isn’t just another one of as many as nine interglacials. It’s also possible to say reasonably that there is, in fact, no crisis. A warmer Earth might not be so bad though it might require some adaptation. But isn’t that what we humans did after the melting of the last glacial episode about eight to ten thousand years ago?


Our Compliant Brains


With tens of thousands of people crying, “It’s the end of the world if we don’t do something,” we find ourselves easily rejecting the occasional “denier,” the modern equivalent of Wegener. That’s how our brains work. It’s easier for us to conform than to rebel, easier to accept what the accepted group accepts than to follow the nonconformists, and easier to avoid the hard work of questioning by acquiescing.  Conclusions about climate, diet, economic policy, social mores, and the very nature of humans often rest on single-path approaches. Multiple working hypotheses present most brains with too much information to process easily. It took decades after Wegener published his ideas for scientists to meld the evidence into a unified Plate Tectonic Theory. Of course, today differs from Wegener’s yesterday in the way information and belief spread. Our ancient ancestors were unaware of distant phenomena; we are keenly aware of everywhere.


My New Year’s Resolution


Here’s my New Year’s Resolution: I resolve to consider at least two approaches to solving any problem or maintaining any belief. I know, however, that as with all my previous New Year’s Resolutions, I’ll probably not make it through January without breaking my resolution to employ multiple working hypotheses.


I have ears, but with age my hearing has weakened. It’s a fate that befalls many. When we are young and have the ability to hear everything, we don’t listen. As we age we gain the ability to listen, but lose the ability to hear as much as we once heard. Nevertheless, I resolve to consider what others consider and follow the paths they walk—till February.     


*What a world we live in! We need caveats and “buts” lest we offend someone or find ourselves wholly misinterpreted. We end up trying to cover ourselves against the onslaught of any person who might be offended even by an unintended offense. We’ve become caricatures of ourselves, memes on the go, Rumpelstiltskins stomping our feet at the risk of breaking the very special interest floors on which we adamantly stand. That is, however, part of the gist here. Whoever might be offended by my suggestion that there are often two sides to the story will never truly listen to the other side.


**Conte, Thompson, Moses. Earth Science: A Holistic Approach and Earth Science: An Integrated Perspective. 1994 and 1997. W. C. Brown, a Times Mirror publication.


***Abundant evidence demonstrates that after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) of 27,000 to 20,000 years ago warming occurred until a cold period, beginning about 12,900 years ago and ending about 11,700 years ago, called the Younger Dryas chilled the bones of our ancient ancestors. If you want to know more, study the LGM, the Late Glacial Interstadial (LGI), and the Younger Dryas. Note also that generations of humans survived both the cooling and the warming, even great swings in temperatures in North America, where rock shelters and encampments date to at least 16,000 years ago (e.g., Meadowcroft shelter in Avella, PA).


****Some reefs, a number of polar bear “families,” and glaciers have flourished in recent decades. Multitudes of international travelers might a cause of spreading tropical diseases. Remember that Washington, D. C., harbored malaria during the Little Ice Age that occurred in the centuries before and ended about the time of the American Revolution. Note, also, that urbanization allows diseases to attack many relatively confined people. And, of course, there’s the belief that Earth has climates that are “normal” when all paleontological, biochemical, and geologic studies have demonstrated the fluctuating nature of not only climates, but also of the proportion of carbon dioxide and methane in an atmosphere that generally lacked free oxygen until the so called Great Oxidation Event some 2.4 billion years ago.


*****The layperson, exposed to “one side” most likely assumes that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to a doubling of temperature. To that point, one might ask of a refrigerator repairman, “If I set my refrigerator at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, can you make it twice as cold?”

Remember the gist of that Biblical story of the Garden, that “Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil” tale? Essentially, God allows Adam and Eve to eat from all the plants in the garden paradise save one, the tree in the center. Their reaction? Well, they were human, so if you belong to the species, you know what they did because you have probably done something similar—even a small something like going 37 mph in a 35 mph zone or crossing a street mid-block as a jaywalker. If you remember, the serpent says to Eve, “For God knows that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” * They do the human thing, of course; they choose to eat the fruit. Hey! It was there for the taking, and the Big Guy didn’t seem to be around, just as the police weren’t around when you exceeded the speed limit or crossed the street as a jaywalker. Their action turned their knowledge of “good” into a memory and evil into a daily occurrence, including your speeding and jaywalking.


Of course, slightly exceeding the speed limit and jaywalking don’t seem to be as significant as defying a Divine Being, but then, they seem less because of that “Original Sin.” If no one gets hurt, what’s exceeding the speed limit by two mph or jaywalking have to do with evil? Don’t we have free will and the intelligence to exercise it? Don’t we, like God, turn daily chaos into order. Look at desks lined up in a classroom, at cups in one cupboard and dishes in another, and at roofs on top and walls on sides. We did that; we established a personal garden by “creating a house” and building a kitchen; we set the rules. Aren’t we already godlike?


Many, if not all, cultures have some sort of creation story that includes an explanation for the origin of evil. And many cultures have axiomatic morals. Take the Chinese, for example. There’s nothing wrong with the practical advice of Confucius or the spiritual advice of the Buddha, nothing wrong with any moral system that advocates peace and harmony, but there’s a brutal lesson in the Bible that might serve every culture. Trying to be “like God” usually doesn’t end well. And that is what the Chinese are learning the hard way from the epidemic they initiated. The virus they altered has cast them out of their comfortable garden. Millions are once again sick, and apparently over a million have died in the latter part of 2022 from the recent outbreak of the disease they “invented” because they believed they were godlike. They just couldn’t resist eating the fruit from that one tree. The virus was there among unknown numbers of other viruses, and they had the ability in the garden labs to experiment on it. They thought no one was looking, apparently, and in their hubris—that’s the essence of the biblical “first sin” by the way—they believed they could do whatever with whatever without personal consequences. Not so, as we know from the pandemic.


Do the Chinese have an analog to that biblical creation story from which they might have learned about hubris? Not sure; I seem to remember something about Pangu dividing yin from yang and being assisted by four dragons, but not an exact parallel to humans being thrown out of paradise. But what if  an analog of that Judeo-Christian story did underlie Chinese culture? Could it have prevented the deaths of millions from an evil let loose in China and spread around the world? Knowing the story of the Garden of Eden certainly hasn’t kept people in the Judeo-Christian tradition from wreaking havoc.    


One can reasonably argue that altering viruses and bacteria to discover mechanisms that undo their potency and mitigate their threat is prudent. Why suffer sickness and death when there’s a path to healing and recovery? Look what we did with smallpox. But the serpent knows our weakness: We want knowledge that makes us godlike and that gives us control over everything, including our “enemies.” Westerners are right to suspect that China’s gain-of-function research was, at least in part, sanctioned by the country’s military (and possibly supported indirectly or directly by American taxpayers through an NIH grant). That the Chinese were building a biological weapon at Wuhan is not beyond the range of reasonable conjectures. Why make a somewhat deadly virus even deadlier? Again, it’s one thing to discover a cure; it’s another to make a new disease. It’s one thing to live in the Garden; it’s another to go after the one fruit, as in Genesis, “So in that day soever you shall eat of it, you shall die the death.” Yeah, the Chinese speed and jaywalk just as you do—when no one is looking.


Like the Germans of World War I who learned that shifting winds can envelope them in their own poisonous gas, the Chinese have seen their weapon turn on them—if, as I say, it’s reasonable to suspect they were manipulating a coronavirus for military purposes. That lesson Adam and Eve had to learn the hard way the Chinese are now learning the hard way, and, who knows, like the consequence of the first couple’s “sin,” the consequences of the Chinese experimentation will follow the ensuing generations of humans. There appears to be a limit to our control over the garden into which we were born—but did not create. You might be able to rearrange your kitchen dish ware, but you can’t like some topologist turn your cups into Klein bottles. There are limits imposed by the nature of the world, or should I say, by the laws of nature. Reshaping a hardened ceramic cup will destroy the cup.


There were bugs and critters and viruses and bacteria on the planet before we came along with the hubris to say, “Let’s recreate the world in our image.” In many instances we’ve done no harm, the development of a smallpox vaccine is an example; polio, too. But the story of the Garden of Eden and that first sin of hubris stays with us. We retell it in our daily lives. It’s the same lesson of the Garden that underlies the plot of Jurassic Park. If you saw the film, you might recall the character played by Jeff Goldblum noting that “nature will find a way.” A coronavirus will, like those fictional recreated dinosaurs, find a way to survive and wreak havoc on humanity. That movie and the biblical story foreshadow exactly what the Chinese did in their hubris. I can picture a lab technician in Wuhan: “I can do this because no one—that is all those people outside my special garden—knows what I am doing. It’s just a little virus, anyway. Where’s the harm?” 


Unfortunately, we lack the knowledge to become omniscient and omnipotent. And we don’t create as much as we recreate. Try as we might, we just can’t account for accidents and malicious and pathological perpetrators. Did that altered virus escape by mistake or by human intention? Was there a serpent? An Eve? We might never know, but we do know that the Chinese and the rest of us have eaten the fruit of that forbidden tree, and as a result millions came to know death. For all of us the Garden isn’t as pleasant a place as it was just a few years ago. And like all the subsequent descendants of the story’s first parents, those of us who have stubbed a toe, broken a bone, or suffered an illness, can’t know what we lost. Into the unknown future, humans will think COVID-19 is as common as any cold and that it has been a human condition from the start.
But no. Just a few years ago that apple hung on the tree unpicked. Paradise was Paradise.
Of course, prior to the pandemic, we had our Garden of Weeds running back all the generations to the first “Cain and Abel.” Poisonous gas used in WWI and more recently in Japan and Syria, deadly viruses like smallpox kept “on hand” in bioweapons labs or in CDC freezers, and the ultimate weapons of mass destruction in nuclear arsenals, are the products of our pride, just as the story of Adam and Eve is a story of pride: They wanted to be “like God.” Yes, there are degrees of defiance, but all defiance is pride; from your jaywalking or speeding to the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons, all of us tell the tale of proud defiance: We can do whatever we want to do with whatever we choose. And, as history demonstrates, we’ll do it even if it means harming ourselves or future generations. The garden left to us by Adam and Eve is one filled with weeds.


Strange how our species responds to “having everything.” The paradises we live in are never enough. We seem to prefer the weeds outside a garden to the fruits inside it when just one fruit is forbidden. We prefer exile from Paradise to a life inside it. As the twenty-first century reveals, no lesson from the past seems to matter. We already know what pandemics can do, what poisonous gas can do, or what nuclear weapons can do; yet, we keep the bacteria and viruses, the sarin and mustard gas, and the bombs and their delivery systems in arsenals under the control of people out of control. In our hubris, we decide our fate.


It really doesn’t matter that we already have knowledge of good and evil. It really doesn’t matter that we already know the consequences of trying to be godlike. We already know the tale long told of a simple plucking and eating a fruit. We continuously ask, “What harm could a couple of extra miles per hour beyond the speed limit or a little jaywalking do when no one is looking?” And we ask, "If we can slightly change a virus, not in the pursuit of a vaccine, but rather in pursuit of a dubious or unethical or dangerous goal, why can't we do it? ** It's just a tiny spike or two on the surface of something so small we have to use an electron microscope to see it. If we can jaywalk with impunity when no one is looking..."



*Translations vary, of course. This is, with the exception of a couple of words I changed, the Douay version.

**Is this another example? https://apnews.com/article/science-health-biology-organ-transplants-minneapolis-1522fa40ec69e565d8c1c90e7c85deda 

If you aren’t Scrooge, maybe you should consider emulating him in at least one aspect of your life.


Is it fitting that humbug entered the language as a student expression during the beginning of the Industrial Age? Traced to the 1750s, the word came to mean “deceiver,” the noun, and “deceive by false pretext,” the transitive verb.


Eventually, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, by 1825, humbug evolved to mean “sham,” “imposition,” “hollowness,” and “spirit of deception.” The association with “spirit” aligns with the famous Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge in which the author employs three spirits to convert the irascible old Ebeneezer into a happy proponent of Christmastime charity and joy. * Until his emotional conversion, Scrooge, you’ll recall, was fond of dismissing Christmas with “Bah! Humbug!” until those spirits showed him Christmas past, present, and future. With regard to Christmas future, Scrooge asks at his untended gravestone whether or not his future is predestined or changeable. Happily, he discovers that his future is not predetermined on the basis of his past and that by changing his present course, he can shape his future.      


That the word humbug originated at the beginning of the Industrial and Technological Age does seem fitting. Advances in both industry and technology generated a class of wealth separate from aristocratic primogeniture and entitled inheritance, making those formerly relegated to servitude into a new class of keep-up-with-the-Joneses rich. A new form of entitlement entered the West with producers requiring merchants requiring bankers. It was this change in society that led to a new form of corrupt politician, one who could glom onto the wealth of others either through graft or through the power to distribute taxes. At the same time, the rise of widespread media in the form first of news sheets, then papers, radio, TV, and ultimately the Web, gave those in power means of controlling the narrative of the times.


In the twenty-first century, we stand at the culmination of efforts to control narratives and to spread humbuggery wide and far. Deceit is no longer localized. It can propagandize a nation or a continent. It can propagandize the world. We live in a world of scams and shams too numerous to mention. Some alter the lives of individuals. Others alter the lives of entire populations. The narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century dictators, for example, has led to the impoverishment, enslavement, and deaths of millions and to inordinate wealth for the elite few. And the humbuggery spread ironically through the quashing of personal skepticism. Whereas the skeptic can look at the narrative of the day and proclaim, “Bah, Humbug,” the manipulated masses have lost their inner Scrooges to a willful compliance to or acquiescence to the mainstream narrative.


Losing one’s inner Scrooge makes a potentially or formerly free person into a slave to the propagandists. Knowing this, self-aggrandizing politicians more intent on acquiring and keeping power and wealth than on serving constituents have aligned themselves with a compliant Press. Supported by a media that has lost its inner Scrooge, deceivers affect more people today than ever before, spreading deceptions with the aid of advanced technology, including AI’s algorithms. And in support, narrow-thinking pundits obsessed with an agenda they believe to be axiomatically true aid the dissemination of untruths. Want to know why Russian media and evenMoscow Patriarch supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine over Nazis? Want to go back to ask how Hitler convinced an entire nation that Jews were the cause of their woes? Want to look at the African-American population in the United States ignoring the historical facts of their slavery, oppression, and voting suppression by southern Democrats while favoring those same Democrats as better than the evil Republicans who supported their emancipation and civil rights? In each instance—and many more—the people lost their inner Scrooges. They lost their skepticism. They read or watched the news without once uttering, “Bah! Humbug”—unless it was to question the questioners, that is, those skeptical of the mainstream narrative. And all the while the masses relinquished their sense of doubt, those in control spread actual humbug, actual deceit with their help.


The recently revealed American government insider deception about “Russian collusion” with regard first to the Trump campaign of 2016 and then with regard to the Hunter Biden laptop, plus a plethora of social media feeds that mainstream editors and pundits perpetrated to shroud the nation with deception that favors one party over another, really make recent years a true Age of Humbug. Yet, the phenomenon of humbug as we know it today is as old as the word humbug’s first use in what has become ever more insidious propaganda. Public manipulation through widespread deceit goes back at least to the eighteenth century and the proliferation of newspapers. Whereas a former ecclesiastical and secular aristocracy simply set up inviolable rules for a largely rural or feudal society, a new self-proclaimed aristocracy of self-proclaimed intellectual and wealthy influencers gained political power and control of information. Nevetheless, today’s culmination of deception shouldn’t surprise anyone. We’ve been on a multi-century journey to this point, starting with the use of the word humbug by those university students almost three centuries ago. **


The modern industrial-technological complex that gave rise to modern humbuggery seems to have more than just a coincidental synchronicity with the proliferation of deceit  that they so adroitly exploit. Cannabis? Tobacco? Hexachlorophene? Red dye number whatever? Above ground nuclear testing? Bisphenol A (BPA)? Green tech in windmills that ceaselessly turn and a sun that always shines? From products to processing, individuals need to question and to doubt. You need to doubt.   


Caught in the networks of deception, the propagandized are either unaware of or do not care about the reality of collusion among politicians, cushioned bureaucrats, and media.  Those who have relinquished their inner Scrooge to the propagandists are living lives of self deception or fear. The latter rises from the threat of ostracism or defamation because today’s humbuggers have empowered themselves to silence any who might call their deceptions “humbug.” Compliance and exile seem to be the only choices modern westerners have. Think that is humbug on my part? Try countering the global warming mob with data that conflicts with models, with logic that conflicts with beliefs, such as the world will end in 12 years, *** or with complaints about 50,000 “experts” flying off to conferences just to agree that “something has to be done.


Those who have paid attention to recent deceptions by government officials, particularly by those in the Intel agencies and FBI, have a healthy Bah-Humbuggery skepticism about any pronouncement by compliant media and government officials bent on keeping their power through deceit in the daily narrative. Independent and skeptical Scrooges refuse to accept those self-serving agendas based on deceit. But there is a consequence to the temerity of showing one’s inner Scrooge: Relentless ad hominem attacks by total strangers and a vindictive Press. The inner Scrooge has to overcome an innate pressure to bond to likeminded people, a pressure that derives from our gregarious nature.


Yet, being skeptical is as much an inborn defense mechanism as gregariousness is a comfort mechanism. When politicians pronounce that the “border is closed” as hundreds of thousands race across it, when politicians claim that after a rise in gas prices, a slight fall “puts money back in the pockets of consumers” (though they still have to pay prices higher than those of preceding years), when an 8% inflation that drops to 7.8% is seen as economic growth for the middle class, and when they claim “inclusiveness” is proper while it comes from exclusion of unfavored subcultures and their agendas slowly become law, yes, when all this humbug and other humbugs are broadcast as wonderful news over which we commoners should be happy, just pointing out the humbuggery can get one ostracized by the politically powerful and condescending rich elite. The skeptic who counters the propagandist always takes a risk. The person with a different story to tell finds few who will disseminate that story. Skepticism breeds loneliness, the bane of a gregarious species.   


Oh! That Scrooge’s ghosts could visit all the hypocrites of our time! Oh! If Jacob Marley could just drag his chains once across the floor of the newsroom or the cathedral of the Patriarch of Moscow. If those spirits were to visit, we might find that our future isn’t predestined by propagandists, and that we are truly free to think and do as we wish. And Oh! We don’t have to be Scroogian misanthropes to say, “Bah! Humbug.” **** We just have to question, to doubt, and to recognize humbug when we see it. On the contrary, recognizing what is humbug will do more to ensure a future peopled by independent thinkers.




*1843. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas. If you haven’t read it, you have probably seen it in a theater or on TV in one or more of its many reiterations. The main character’s name has become part of the English language, generally indicating one with a misanthropic and greedy personality.


**In my own school days, my classmates and I used to use bunk as our substitute for humbug. Bunk derives from Buncombe County, NC, and a meaningless but prolonged congressional speech by its representative Felix Walker who wanted his constituents to believe he was “on the job” simply because he talked to the House. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he confessed, "but to Buncombe." Since 1841, bunk has evolved to mean “nonsense,” and, by extension, “humbug.” As a high school student, I was unaware of the etymology, but I did use it when I was skeptical: “That’s a bunch of bunk.”


***“Millennials, and Gen z, and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we’re like ‘the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'” @AOC #MLKNow #MLK2019 pic.twitter.com/fbUxr2C0tJ


****Skepticism isn’t misanthropy, though individual skeptics, like the fictional Scrooge, can be misanthropic.

“No Mose; no Mose,” chant those opposed to the expensive system to prevent flooding in Venice, Italy. But all the alternatives are also costly, and the muddy island on which Venice lies seems to need Mose, the system of barriers that rise to protect Venice from high water. Raising the barriers is a costly procedure, maybe something on the order of 300,000 Euros for each use. And the overall cost of the system, scheduled to completed in 2023, will be twice the original estimated costs. Saving Venice? Not my worry, however. I live a thousand feet above sea level in western Pennsylvania on sedimentary rock that underlies my house in layers miles deep; no chance of slowly sinking here though occasional subsidence from old mine collapses is a possibility. But the local river lies 300 feet lower than my house. Flooding? No chance on my hilltop. Venice, by contrast…


No place on the planet is free from natural and manmade * dangers. New Madrid, Missouri? Yep. Sits above an earthquake zone that could shake the continent’s interior. San Francisco? We all know about California’s many faults and their threats. Storms in the Midwest? Nor’easters along the eastern seaboard? Volcanic eruptions in Central America and along Cascades in the West, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico? Holy Cow! This is generally a very risky planet on which to live, and it seems that some of us have sought out the most dangerous environments as places to live or had the misfortune to be born in the midst of manmade and natural risk—not me, of course, because I live in quiet western Pennsylvania where earthquakes are rare and mild when they occur and storms are rarely life-threatening—have sought out the most dangerous environments as places to live. Venice, Italy? Muddy island on which people over centuries have built their lives only to find that mud compresses under weight. The city sinks even in the absence of sea level changes. The same thing happens in every muddy delta, including the Mississippi Delta and that expansive sea-level land of millions along the Ganges-Brahmaputra distributary streams. Did I mention that Bangladesh is also subject to Indian Ocean cyclones (hurricanes, typhoons), some of which have killed tens to hundreds of thousands of delta residents.


A fifty-car accident on the Ohio Turnpike during the December, 2022, winter storm resulted in many injuries and at least one death as of this writing. The Ohio Turnpike Commission, like the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, had put out advisories against travel during the snow-and-ice event. Nevertheless, people traveled, took the risk, and wrecked. That’s what our species does. We build on a muddy island during an interglacial epoch when sea level rises; we build along rivers that flood and shorelines that undergo storm surges; we build in earthquake zones and tornado alleys. That’s who we are. And in the aftermath of every destructive event, we rebuild as though the same event could not occur.


Flooding of communities along the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania isn’t a yearly occurrence, but the parking area called the Mon Wharf in Pittsburgh does get inundated rather frequently. And big floods do occur along the length of the river, washing over small towns and causing damage to the many houses on the Mon’s banks. But over the years, people have cleaned up the muds, replaced the carpets, couches, TVs, and dryers, and resettled in “the old homesteads.” That’s who we are. Risk be damned. And if it doesn’t come to us as in a river’s flooding, we go to it, skydiving, ice- and rock-climbing, white water rafting, skiing on treacherous slopes, swimming among sharks, and walking through territories where bears and mountain lions roam.


We build on unstable ground. If not on the muds of Venice, then on slopes. In fact, that house—my house—I mentioned above sits more than a hundred feet a stream that runs through the woods on my property. If one lives on a hill, one pretty much assures living near some slope, not necessarily a Tepui’s cliff, but certainly all hills imply valleys and lowlands. That river not far from my house goes by a name given by indigenous denizens. Monongahela is loosely translated as “River of Falling-in (or Sliding-in) Banks.” Landslides are common, as weak shales that underlie tough sandstones and limestones erode away. So, yes, I have a great setting in overlooking a forest and a winding stream populated by deer, groundhogs, turtles, rabbits, and numerous species of birds, but I have like those I fault for shortsightedness, built a house in an area with a specific risk—two, if one counts potential subsidence; three if one counts winter and spring storms, four if one counts 80-foot trees potentially falling on my house. Whoa! What am I doing here? Oh! That’s right. I live on Earth, where risk is endemic.


What’s a Venetian to do? What’s a Pennsylvanian to do? What’s anyone to do? Venice is sinking and will continue to sink as sea level continues its interglacial rise. Those who choose to continue their lives on that island or on muddy deltas, have little choice other than to leave or to spend money on maintenance, or on minimizing the risks. I suppose one can say that at the end of life each person can say, “Well, up until this point, I’ve been able to minimize risk.” The winners in life have minimized risk effectively, but it eventually overwhelms each of us in our ultimate demise, for just living a long life increases the risk of death. Not many 120-year-olds running around, are there?


But minimizing risk is the only way to live a long life on a risky planet. That so many humans have lost their lives in “foolish” risks is astounding to me. Yet, I am, if I examine my life, in some ways just as foolish. The lure of risk is powerful. That’s the reason for roller coasters and other theme park rides, isn’t it?


People will continue their efforts to save Venice until the muds eventually swallow the city. The costs will get increasingly more prohibitive, but generations from now, a new group of Venetians will discuss further expensive measures to save their homes and businesses. They will attempt to the very subsiding end to mitigate the risk they chose rather than abandon the city. People will continue to build along rivers that flood. And my descendants, post my departure to a realm of no risks, might be asking whether or not they should unload the cedar house on the hill before a landslide or falling tree claims it.


Remember that this is not your practice life. Anticipate what you can, and adapt when anticipation fails you. And when adaptation fails, get out, run away, hide, or do whatever it takes to minimize the consequences of risk. Venice? Great tourist spot, but I wouldn’t want to live there.      






*Manmade. Interesting choice of word, Donald, especially in the context of the U. S. Marines eliminating all use of “Sir,” and “Ma’am,” in a politically correct change that will no doubt help our military break things and kill people better than our enemies—who, unless I’m wrong don’t care about political correctness when breaking things and killing people are on their agendas. But, hey, this is the twenty-first century and almost, figuratively speaking, 1984. Poor Neil Armstrong. Had he made that first-ever trip to the moon today, he would have been castigated by the PC crowd for not saying, “That’s one small step for a person, one giant leap for persons regardless of their choice of gender—or nowadays, species.” As long as truly dangerous risks don’t threaten, the PC crowd will make the choice of words the risk. But I can’t imagine a U. S. Marine in the heat of battle thinking, “Now, what’s the politically correct way to address my captain? I don’t want to offend….” What’s that expression we used to say as kids? “Sticks and stones might break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Instead of shooting bullets, marines should shout “sirs,” and “ma’ams” at the enemy; certainly, the enemy will be doing that to a politically correct military force.

In A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young,” the fifth stanza ends with the line “And the name died before the man.” Housman speaks of those many athletes whose feats came and went and whose names disappeared in the dust of time. Not so with former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris, who made arguably the most memorable play in football, a play known for a half century as “The Immaculate Reception” after the conception of Mary.


Franco’s name, frozen in acrylic beneath his bust in the football hall of fame, has outlasted the man; his deeds on the turf carried him to Canton and memorialization. And few football fans, even younger fans, can say they never saw a rerun of that famous catch. At the end of this week of Franco's death, his team, the Steelers removed by two generations of players, and their opponents, the Raiders, intend to play an anniversary game honoring that catch. Franco, needless to say, but voiced by many anyway, will not be there.


At his funeral, we will see an enactment of Housman’s line in the second stanza, “Today, the road all runners come,/Shoulder-high we bring you home.” Carried on the shoulders of teammates either actually or figuratively those many years ago at the end of a game he won in spectacular fashion, he will once again be carried “home.” And the town itself will become “a stiller town” now that he has reached the ultimate end zone.


Franco, in my personal experience, always seemed to care about people. When my daughter represented her parochial elementary school because she won the Readathon, Franco, who attended the award ceremony for all the Readathon winners, patiently posed with each child as parents, awed by him and proud of their children, snapped photos. Meeting him by chance in her adult life, she found him to be patient and friendly, as though nothing else was important save that chance meeting. My younger son had a similar experience after Franco came to our hometown for a football awards dinner. Recently, that same son met Franco at an event to which they both were invited, with Franco once again acting as though nothing was more important than that moment in time and space.


In posing over the years for those many pictures with fans and their children, Franco did in each encounter what so many have done over the past half century, stopped time by hitting “pause” on the video to see that catch. Anyone who has ever landed at the Pittsburgh airport has seen alongside a statue of George Washington and Nelly Bly the moment of the catch captured in the figure of Franco Harris with outstretched arms scooping up the ball before it hit the turf. Good company for Franco, George and Nelly. Franco, like the other two, has come to symbolize the area that harks back to Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt, Fort Necessity, Braddock’s grave, and the confluence of rivers. Franco personifies the area now as much as the country’s founding father and a woman who was as much as surveyor of the human landscape as Washington was a geographical surveyor.


I find it interesting that Mary has become associated with football. At the end of close games, quarterbacks launch “Hail Mary” passes to the end zones in hopes of a miraculous catch, each successful one becoming an analog of Franco’s Immaculate Reception. But few of those miraculous catches carry their meaning beyond the fandom of a particular team. Franco’s catch seems to transcend all; it belongs to city, region, era, and league. It was the birth of a championship team. The Christmas Eve memorial game gives evidence of that. I don’t recall the league memorializing a single historical play with a special televised game. And that it comes on Christmas Eve…


Think about it for a moment. Mary, whose conception was deemed immaculate gave birth in a humble setting in what has become as enduring an event as humans have recorded in art, architecture, and culture. That moment is memorialized every year throughout the world. The celebration of that “miraculous” catch is primarily an American matter, but even international visitors who land at the airport can’t help but notice the statue of Franco.


Franco, the great teams he had in support, and that catch have become indicative of American sports legend. But I prefer to remember him as a public figure with genuine patience in a fast-paced world. Yes, the statue and Hall of Fame bust memorialize him; the repeated showing of that catch does so, also. And the fiftieth anniversary game will capture the memory for a new generation of fans and athletes as older fans watch in nostalgia. But I prefer to remember Franco as one posing for a picture with a little girl, speaking to young football players at a banquet in a small town, and stopping to talk during chance meetings with my children in their adulthood as though no other matters weighed on his schedule. When Franco was with people, he was truly with them, attentive and kind, patient always with fans who associated their lives with his team, that catch, and the subsequent years of football dominance.


And while it’s inevitable that Franco’s catch and life will probably not endure as long as Mary’s immaculate birth and her eventual delivering a baby in a stable, both his catch and life will last as long as people play American football, go to Canton’s Hall of Fame, or pass though Pittsburgh’s airport. To have a moment in one’s life depicted in a statue placed next to George Washington’s statue reveals the honor afforded to Franco by the people of Pittsburgh. Would that any one of us could be so honored for a momentary accomplishment and an excellent career, or for a life marked by patience for others.


The most appropriate memorial to Franco is for each of us to freeze the moment of every encounter, to be with the person next to us as though there is nothing more important or pressing. Make every encounter a Franco encounter.

Mr. S. and Mr. H. talk.


Mr. S.: The thought occurred to me that context is everything.


Mr. H.: Sure, especially if you consider that the Universe is the context. Then, yes, context is everything. It’s all there is. Did you ever consider the corollary that everything is context?


Mr. S.: But I was thinking smaller than that. I know the Universe is the overriding context—and don’t even bring up that there might be other universes where the context is different; I was thinking more historically. Slavery in America, for example, existed in the context of a history of slavery, from ancient to modern times, or, in the case of America, until the Emancipation Proclamation abolished the practice. Of course, slavery still exists though many don’t seem to acknowledge it. In that historical context, however, I suppose most people who were born in the American South saw slavery as the “natural order of things,” maybe as a hierarchy of life they tied to their interpretation of the Bible. Slavery in America began in an era when many European Christians believed that both the distance from the mythical Garden of Eden and descent from Noah’s son Ham distinguished “humans” from “savages.”
    Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan. Hold on a minute…Let me look…yes, here it is in Genesis chapter 9: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” At the time of the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s, that passage had come to mean racial differences determined a hierarchical human totem pole. Ham’s offspring were thought to be darker skinned and to live farther from that Garden of Eden.


Mr. H.: Sorry. Catch me up on that. It’s been a long time since I heard the story of Ham.


Mr. S.: Well, a good example of the belief lies in the story of Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle, the ship famous for carrying Charles Darwin around the world. FitzRoy held that concept of “inferior humans” before, during, and even after the famous voyage. For the bright, but fundamentalist captain, Noah’s outcast son spawned generations of savages, including the denizens of Tierra del Fuego, four of whom FitzRoy tried to “christianize” by taking them to England, dressing them in British clothes, and sending them to school. The proof of their innate savagery lay for FitzRoy when one of them, Jemmy Button as he was called, returned to his native land, where he immediately went back to his “primitive ways,” shunning the education and the fashion of the British. That attitude of condescension based on the context of Ham’s descendants was pervasive among 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century Europeans. It certainly played a role in FitzRoy’s beliefs and actions.
    
Mr. H.: So, you are saying the context of both religion and culture was a driver of enslavement.


Mr. S.: Yes, but I really wanted to make a different point. I want to stress the significance of the context in which millions of humans lost their personal freedom. And I could point out other contexts that drove people to believe and act as they have.


Mr. H.: Makes some sense. Let me guess. There’s a lesson in all this.


Mr. S.: It’s not a difficult lesson to see. Context is everything. If I had been born in the American South in the early nineteenth century, I would probably have followed the belief of the day. Oh! I know. You want to tell me that anyone who was born then and there had a choice. But I would counter with today’s examples of gang members reared in inner cities without father figures, educated—or rather kept in ignorance—by failing public schools in economically depressed neighborhoods, and taught that they are victims. Sure, some of them break free from that context, but most don’t; thus, the many crimes and murders that disproportionately plague that inner city culture. It would be prideful of me to claim that I would have been the exception, the one who could break free from the context of southern culture in the era of slavery. And yes, I know that there were southerners who funneled people to freedom through the Underground Railroad. I just don’t know, given the context of the twenty-first century that I would have been one given the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the South. Can I truly understand a context when I am inside it? Can I truly understand it when it is part of who I am? 


Mr. H.: You have me thinking. I guess I could break down my own life into various contexts. I see that some people live almost exclusively in the context of political ideologies; some, in the context of religious beliefs; and others, in the context of some a like climate change or on rights based on identity. And I can’t go without mentioning the contexts of family, job, and health. I mean, look what some people do in the context of a chronic or terminal illness.


Mr. S.: I suppose you missed all those contexts associated with suicide, murder, and even war.


Mr. H.: I did, thanks. Plus, I failed to mention that contexts can be external or internal. Take all those riots in Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, D.C., and…just take all those riots. People rioting in one place because of something or someone in another place—externally driven by the context of an event or a statement and internally driven by some need to loot and destroy. Look at what just happened in Iran, where women acted in the context of the “morality police” killing Masha Amini. Look at Russians leaving their country en masse because of Putin’s ill-advised war in Ukraine. There’s one, by the way! Look what Sweden and Finland did in response to the context of that invasion.


Mr. S.: Hmmnnn. Now that I think of it, telling children to see their lives in the framework of contexts might be a good move if they can be convinced that they are not victims of context. No doubt many teen suicides result from a belief that context is Everything; yet, the contexts of so many teen suicides are probably as limited in scope as mean girls shunning or shaming, bullies harassing, or a family member’s leaving or dying.


Mr. H.: Each of us could benefit every moment we understand the context of our actions.


Mr. S.: Where have you been? Isn’t that what mindfulness is all about, knowing the context of one’s thoughts and actions?


Mr. H.: I guess so. Mindfulness is context awareness now that I come to think of it. I’m going home to think about the contexts of my life.


Mr. S.: You’re welcome.

Desperation is dangerous. It limits the search for solutions. The desperate take ill-advised chances. You can see desperation’s effects in children abandoned at borders during the current Great Migration that historians generations from now will be able to assess. You can see its effects in the United States as millions surge toward Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. You can see its effects in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and even South Korea, where Russians have fled to avoid conscription into Putin’s increasingly more desperate battle that initially drove millions of desperate Ukrainians to migrate. You can see it in the diaspora of Venezuela, Syria, and Northern Africa. You can see it in Iran and in China, where oppressive governments impose the most restrictive laws. Just about everywhere you look, you can see desperation and its effects.


Individuals have long painted themselves into corners from which they see no hope for extrication. Nowadays, whole populations multiply what individuals have done: Take ill-advised chances. You can hear the desperation of Russian soldiers in intercepted phone calls to their loved ones at home; you can see how desperation has driven Russian soldiers to revolt and risk summary execution; you can hear it in the voices of Russian pundits that keep broaching the subject of nuclear war, the most ill-advised of all desperate acts humans have ever contemplated. Desperate times, indeed!


It’s now a world fraught with desperation, but it might be no more so than in centuries prior to the pandemic, World War I, and World War II. There have always been wars, have always been people conscripted into military engagements that held no personal value for them, and there have always been evil leaders running bad governments that suppressed their own people as all could witness even in the “free world” during the pandemic and as a constant in socialist and communist countries since their inception.


Desperation has long been a personal and social malady. Prior to its widespread proliferation through media, desperation spread by word of mouth. Today, it spreads its shadow overnight as social and mainstream media convince more people that they are desperate, that they have either backed themselves into an inextricable corner or been backed into that corner by some group or movement. Even governments enhance desperation’s spread. Take Putin’s gathering a soccer stadium full of Russians to announce in a televised speech Russia’s “special operation” to protect itself from supposed Nazis in Ukraine and from evil NATO members that seek to destroy the “motherland.” The cheering crowd in that stadium did not seem to recognize that they were backing themselves into a corner of desperation until months after the event, when body bags began showing up in villages and young men, conscripted to become cannon fodder, began calling home from the Front. Now, almost a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the world hears desperate Russian spokesmen talking about a greater likelihood of “going nuclear.”


Commonsense advises us to plan every paint job. Commonsense tells us to anticipate a way out before we paint a floor. And commonsense reveals that how we begin a project determines how we end it.*


Every family and every teacher who has encountered desperate people doing desperate acts should be motivated to include one very important lesson in every child’s curriculum: How to paint a floor from wall to door.




*Those who vote into power people who favor socialist and Marxist governments fail to plan their “paint jobs.” One need only look at the desperation of those who allowed socialist and communist governments to dictate how to paint their “floors.” One need only look at the historical migrations from “rooms” painted from door to corner.


            From Inside Out


    I painted the floor from outside in,
    Not knowing how I should begin.
    And now I find myself quite trapped
    Because my future was not mapped.
    If there’s a lesson all should know
    As they live and as they grow,
    It’s that for all the downcast mourners
    The world comprises many corners,
    And none provide an easy respite,
    They make, instead, the cornered desperate.
    “If I were you,” the wiseman said,
    “It’s best when people plan ahead
    “And paint the room from inside out,
    “Escape is then beyond a doubt.”