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

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

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

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

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

 
Peace might be the exception, not the rule.  
 
Tens of millennia ago humans walked across a land bridge to occupy Australia. * That bridge of migration is currently under water that separates Papua New Guinea from Australia. The early settlers came from the Northwest, moving southward to spread throughout the continent over an estimated 5,000 years. For some, the travel stopped at the place now known as Port Moresby, now isolated from Australia by the sea and located on Papua New Guinea. 
 
For the state departments of a number of countries, Port Moresby is on a travel advisory. Yes, you guessed it: Crime, violent crime is the problem. Fueled by widespread poverty, the crime makes living in a tropical paradise a living Hell. But, I suppose, the circumstances in Port Moresby are little different from, say, living in Chicago during weekend shooting sprees. The crime index for Port Moresby is 80.95; for Chicago, 64.88. Need more comparisons?
 
Port Moresby is second in crime index only to Caracas. It’s ahead of South Africa’s Pretoria, Durban, and Johannesburg, Brazil’s Natal, Fortaleza, Rio, and Recife, and even ahead of Kabul, Baltimore, and Detroit. Weekends in Chicago are, by comparison, mere flies in the ointment. Port Moresby, after tens of thousands of years of occupation, has like so many younger settlements around the world, not discovered a walkable path to peace. By the way, in case you’re curious, on the other end of the crime spectrum index lie Zurich (16.4), Quebec City (14.76). Taipei (13.45), Doha (12.04), and the safest, Abu Dhabi (11.54). Darwin, also on that ancient path of migration that peopled Port Moresby, has a crime index of 56.21, about the same as that of Las Vegas. **
 
Port Moresby, if you remember your World War II history, was a key objective of the Japanese military, and it became MacArthur’s headquarters. Its people sided with the dominating force, but they had little choice. The point here is a simple one: Port Moresby is, if not the center of Hell on Earth, then it is surely one of its suburbs, and it has been so probably not just during a world war, but for untold millennia. This is how encyclopedia.com describes it: “Beyond the village, oral traditions and early historical records suggest that Motu engaged in warfare or conducted raids intermittently against other neighboring peoples and even sometimes against other Motu villages. Such warfare, endemic in this area, was eventually suppressed by the British administration after its establishment in 1884.” 
 
The 1942-43 battles for control of Port Moresby by allied U.S. and Australian forces against Japanese forces went to the Allies after the famous naval confrontation known as the Battle of the Coral Sea and battles between Australians and Japanese on the infamous Kokoda Track. That “track” is itself a road through Hellish violence, and its making belies the statement above that the British “suppressed” the endemic violence of the area. The Kokoda Track is a narrow trail cut in 1899 by Henry Hamilton Stuart-Russell to connect Port Moresby to the North Coast. As Stuart-Russell progressed through forests and over mountains, he met resistance by the indigenous Motu. In the skirmishes between British and Motu, the British killed many of the latter who were unfamiliar with firearms and who believed their shields afforded them protection. Thus, even if the Motu might, after thousands of years of off-and-on violence, have established a peaceful region, they always faced the threat of violence from outsiders. Port Moresby and its surrounding area attract violence the way carrion attracts flies. 
 
Tens of thousands of years of violence with only intermittent periods of peace: Which human condition prevails? Is peace the exception and not the rule? Is peace the exception in Caracas, Kabul, and Detroit? Is it the exception everywhere?
 
Notes:
*Flinders University. Mapping the ‘superhighway’ travelled by the first Australians. Phys.org. 29 April 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-superhighways-australians.html   Accessed April 30, 2021. Stefani A. Crabtree, et al., Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the peopling of Sahul. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01106-8
 
**Numbeo, Crime Index by City 2021: ​https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp  

Where to begin? Where to begin? This problem we humans have with appearance and reality is ironically, a real problem. Well, if not real, then persistent and by persistence becomes real. How do we distinguish between the two especially when we usually observe only partially, and even on the so-called rigorous level of science, we see in degrees of refinement or resolution. 
 
Maybe what I just noted, the level of resolution, is at the heart of our problems with appearance and reality. Think pixels as an example. Those QLED TVs have resolution that when first viewed elicits a “Wow, that looks real” response. Note our desire to make our simulacra indistinguishable from whatever we wish to simulate. Black-and-white grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 can’t compare with the full color 2021 images of that little helicopter on Mars. We’re now so accustomed to seeing in high definition that we expect to see it; we are disappointed by a grainy view. 
 
Some appearances are not the realities we initially believe them to be though we accept them as such. Mirages, for example. They are, of course, “real” appearances insofar as they are observable by multiple people, even people looking from slightly different perspectives. Rainbows prove their ephemeral nature, but appear real by lingering. I think of a spring evening’s drive along the National Road eastward toward Chestnut Ridge in the distance. I was following rain that was approaching the mountain; the low Sun had broken through the dissipating clouds behind me, and a rainbow, a bright one, arced before me. As I drove for miles, I could see the rainbow, always, of course, receding from me. As you know from your own experience, I was incapable of reaching it, of driving under it or through it as though I were passing beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. I knew the rainbow’s nature, but I also knew that it was a reality that drivers in my lane could share. I assumed that those drivers, like me, knew that the refraction of light off millions or billions of discrete raindrops separated by gaps differed from the more tightly packed atoms in the Gateway Arch. It’s a matter of resolution, the solidity of a “real” object like that arch merely the result of our inability to see gaps between atomic nuclei 100,000 times smaller than their electron clouds, the former like a pea in the middle of a football field with nothing between it and the cloud in the end zone.  
 
With regard to those old grainy films like the moon movies of Armstrong-Aldrin, I might note that the brain fills in gaps, a point you well know and experience daily. That blind spot in each of your eyes means that you must, even if just over a tiny part of your field of vision, fill in the missing pieces. What you see, that is, the appearance you accept, you have a role in making. But after a half-billion years of evolution, your brain is capable of closing gaps and turning appearances into realities, or at least, into views you can accept as realities. That we can be fooled by optical illusions is an argument against the infallibility of seeing, of flawlessly distinguishing between appearance and reality. Think, also, of black-and-white movies with damsels and dancers dressed in dazzling colors you cannot see but can imagine. Before the age of Technicolor, Hollywood did not make elaborate sets and costumes in black and white; set and costume designers used colors only they could see but the audience could only imagine. 
 
In an age of ubiquitous videographers, we have much to see in both high definition and full color. Or should I say, we see much in HD and color from a distance, such as videos taken from a space station or from rovers on the moon or on Mars. We also see more than our predecessors ever saw, from places on Earth where we never stood and at times when we were otherwise occupied. We have access to videos of events that took place in our absence. 
All those videos give rise to questions about what appears to be reality, especially as we see controversial videos. Do we have the best resolution? Do we share a view as the drivers in my lane that spring evening shared the appearance of the constantly receding rainbow? It’s a modern problem, isn’t it? Not only do we have to ask whether or not we trust our eyes, but also whether or not the video captures a “reality.”
 
Our ancestors who lived prior to the 1832 invention of the phenakistoscope didn’t have to fill in the gaps of simulacra though they had the mechanism known as the persistence of vision. The brain’s holding onto a past image allows us to see a continuum of action that appears when a series of still images runs in sequence before our eyes just as it allows us to fill in a scene with blind-spot gaps. Today, we’re all about persistence of vision, about holding onto appearances to make them “real.”
 
And even when we don’t fill in a gap during an initial viewing, we can rely on replays, now enhanced with computer graphics that enable us to have multiple perspectives, godlike perspectives that cross both time and space. And short of having access to enhanced computer compilations of events from different angles, we always have multiple videos from different eye-witness videographers. We get to choose the perspective we want. We get to choose the appearance we want. Seems we can drive beneath the rainbow. We can even have a deceased actress or actor appear in a film thanks to artificial intelligence and ironically to our ability to dissociate our minds from reality. 
 
Nowhere along the human spectrum does the problem of distinguishing between appearance and reality become more significant than in social interactions. Uncounted billions of humans have over the life of the species found themselves subjected to judgments based more on appearance than on reality. Filling in the gaps to make the world around us isn’t just a visual mechanism. We also fill in the gaps associated with emotions and behavior. Regardless of our blind spots, we see a continuum, not a grainy view interrupted by gaps. 
 
It’s in smoothing out the images of the outside world through not only the persistence of vision but also the persistence of belief and emotion that frequently drives us to accept appearances as reality. What we see in others is often just a vision in our mind’s eye. As social beings, however, we have the ability to share such appearances and thus to make them, like that rainbow seen by all the drivers headed in the same direction I was headed, a shared reality. 
 
Whatever road you drive, you will have others in your lane, others who see what you see. You, in turn, see what they see. Just hope that as you can recognize the difference between mirage and reality, between appearance and reality, and between a rainbow and a Gateway Arch, that the others in your lane can also make the distinction. 

“Sam, did you hear about those French people living in a cave for 40 days?” *
 
“No, Gwendolyn, I didn’t. Who volunteers for such stuff? And why 40 days, is it some biblical thing, like wandering with Moses for 40 years or taking your canteen to walk with Jesus for 40 days? You know, that number 40 has biblical significance, don’t you? It represents a period of trial. Think the 40 days of Lent for a modern equivalent. Or, now, I’ll think of 15 cave people who drop the last letters of words and names. Did they build les maisons in the caves or sleep on the cave floor in a pile of bat droppings? And what’s the deal with not pronouncing that final ‘s’ in maisons?”
 
“Well, you don’t say ‘I-k-now,’ so what’s the deal with not pronouncing the ‘k’ or the ‘w’ in the word know when, as the French would say without pronouncing the ‘s,’ ‘tu parles’ or without saying the ‘z,’ ‘vous parlez’? How did we get on French pronunciation? I was asking if you knew about the experiment that involved 15 people living in a dark cave.”
 
“Okay, Gwen, so 15 Frenchmen went into a cave to live. Big deal. What was the point? Native Americans, heck, people all over the world lived in caves before we learned to build les maisons we live in today.”
 
“I was reading the article, Sam, because the cost of the experiment run by the Human Adaption Institute was $1.5 million. One and a half million bucks! They called the experiment 'Deep Time.' What’s wrong with people. Over a million bucks to stick people in a cave that cavemen, not just the Homo sapiens sapiens ones, but the Neanderthal ones, also, did for free. I remember going on one of the Mammoth Cave tours during which the park ranger explained how a Dr. Croghan put tuberculosis patients in the cave because the air in there was supposed to cure them.” **
 
“How did that work out?”
 
“Not well, as you can imagine. There’s an interesting quotation from one of the people who used to serve the en-caved people. Alfred, a guy who served meals to them, said, ‘I used to stand on that rock and flow the horn to call them to dinner. There were 15 of them and they looked more like a company of skeletons than anything else.’ That was back in the winter of 1842. After five of his experimental cave dwellers died, Dr. Croghan ended the experiment. You can still see two of the stone maisons in the cave. This is 2021. What the heck were the people at the Human Adaption Institute thinking? Or, should I ask, ‘What the heck were the people of the institute ingesting?’”
 
“What did they eat, by the way?”
 
“Get this. Get this. With their food the French cave-dwellers also swallowed little capsules with thermometers that transmitted data to a portable computer. That is, the thermometers transmitted until they pooped them out. A million and a half bucks! A MILLION AND A HALF! How many poor people actually living in caves today could have had an apartment with electricity and running water for that amount? Did you know that the L.A. Times once ran a story that there were 30 million Chinese currently living in caves? Talk about a breeding ground for tuberculosis! And it’s not just the Chinese. There are not 15, but fifteen hundred people living in caves in Coober Pedy, Australia. Twenty-first century, and people are still living in caves. And not only those who have no alternative housing, but 15 volunteer Frenchmen!”
 
“I see this has you pretty worked up, Gwen. Certainly, there must have been some science behind these experimental cave-dwellers.”
 
“Yeah. Big science, Sam. The ‘scientists’ wanted to monitor sleep patterns, social interactions, and behavioral reactions. Couldn’t just go ask 30 million Chinese cave-dwellers or 1,500 cave-dwellers in Coober Pedy. Had to spend a million and a half bucks on something that actual cave-dwellers do free—well, that is, except for swallowing a tiny thermometer. And the 30 million in China and 1,500 in Coober Pedy just don’t live in caves for 40 biblical days of trial; they live there year ‘round, every year, every decade. And surprise, surprise. What happened? As you could guess, the French people in the experiment lost track of how long they were in the cave. Geez. Even Dr. Croghan’s tuberculosis patients had watches, and that was way back in the mid nineteenth century. And then, when the French cave-dwellers emerged, they supposedly looked ‘visibly tired.’ Surprised? Me neither. But, million-and-a-half-buck experimenters included a ‘chronobiologist,’ I guess some guy who works with biological clocks to draw some conclusion. I actually don’t care. Adaptation Institute, Adaption, whatever. What about the people thrown into the Black Hole of Calcutta? What about people thrown into a dark trailer to be smuggled across the U. S. border with Mexico? What about those times when I was so tired, I fell into a deep sleep and awoke not knowing for a moment how long I slept or even where I was?”
 
“Sounds as though Dr. Croghan’s turberculosis experiment missed the mark on all he could have studied.”
 
“No. He and the others in Mammoth Cave knew that they were in sync. What’s that they say about college girls living as roommates? Of course, people living together sync their lives, whether they live in darkness or in light. By the way, did I mention that they laid out the dead tuberculosis patients on a rock now known as Corpse Rock? So, anyway, Dr. Croghan didn’t run a high-tech experiment just as the Chinese cave-dwellers aren’t running a high-tech experiment with poopable thermometers. What Croghan and the others noted about living in a dark, damp cave was what any of us would have noted about human interactions without spending a million and a half dollars. In fact, aren’t we always observing sleep habits, synced lives, and behavioral adaptations? I guess all the twenty-first century cave-dwellers around the world  don’t know they are running an experiment in human adaptation, or adaption, or whatever. Bet all those real cave-dwellers couldn’t wait to find out what the French discovered after spending a million plus bucks.”
 
 
Notes:
*Brito, Renata. Out of the Cave: French isolation study ends after 40 days. Phys.org. 24 April 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-cave-french-isolation-days.html  Accessed April 24, 2021. The story was reported by the Associate Press.
 
**If you would like to read about Dr. Croghan’s experiment, see the National Park Service’s story at file:///Users/Taylor/Downloads/Tuberculosis%20in%20Mammoth%20Cave%20(U.S.%20National%20Park%20Service).html
 
 
 
 
 

The discovery that grasses can “borrow” or steal genes from neighboring vegetation through an unknown mechanism plants an idea in my head: What if, now bear with me, what if humans could do the same? * And what if, again, just speculating here, what if we discover someday that the saying “It’s in my genes” proves to be more accurate than we now imagine? Would, mind you, I’m running through a stream of ideas, would it be possible to breed a peaceful human type that enhances peace by both nature and nurture? 
 
I suppose you’re going to argue that nurture plays a more important role than nature in making a peaceful society. If you adopt that argument, you side with William Golding’s theme in his Lord of the Flies, that humans are basically savage and that the only control on that savagery lies within a civilization. I say “within” because we have a history of accepting violence against people of other civilizations through war, an event that justifies killing outside the arbitrary boundaries of socially and politically unified people within the society at war. Something in there, in that group of blood and social relatives says, “Okay, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in the ‘family.’” So, assuming you have adopted the Golding psychology of inherent savagery, I think the only recourse you have to explain peace is nurture. Train little humans to be peaceful as they begin their life’s journey through the maze of conflicting ideas and behaviors that are characteristic of any society’s accepted membership. What do we nurture today? Don’t we define a group, define outside groups, and train kids it’s okay to hurt the latter but not the former. Has there ever been a year without a war somewhere?   
 
But, as I was asking above, but what if, just what if, there could be a peaceful nature, maybe one that unfolds as an expression of a gene? What if peace came from biology and not from culture? 
 
That Golding thing I mentioned, is that your view? Are you peaceful because of civilization’s, that is specifically, because of your civilization’s restraints? Are you a veiled monster like the neatly uniformed sailors who rescue the savage raggedly-dressed boys-run-wild at the end of Golding’s novel? Neat but savage: Isn’t that what the sailor represent? They’re at war, you know—but not at war with their shipmates. Do you accept society’s limitations, its restrictions because you see that deep-down savagery that would emerge without such controls? 
 
Golding published his novel in 1954, just a year after anthropologist Siegfried F. Nadel published “Social Control and Self-Regulation.” Nadel begins his article with:
 
            “No one will quarrel with the assertion that social existence is controlled existence, for we all accept a certain basic assumption about human nature—namely, that without some constraint of individual leanings the coordination of action and regularity of conduct which turn a human aggregation into a society could not materialize” (265). ** 
 
Nurture. See. Not nature. At least in Nadel’s view. And in his studies of various peoples in eastern Africa, Nadel used the Nuba as an example of what I wrote above. As K. E. Read expresses it:
 
            “[Nadel] pointed out that among the Nuba the evaluation of a crime such as homicide and the sanctions which it provokes, varies according to whether it occurs ‘within the clan or outside it, in or outside the political unit.’ Homicide within the Nuba kinship group or clan is an unpunishable offence, in the sense that it does not provoke forceful retaliation by the members of the clan or its segments. Between clans, however, punishment is exacted in the form of blood feud and revenge” (202). ***
 
Sounds like the Hatfields and McCoys along the West Virginia-Kentucky border of Big Sandy River in the nineteenth century, doesn’t it? Acceptable violence, that is, acceptable violence as long as it is perpetrated on someone outside the clan. So, I return to my speculation: Are we deep-down Golding-style savages restrained only insofar as we adhere to society’s nurture?
 
And if that’s so, if, as I was speculating, we are deep-down savages, wouldn’t it behoove us to look for some mutant among us, some deep-down incarnation of peace, that one in a 7 billion with a peace gene, so we could borrow, steal, rent, or, as the phytologists say with regard to grasses, laterally transfer that gene? Wouldn’t it be great that if such an incarnation of peace were available, that we could do what grasses do, that is, that we could transfer the peace gene into people, all people? And once implanted in the DNA of this generation of humans, wouldn’t that gene find expression in the next, a mutation preserved because it is a favorable one, favorable because it extends the life of members of the species on average in the absence of inter-clan conflict and inter-civilization war? Why, wouldn’t such a gene even prevent domestic violence? 
 
Apparently, ubiquitous grasses became ubiquitous because they had the ability to somehow incorporate genes from other plants that were favorable to the survival of the grass. We don’t know how they do it, but we know that grasses do, in fact, borrow genes. Now if only we could figure out a way…
 
Okay, I know I’m just speculating. And there’s a counter argument. If we are, in fact, controlled by biology, even the biology of peace, then what’s that say about our belief in mind, or psyche, or freedom, especially the freedom we call free will? Could we through lateral gene transfer make humanity an analog of gentle Golden Retrievers? Then what might happen to the aggression that drives us through some Will to Power that also leads to invention? Would civilization have become civilization without invention? Is there some savage drive toward success in a risky world that was populated by large and dangerous carnivores? Is our savagery a survival mechanism? 
 
I think of Carl Sandberg’s “The Grass”:
 
            Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
            Shovel them under and let me work--
                                    I am the grass; I cover all.
 
            And pile them high at Gettysburg
            And pile them high at Yres and Verdun.
            Shovel them under and let me work.
            Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
                                    What place is this?
                                    Where are we now?
            
                                    I am the grass.
                                    Let me work.
 
There’s a lesson in the grass, but I don’t think we’re capable of learning it. 
 
Whew! So many questions and so few answers. Well, just something for you to think about.
 
Notes:
 
*University of Sheffield. Naturally GM: Crops steal genes from other species to accelerate evolution. Phys.Org. 23 April 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-naturally-gm-crops-genes-species.html   Accessed April 23, 2021. Hibdige, Samuel G. S., et al., Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses. New Phytologist. 22 April 2021. Online at https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.17328   Accessed April 23, 2021.
 
**Nadel, S. F. “Social Control and Self-Regulation,” Social Forces, Volume 31, Issue 3, March 1953, pp. 26 5-273 https://doi.org/10.2307/2574226
 
***Read, K. E. “Morality and the Concept of the Person among the Gahuku-Gama” in John Middleton, ED., Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism. Garden City. The Natural History Press, 1967.

It’s easy for any of us to dismiss others for their apparent small-mindedness. But in calling someone else petty, do we miss something about our own pettiness and about the brain’s intermittent obsession with trivialities?
 
When my wife, first child, and I moved into a rental at the beginning of my four decades of teaching in a college, we lived across the street from a retired electrician and his wife and next door to a nearly hundred-year-old and still very vital couple. The latter two tended to their house and garden the way NASA tends to its spacecraft like long-lived New Horizon, Voyagers I and II, and Pioneers X and XI, that is, maintaining upkeep so meticulously that the objects last for years in the best condition possible. Next door, the Ks had plastic covers on their decades-old living room sofa and chairs, windows so clean they could have been featured in a Windex commercial, and a garden that produced crops of peppers, tomatoes, beans, and squash so abundant that they exceeded the Ks’ canning needs and found their way to our kitchen through the couple’s generosity. And across the street, the Ls were equally generous, with Mrs. L providing her fresh breads and Mr. L providing wisdom by example and word. Like the Ks, the Ls also kept a very neat house, well-tended to daily. One might say that both families lived rather mundane and simple lives. During our five years as neighbors, the Ks weren’t travelers though they had migrated decades ago from Russia. The Ls did travel, occasionally to Florida, where Mr. L collected shells that for a hobby he encased in solid plastic cubes which, I think, composed the crop he grew in his basement workshop, the analog of Mr. K’s garden across the street, all his shells neatly arranged on shelves.  
 
You will, of course, wonder, “Where’s he going with this? What’s it have to do with pettiness?” 
 
Both elderly couples lived lives characterized by patience. Both had started life before WWI; both had lived through the Great Depression and WWII, and both had an identifiable appreciation of the moment. Their consecutive todays were episodes for focus. I suppose they had had their share of running headlong into tomorrows long before my wife and I were born. And I suppose that they, like so many others, had their moments of pettiness. Maybe impatient running toward the future and emphasizing trivialities are characteristics indicative of all youth, but in their later years the Ks and Ls lived in the present and seemed unperturbed by nuisances as much as anyone can live with such a focus. They seemed to have left behind most of the petty concerns that might once have occupied their minds. 
 
I remember mentioning to Mr. L some petty faculty problem covered in long hours of heated debate either in a department meeting or in the faculty senate, and receiving his slow-paced advice to be patient. From my perspective today, I cannot recall what that problem was, but I remember Mr. L’s advice to be patient. Apparently, up to that point I had not fully learned that pettiness arises in every enclosed society from a workroom full of big-box employees complaining about bosses, work schedules, and procedures, to the offices and hallowed halls of every college, where people argue over chairmanships, intellectual territories like courses, promotions, tenure, and procedures. I believe I have even observed similar pettiness among members of religious groups, and certainly, I have seen it in political and special interest groups. In academia pettiness is often the product of hubris and the drive toward self-aggrandizement linked to in-house struggles for recognition and award. Impatient pettiness is an inevitable offshoot of pretense that grows like Mr. K’s garden vegetables. Those who work in ivy-covered ivory towers plant seeds of petty discord that in the garden of academia’s campuses grow pumpkin-size, the vines extending into standing committee rooms, faculty offices, campus coffee shops, and over long conference tables in administration buildings. Although I retired from academia, I believe from what I read and hear that similar pettiness continues unabated as a new generation of professors replaces my generation. 
 
No doubt, in my youth I succumbed to such pettiness that I acknowledge years later and in memory of Mr. L’s advice to be patient. Am I still occasionally petty? Of course, but I remind myself every so often that whatever seems to be urgent is often petty and that in a hundred years, I’ll look back and laugh about what I now consider seriously. I also remind myself of that famous line at the end of Voltaire’s Candide that one should “cultivate” his garden. I suppose that had I, like Mr. K next door, spent time tending to my “garden,” I might have spent less time concerned with trivial matters either immediately past or future. I think of all those committee meetings and arguments I sat through, all those in-house reports I wrote for the department, the college, the Chancellor’s office, and all those faculty concerns that added to naught, concerns that no doubt still occupy the minds of the present generation of professors. Big-box company employees do the same; I’m sure of it. People in office cubicles, also. And, Holy Mother Milk of Magnesia, probably among the cloistered. My experience, limited as it is, tells me that petty concerns have always been the lot of humanity—all humanity, but particularly humanity in closed groups. 
 
What’s the source of pettiness? Rather, maybe I should ask why we are so petty. Is pettiness the inevitable product of big brains that have the capacity to do much but that are offered only limitations imposed by others or self-imposed? Do natural or social limitations inevitably result in pettiness in a brain equipped to seek solutions to life’s riddles? Is the impatience associated with trivial concerns rooted in self-importance or in the desire to see that others are aware of our significance? Isn’t that vanity? Certainly, in academia the latter seems to be the driver of pettiness, especially since promotions are mostly in-house processes based on arbitrary traditions started centuries ago. I think of Carl Sagan’s not getting tenure at Harvard and Eric Segal’s not getting tenure at Yale. Pettiness serves as an underlying driver in the enclosed society of academia because few people are held accountable by objective and external Inspectors General of any kind. Pettiness emerges from the recesses of educated, but narrow minds. 
 
Of course, I could argue that in tending one’s garden like Mr. K or shell collection like Mr. L, a person has time to think and that given a time for thinking, petty thoughts occur. Watching a garden grow or liquid polymers solidify isn’t a guarantee against pettiness. Staying in the present without pettiness is a difficult task for a complex brain in a quiet environment. However, both the Ks and the Ls seemed to have managed to maintain a life undisturbed by the petty concerns in the world around them. With my weaker mind, I sometimes need to engage in a risky task to focus, maybe not high-wire walking, but at least something that requires undivided concentration like using a circular saw. Using power tools puts pettiness on the proverbial back burner. A loss of concentration on the moment as the blade spins can result in injury or a board of incorrect length. In all those closed groups of incessantly arguing academicians and complaining big-box employees, real risk is rare. In its absence, the mind plants the seeds of trivialities.   
 
As petty thoughts emerge in consciousness, the brain does have the recourse of considering them in context. A hundred years from now, that petty incident, someone else’s behavior, or a conflict which appears important will, in fact, be amusing—or pitiful. You’ll look back a century from now, wish you had been more patient, had more wisdom, and considered the significance of your past concerns. Maybe that’s what the Ks and Ls had done in less than a hundred years. 
 
In looking back, I see that many of us have knowledge, but few have wisdom. Few of us have patience, also. Those with great learning, like my university colleagues, proved frequently to be petty individuals. Allowing myself in my youth to become wrapped in that pettiness was a difficult behavior to change. Having great knowledge does not guarantee the wisdom that patience yields. Becoming patient is not an easy lesson to teach the young or those who imprison themselves in the trivial concerns of a closed group. 
 
If you try to recall your own encounters with trivial concerns, you might notice that the details and emotions of the time have faded. You might ask, “Why was I so worked up? Why didn’t I just walk away to let others waste their time on matters that I can only vaguely remember?” See, you don’t even have to wait a hundred years to look back on your past concerns and laugh.
 
 
 

Human: “I see you coming in for your morning coffee and scone, but I don’t know your name. I’m Average Joseph, but my friends call me Av.”
 
Alien: “I like the coffee. I’m Doe Everyman; mine call me Ev.”
 
Av: “Live around here?”
 
Ev: “Nearby. You work nearby?”
 
Av: “Yeah, at the newspaper down the street. I cover the national news.”
 
Ev: “Oh! So, what am I going to read about in tonight’s edition?”
 
Av: “This might sound silly, but aliens. Seems both the American military, the Navy, specifically, and the Australian military spotted some UFOs. They both released films. Now, the US government says it will release its information on UFOs this summer. Finally, we’ll know about those allusive aircraft.”
 
Ev: “I wouldn’t expect much. They might have seen allusive illusions, not real spacecraft with aliens. Human brains, and thus, humans, seem ready to accept almost anything. Thus, the success of scammers.”
 
Av: “No. I think we’re going to see some proof this time. Those videos, pictures, and witness reports seem legit.”
 
Ev: “Okay, so you think we…er, so, you think aliens are here, I suppose. Maybe living among us. How about that guy over there? Or that woman? The guy is always wearing a hoodie every time I see him. Maybe he has a third eye in the back of his head. The woman, you’re a reporter. Ask to see whether she has three breasts. She’s always in a very bulky sweatshirt, even in summer.”
 
Av: “Ev, you can joke, but what if aliens are here, maybe to take over the world?”
 
Ev: “Might not be a bad idea. Humans certainly haven’t done a very good job at stewardship.”
 
Av: “What do you mean? Maybe I should do an opinion piece. You know, get your opinion and then go around the coffee shop to see what everyone thinks.”
 
Ev: “Well, consider your…I mean, our ironies. I’ve read news stories and seen TV specials on how people are destroying the planet, not just the global warming stuff, but also all those fragile ecologies. Brazilians are burning down the rainforests. People are filling the ocean with plastics and now, with COVID face masks and nitrile gloves. Yet, there’s article after article and report after report on sustaining the planet, and government agencies are always making more environmental regulations. There’s a whole industry devoted to sustainability, lots of college professors, rich people with private planes, and little kids concerned about dolphins and polar bears. Amazing! People are obsessed with sustainability, the same people who don’t give their nuclear weapons a second thought. Talk about irony! And, of course, hypocrisy. So, yes, aliens could probably run the planet better than people, that is, unless they are also subject to all the human faults, what do you call them, I mean, what do we call them? Sins.”
 
Av: “Really, I think I get your point. So, the skeptic in me wants to ask, ‘What if aliens were living among us? Wouldn’t they already be part of the problem? If they were here to save the planet, ala Michael Rennie in the original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, wouldn’t they have announced their presence and given us solutions to our wayward ways?’ I should put those two questions in an article. But in my opinion, no, instead of being here to help, I think they would be here for conquest; yes, that’s their motive. Here’s a planet like a house with squatters, ready for new legitimate occupants. They don’t have good intentions; otherwise, they’d already have made their presence known and told us their purpose for being here.”
 
Ev: “You humans, I mean, you reporters think that aliens would operate and think the way humans operate and think. Anyway, those videos could just be optical illusions. All this could be moot. All those alien abduction stories just so much nonsense. Probing bodies stories, also. Heck, anyone can pick up Gray’s Anatomy in the bookstore or watch Grey’s Anatomy on TV. No need for probing abducted people; if aliens are smart enough to travel across the vast reaches of space, certainly, they’re smart enough to read or see broadcast TV.”
 
Av: “Go ahead. Joke. But I’m going to report on the government’s release of documents. Maybe the aliens don’t care about the planet, either saving it or conquering it. Maybe they are just passing by like Oumuamua; maybe they come by for a drink of water; or again, maybe they are truly just curious.”
 
Ev: “And I’ll look forward to your report, but on that last point, if they are curious, why not get out and kick the tires, do something to touch whatever puzzles them like the astronauts and pre-humans touching the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe even show up at this coffee shop and converse with a human? Heck, I could be from somewhere out there. How would you know I was an alien if I looked like a human? Maybe I’m in disguise. Maybe you are, Av. Maybe the reason you are a reporter is to find out more about humans to report to your home world. Being a reporter is a perfect way to mingle among humans.”
 
Av: “Nah! Now you’re joshing me. Anyway, it’s been nice talking to you. I’m here on my way to the paper every morning, so I guess you’ll be seeing me around.”
 
Ev: “Seeing you? I’ll be watching…I mean, I’ll watch for you.”