Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

Still Waiting for the First Amish President

When our younger son was in third grade he fell off the monkey bars and broke his elbow. The ER doctor was flabbergasted when she heard that we were watching when it happened. She couldn’t imagine why any parent would allow a child to play on the monkey bars, an apparatus that brought the hospital quite a bit of business. At the time I was substitute teaching, and spent plenty of lunch periods watching streams of children of all ages cross the monkey bars without incident.

Our life experiences shape what we believe, and that ER doctor and I will never agree on the monkey bars since we both know what the monkey bars are really like. However, that doesn’t stop us from having a lot of other things in common.

A lot of people on the Freedom to Play on the Monkey Bars party, having lost the last election, now profess complete shock that anyone on the Prohibit Playing on the Monkey Bars party could not see things their way, yet in retrospect the outcome seems sort of inevitable.

Workers like me who were both white and white-collar in the 1990s and 2000s had a great run. Our wages were high, our subsidized 401(k) programs were burgeoning in the stock market, and we fully believed we were the vanguard of the so-called meritocracy, which of course turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with merit.

During that same time period, politicians of all persuasions were cozying up to billionaires for contributions, removing restrictions on corporate greed and overgrowth, sending manufacturing jobs abroad, cracking down on “crimes” such as the inability to pay bail, admitting immigrants from migrant farmers to engineers to increase the employment pools for corporations from Big Ag to Silicon Valley, and sending the children of small town America to fight and sometimes die in multiple wars in the Middle East. Those who tried to change their trajectories by going to college were saddled with inexplicably nondischargeable student loans, then released into an economy in which greed-frenzied CEOs colluded to minimize both the number and the wages of their employees, unimpeded by unions, which were reeling under attacks from both government and corporations mesmerized by capitalism.

I think we are the only developed country that went full bore down the rabbit hole of worshiping capitalism. Folks who think capitalism is some sort of moral calling remind me of folks who think hunger is an emotion, except it’s not at all funny.

The gang of Prohibits in the White House is not going to make any of this better in my view. However, I can certainly understand why a lot of people who think we need to get off the monkey bars because we’re all broken decided to crash the system rather than let it spend a fourth (roughly) decade impoverishing them.

I can also understand why the Freedoms, with whom I identify, feel beset by mobs seeking to control how we worship and what we read, and to limit our medical choices, especially when it comes to vaccines, demonstrably one of the most effective public health improvements in history, yet now completely prohibited in parts of Idaho and discouraged in Florida.

Banning vaccines certainly feels like going back, waaaaay back, feels crazy, to us. Some would even say “uneducated,” but that’s not fair. For Freedoms who want to seek common ground, I would recommend you meditate on what it would feel like to have your family’s net worth and opportunity for advancement continually dropping for decades. Might you not also get tired of waiting?

Posted on by Jo Gent

Floating Motes

I’ve started to think of humanity as a cloud of floating motes. Floating motes can be wafted by water or breezes, carried by flora or fauna, or moved by cascades of snow, dirt, rock, or lava. That they have no agency of movement, however, does not mean they have no effect. Particle density affects air quality for everything that uses air, alive or mechanical, as well as water sedimentation, sunlight impinging on Earth, sunset spectacularness or lack thereof, and how often I have to clean my windshield.

Dust was the leading factor in the extinction event that ended the 165 million year reign of the dinosaurs after that asteroid hit Earth. Don’t underestimate the power of tiny, brainless, nearly invisible specks.

Humans similarly seem to cause large effects without intending to. We refer to this as unintended consequences, and the way we wield that term implies that these are rare, that most consequences of our actions are just as we intend. This may be true in a very local sense: When I wipe down the countertop, it looks cleaner. Of course if I had a microscope, I would realize it is completely covered with Colony Forming Units, aka CFUs.

Though the bacteria and fungi that comprise CFUs are quite small, they are not motes, not only because they are alive–that’s how they form those colonies!–but also because they are much tinier; though the size of dust particles can range widely, in most cases each is 3 to 25 times larger than a bacterium. It’s easy to read some shocking stats on how disgusting most kitchens really are, but why bother? We are all covered with CFUs, both inside and out, as is the air, the water, pretty much the entire planet. We evolved to live with these things, and if you know how to keep your immune system healthy you shouldn’t worry too much about it.

Since we’re human, what we do doesn’t matter to us so much as what we believe we do. The countertop looks, feels, and smells great after my husband cleans it–really, he is so talented, you would not believe it–and that works fine for me. I don’t even own a microscope, and my vision is deteriorating each year, so I’m going with the evidence of my senses, especially since I can’t do anything about the situation anyway.

At least when we clean the countertops we aren’t making things worse. When we heightened smokestacks to improve local pollution, we created nationwide acid rain. During the Plague, Londoners killed the dogs and cats that might otherwise have eaten the rats carrying infected fleas. We tried to stop forest fires by just stopping them, leading to a massive increase in underbrush that fueled megafires many times more dangerous.

Unintended consequences can be positive too. Demilitarized zones often become vibrant ecosystems. Reduced human activities in cities during the pandemic allowed birds to sing more softly.

When we are noisy, birds have to yell.

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t try to do our best. I think our best strategy is to be as kind and patient as we can and to not try to influence other humans other than by our own example. They will take from it what they will. Doing my best is, well, the best I can do.

As a retired person, I sometimes enjoy thinking of myself as a floating mote, open to whatever happens without trying to force it. Wonder what I’ll do today?