An Outback Steakhouse menu even has pictures, but even these won’t feed you…looks good though, doesn’t it?
# 32 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: The Bible is a menu describing a life that is available. Memorizing a menu won’t feed you.
I realize that, to many people, those words will come across as either sacrilegious, anti-Christian, or both. Nevertheless, after 35 years of careful consideration, I am willing to say again, the Bible is a menu. It describes a life that is available. Memorizing a menu won’t feed you. It is not that I don’t care if some are offended. But, I care more that too many have not well considered the matter and thus venerate the menu, mistaking it for the things it describes.
In an interesting synchronous side-trip, this morning, having already decided to write on this subject, I got the following link to Seth Godin’s blog. His post today is called, Code Words. In it, in his characteristic, brief, minimalist way, he makes the argument that all words are code, or rather, that every word is a code. This…this is what I mean by my tip.
It’s probable that I cannot sum up all of language theory in a sentence. A quick Google search, it turns out, isn’t so quick. Major research universities devote entire departments to the study of language. For example, this link to the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. So, it’s a big discipline to try to summarize. Here goes: Language, whether spoken or written, is representative of actual ideas or things and not the ideas or things themselves. That will suffice, I believe.
You Can Memorize A Menu And Still Leave Hungry
That being the case, I ask each of you how many times you have read the words Bloomin’ Onion and Bone-In Ribeye from the Outback Steakhouse menu and pushed away from the table satisfied? What if you memorized the menu? Would that help?
I understand the silliness of my comparison. But, can we agree the menu is not the point of the restaurant experience? You do not go to a steakhouse to read the menu. The food, the steak, is the point. If you look at a menu, see an item, order it, then eat it, the menu has accomplished its purpose. It led you to the thing itself. To get full, or receive any nutritional effects, you will need to take some additional steps after reading the menu.
That’s how it is with the Bible. It is not a magic book. The Bible is a menu. The words themselves have no power apart from their ability to induce belief. The words are pointing towards the thing itself. They are not the thing. To make the Bible more than that is the equivalent of making the menu the point of going out to eat. But think with me, if all the Bibles in print vanished simultaneously, would the God described disappear too?
Beware the confidence that you know what is good for you…no one can see very far down the tracks
# 31 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you.
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher of the middle-1800’s penned this famous quote in his journal. It is instructive as to why this tip to beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you is worth heeding.
“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.”
~ Kierkegaard, Journal, 1843
This usually ends up shortened to:
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”
Ibid
True Good Must Pass The Test Of Time
As a father to seven children, I’ve oft told another about a lesson I’ve shared with one of my kids. Sometimes, they have remarked to me, ”Oh, that is soooo good!” My reply has usually been, ”We’ll see in six months.” Goodness can pass the test of time. It’s best not to judge to soon.
As the philosopher noted, we do not have the luxury of time-travel while living. We are stuck on the railroad tracks of sequential time. One thing follows another. We are forced to respond on a moment by moment basis. Not being able to see far enough down the tracks of cause and effect, we don’t know at any particular moment how one thing, one decision, one attainment, or one disappointment, may turn out in the long run. If you cannot have the confidence of certainty about the future, isn’t it wise to beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you in the present? Because good is not just about immediate gratification, but also long-term effects.
I’ve said many times, one of the worst things I can get in life is what I want. Just because you want something doesn’t mean you should have it. Just because you think it is good for you, doesn’t mean it is. We are trapped in a short-sighted series of near-term decisions that produce unknowable long term effects.
True Good May Not Be What You Think It Is At All
On two occasions thus far, I have suffered the devastating loss of life. The me that was alive from birth to 21 died at a Grateful Dead show in March of 1986 when I met Jesus. My whole conception of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and bad, died with that 21 year old drug-addicted hippie. That me died in possession of a hundred-hit sheet of 3-day-old blotter acid, and tickets to 12 more concerts on the Spring Tour. Things that I was confident were very good for me. And a new me arose in his place. A better me, yes, but with similar limitations at being able to predict the future accurately.
Losing those ”good things”, this death and rebirth, was the first best thing that ever happened to me.
A Second Death; But This Was Good…Wasn’t It?
The second me died on May 15, 2009 when, under duress, I left my wife of 22 and a half years and a houseful of six minor children for whom I had given everything I had to give. They, including my unfaithful wife, were my whole life. Like a vessel ripped loose from its anchorage at a dock, I was completely un-moored from the reality I had known from age 23 to 45 and a half. That role and those relationships formed my entire conception of who I was. That me was as indissoluble from that life as if blue dye was dissolved in water. How would one ever separate them?
There was no “me” apart from the life I’d spent more than two decades living. And yet, through actions not mine to control, that version of me died; along with the at-home father and husband. Those things were so incredibly valuable and good to me, that the whole notion that I would ever see good again, died too.
And yet…
Life Can Only Be Understood Looking Backwards
Looking back these 12 years, this 3rd iteration of me can see and understand. I now know that this devastation was the second best thing that ever happened to me. Not only did it bring about a much needed humbling, it opened the door to a relationship with a life partner with whom I have never been more happy, more authentic, more complete, or more grateful.
I carry in my mind an appreciation for a God who may not keep bad things from happening to me, but who will be with me through them and will work them out for good. Almost like Someone who isn’t stuck in sequential time could see down the tracks and cause enough good to wipe away every tear.
So yes, I repeat, beware of the confidence that you know what is good for you. Rather, do your utmost to be good to others, treating them as you’d wish to be treated. And cultivate your awareness and relationship with One who can see further down the road of life than you, One who knows you better than you know yourself, and Who can love you more fully than you ever could love yourself. One who does know what is good for you. That’s a better place for your confidence.
Misinformation Is A Toxic Poison – And Its Being Used As A Weapon
There are unwritten norms that in the past have governed and united us as Americans. But, these have proven too weak for the job in the face of modern stresses, and given the existence of weapons of mass misinformation (WMM’s). Especially since it is so easy to present alternate ”facts” using these channels, and do so with impunity. Sadly, the most basic assumptions we once shared about reality itself, and our agreed upon notions of it, are no longer a “given”. Even empirical, mathematical facts are not able to withstand politicized assaults in highly-charged racially or socially coded language, specifically intended to divide us into alternate worlds, with alternate facts, and alternate versions of ”reality”.
Destroy Consensus and Kill Consensus Reality
Consensus reality is that which is generally agreed to be reality, based on a consensus view. If so, is there a doctor in the house? This piece from Post Carbon Institute claims 2020 is the year that our shared reality finally cracked. We don’t seem to have any shared objective reality anymore. Nor, it seems, do we any longer enjoy a shared cultural reality. Seth Godin’s treatment of this concept is brilliant.
The consensus reality defining America and what it means to be an American may already be dead. Ironically, a reality-TV con man killed it. While ironic, I guess it is fitting. Give the devil his due. Modern American politics in the age of Twitter and Facebook is more like fake tv than we knew. Reality television, even though it is not real, doesn’t work, generate enough profit to stay on the air, and provide entertainment value unless enough people believe it’s real. Consensus reality doesn’t work without a consensus. It evaporates when enough people believe a different narrative. Destroy consensus with incendiary and divisive language, and kill the shared reality that was the by-product of that consensus. Done and done. Facts be damned.
Social Contract Theory
In some respects, it is miraculous that it has taken this long for the fabric of the country to fray and tear. Social Contract Theory has been around a long, long time. It arose in a time before printing presses and certainly before the internet or social media platforms. This entry at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests the idea has been around as long as philosophy itself. Check it out if you’re not familiar with the idea.
This is a short article on social contract theory from the University of Texas school of business. Members of society live together under certain pre-arranged and agreed upon rules of engagement. These ideas are deeply interwoven into social, economic, and political life. So much so that we have been able to assume their strength and take them for granted. Democratic, Representative governments, exist both as the result of, and for the protection of, this bedrock social contract. As such, they operate best behind the scenes of everyday, normal civic life.
I wrote this essay back in January in remembrance of the days when our government was virtually invisible except for rare, highly unusual, high visibility occurrences. Reliable assumptions about the underlying, invisible social contract are the foundation of a national reality. In combination with shared language and art, the result is stable, flourishing culture and civilization.
Who Wields Weaponized Misinformation?
To destabilize a society, attack the shared ideas that bond the members together in a mutually beneficial reality. Nothing does this more effectively than weaponized misinformation. Historically, only totalitarian, dictatorial governments (whether right-wing fascists, or left-wing communists), have turned their citizens against one another by means of misinformation and propaganda. Russia, or China, or fill-in-the-blank state actors have wanted to undermine the US with these tactics for half a century, having used them with success against their own citizens.
Now an ex-President and the political party he controls do the job for them. Only an autocrat wishing to use you for his own power willfully, repeatedly misinforms you to think of your neighbor and fellow citizen as an enemy. And to base that belief on some factor like race, or religion, or sexual orientation, or in the past year, misinformation about mask wearing, or getting a vaccine.
Obviously, the fissures in American society didn’t start overnight. They didn’t start with a dangerous, deranged, anti-democratic demagogue. In some ways, there have been two or three different Americas from the nation’s inception. Your version of America depended upon which race and economic class you were born into. But a large portion of the country has been unwilling or unable to see a clownish buffoon for what he was and is. Failing this, they have joined him and his puppets in the effort to turn us against one another, denying even basic human decency, medical science, the rule of law, and the democratic process. These are enough combined straws to break the back of the national consensus reality camel.
Misinformation Has Created A Separate World With Its Own Reality
Didn’t we used to be better than this? We used to have cherished words, national words, that we treasured for their inspiration. They urged us towards a common, shared vision of a more perfect union and a general welfare. But words are not reality. They are mere approximations of reality. And the same language that had the power to unite us in agreement and solidarity, has been used to foment hate, mistrust, and derision. Powerful, pervasive platforms of language dissemination have been used to craft alternate, disparate, separate versions of reality. Versions of reality believed in regardless of the presence of objective facts.
The Only World That Exists Is The One In Your Mind
In short, purveyors of malignant, malicious fiction have broadcast descriptions of an alternate reality in which many believe. I cannot argue against the truth that the only world that exists is the one that is in your mind as far as you are concerned. But, unless there is some return to consensus reality, based on verifiable, objective facts, and unless we hold those who traffic in lies and disinformation as culpable, dangerous criminals, this American experiment will soon be over.
Being discriminating is not a bad thing. It’s the only way to decide which world you’re going to live in
I appreciate fiction as much as the next person. I love that Stephen King, or Ernest Hemingway, or Daniel Silva can create world’s from words. To your mind, these elaborate worlds that are real and engaging.
In like manner, the world you woke up in today, and interact with from the driver’s seat of your own perspective, while not quite as fictitious as the one’s constructed so skillfully by a great author, is still fundamentally a fiction. It is also created with words. Yours. The ones you tell yourself, and the ones you listen to. It is fiction because it is limited and relative to your experience of life alone. It is however, very real to you. You don’t live in my head, nor I in yours, so our realities are unique to us. But if you’re reading this, you’ve given me, sitting here, at a particular juncture in space and time, access to your mind. And my words are shaping it.
Never in American history, have the unscrupulous, power-hungry, selfishly motivated, or willfully and negligently ignorant had so much access to such powerful tools to shape our minds with the fiction of misinformation. They do so via social and mainstream media platforms, wielding them as weapons of mass misinformation. The fact that they have gained such an allegiance among the non-discriminating is astonishing. And, that they have successfully created a completely different world with its own ”reality” is equally shocking. Perhaps, in the final analysis, we only have ourselves to blame.
Obviously, things like microscopic airborne viruses don’t give a damn what kind of lies you believe in. The truth will always prevail in the end. But for some, it will be too late. It may be too late already for the country. The disparate, divided realities may never reach consensus again.
Eye vision test with sight chart – the chart is what it is
# 21 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Accept life as it shows you it is, not as you wish it was, or as you want it to be. The same goes for people.
It’s possible some will read that tip, shrug, and think, ”No duh!” While others, myself included, will see that we resemble the remark, and try to act on it. While it is undoubtedly normal to put the best spin on life, some of us invest too much in the spin. If this is you, then let this be a reminder to accept life as it shows you it is. And also, accept people the way they show you they are, not as you want them to be.
Rather than try to enumerate all of the psychological reasons some people have difficulty with this, let’s stipulate that some simply do. You may be among that number. Assuming that’s the case, consider the following questions:
Is your experience of life the result of how you think life is; or do you think about life based on how life has shown itself to be to you?
Perception Is Reality
Few would admit they belong in the first camp. And yet, to some degree, we cannot experience anything differently than how we think prior to the actual experience. You bring your way of thinking about life to every life experience. This is commonly referred to as paradigm, which is nearly synonymous with perspective. The difference being that paradigm refers to the big picture ”model” of reality we mentally construct, while perspective refers to the small picture, individual, subjective point of view from which we observe the model and form beliefs about it. Together, these influence our perception of the world. And our perception is our functional reality. How could it be otherwise?
In this way we experience life like a person who perpetually wears sunglasses. The sunglasses filter everything. The filter modifies the reality of what is being looked at. Remove the sunglasses, and everything looks a little different. Change the filter and change the world.
This optician, with his charts and machines can help you see things in the physical world the way they are. You’ll have to do that for yourself in your mental world.
A patient in need of eyeglasses looks at a chart, or at images though a machine. The images are blurred. An adjustment is made. The images get worse. Another adjustment, and the images get better. They appear sharp, crisp, and in focus. In this scenario, do the actual images change at all? No…they are what they are. The patient would be foolish to see blurred images, wish they were clear, and declare them to be so because he wants them to be.
Reality Cataracts
A few years ago, I had cataract surgery for both eyes. Prior to the surgery, vision in my right eye had become so occluded that if I tilted my head a certain way, objects would disappear. I could make street signs, cars, and people disappear just by closing my left eye and tilting my head. Some people try to live this way. They try to make problems disappear by an inner tilting of their mind. But guess what? Just because you cannot or will not see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
If your own paradigm, perspective, personality, perception, or personal hang-ups make it difficult to accept life as it shows you it is, then, like a person in need of an optometrist for corrective lenses, you probably need a new prescription. Or, like me you need an ophthalmologist for your eyes and your life. Tilting your head and pretending is not a long term solution.
And friends, not to be too heavy handed with the analogy, that’s us. Life and people are images on a chart. The chart does not change. The way you see the chart changes. Better to see the chart, and life as it shows you it is, not the way you wish it was.
Awareness Of The Susceptibility Helps You Look Twice
I wish there was a magic cure. If there is one, I haven’t found it. Knowing that I’m wearing my own sunglasses of perception, and that I cannot take them off, helps me to realize that I could be wrong. Knowing that I’ve had a past history of mistaking my glossed over version of reality from what was really on the chart, makes me wary. It makes me look twice. I don’t tilt my mind and hope the evidence will change. This healthy skepticism at least gives me the awareness that my own uncorrected filter tends to skew life towards the way I prefer it to be, not necessarily the way it is. This is an imperfection that I will likely always carry with me. So, my tip to accept life as it shows you it is…definitely applies to me. If it applies to you, get those eyes checked.
# 20 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: When asked for advice, rather than giving the inquirer a solution to their problem, give him a new way to think about his problem.
The corollary to this tip is, Do Not Give Advice Unless Asked. Unsolicited advice makes the adviser feel good about himself but seldom gives any assistance to the hearer, since they were not in the market for it. I am most successful wearing my sage hat when I wait to be asked before indiscriminately imparting the profundity of my wisdom. Especially when I preface my own advice by tying to provide a new way to think about the problem. This seems to be better than the standard, ”Well, if I was in your shoes…” approach.
There is a fancy word for problem solving systems. The word is heuristic(s). We all employ them. Some methodologies are more useful than others. Some mental shortcuts are more harmful than helpful, being little more than thinly veiled cognitive biases. I have written before about a particular bias called the Availability Heuristic. Regardless of your particular way of solving problems, here is a variation of quote attributed to Einstein:
”One will never solve a problem by thinking in the same plain in which the problem was conceived.”
Or put more simply, this:
Solving problems requires a new way of thinking. Sometimes the old way is the cause. This from brainyquotes captures the idea pretty well.
In order to give someone a new way to think about a problem, you must first determine how they are currently thinking about it. Ask questions, get responses. Keep probing. Often, this process is helpful in itself. Allowing a person to think through and voice their own views may uncover areas of speculation, or error, or confusion.
Taking this approach provides the chance at self-discovery for the one with the problem. And I wish I had a dollar for every time some entrenched internal narrative has been the crux of the matter anyway. Poor thinking in will always equal poor thinking out. Your job is to help change the thinking patterns.
Oftentimes we can’t see the solutions to our problems because we’re just too close to them. Our vision is obscured the way a person’s vision of the sun is blocked if he holds his hand too close to his eyes. Rationality diminishes in direct proportion to the engagement the emotions. Throw in stress, and cognitive function rapidly diminishes.
This is why finding a new way to think about the problem often requires a sympathetic, objective adviser. That’s you. If you can resist providing a quick fix long enough to be an empathetic sounding board, you might give the other person not only your solution for this one problem, but a new way to approach all future problems as well.
Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, delivers the rebuttal to Joe Biden’s speech. Photograph: AP
Does anyone besides me find ironic the speech of Republican Senator Tim Scott, the only black Senator of 100, in his rebuttal to President Biden’s address to Congress on Wednesday night, in which he emphatically stated that America is not racist? Amazingly, he said this after listing several ways he has been discriminated against (which is the very definition of ”racism”).
Undeterred by the contradiction in his claim, and not content to stop there, he asserted that now some white children are suffering oppression for the color of their skin. And…wait for it…He said these things not on SNL, but on the national networks. It would have made a great parody skit. But Senator Scott spoke as if he was serious; as if he’d convinced himself it was true.
This would be laughable if it wasn’t so bizarrely, shamefully, unequivocally absurd; along with being patently false. The fact that the Republicans paraded out the lone black Senator to make the anti-racism case smacks of tokenism, propagandism, and cynicism that reaches a new low, even for the Nazi-Sympathizing, White-Supremacist-Hugging Insurrectionist Party.
If there were zero black Senators, instead of only 1, would that be evidence of systemic racism?
If neither of those statistical anomalies are evidence, then where do we look for something empirical and demonstrable?
Incarceration rates?
Income levels?
Percentage of college degrees?
I think the GOP has taken all those off the table too.
I’m curious to know how this denial helps a political party? Of course, it seems shockingly obvious that the GOP panders to white bigots. That demographic is the Trump base. (Republican Tim Scott, the literal one-percenter), notwithstanding.
But why? What does this gain for them? Do they really think there are that many racist white voters to keep them in power? I know they are going for voter suppression, but you can’t suppress all the votes.
Conversations In Vain
I have tried (in vain) to have conversations with people about what it must be like to be born into this country as a member of a traditionally non-privileged (read oppressed) race. I can’t speak directly to that experience. I’ve never faced a system with a history of holding me down, or holding me back, or holding me in contempt or derision. And my efforts have proved vain because many people either lack the capacity or the willingness to use their imaginations and put themselves into someone else’s world. They seem to fear admitting the reality of institutional, systemic racism as an admission of personal guilt for being born white. Which is simply not the case.
I wasn’t born into a race whose ancestors were enslaved (at least not in this country), or whose ancestors had tribal lands stolen from them for trinkets like beads, tobacco, and alcohol. I’ve never had a great-grandparent tell me about a cross being burned in his yard. No grandparent has ever told me they were denied the opportunity to vote.
But I can imagine these things happening. I can empathize with it. I can believe it when someone from a different race with a different experience tells me what has befallen them. And I certainly find it ironic when someone from that race against which all these atrocities have been systematically committed, denies that reality, for some hoped for political benefit.
A Statesman, or a Puppet? The First Step Is Admitting The Problem
That’s not true. I don’t find it ironic. I find it shameful. It is a denial of humanity. I’d respect Tim Scott if he had embraced his humanity and used his political platform to call America to a higher, purer version of our National selves. That’s what a Statesman does. Instead, we were served up an ironic speech by a party puppet, one who talked about suffering racial indignities, but who nonetheless refused to label that treatment the true, but politically unsavory term, ”racism”.
Admitting systemic racism doesn’t mean we have to stay this way. It’s like overcoming addiction…the first step is admitting there is a problem.
How many of my white friends ever received a talk about how to interact with police from your parents?
I sure didn’t. My parents weren’t afraid that if I faced a cop, I may be facing a cog in a system with an ingrained history of bias against our race, and that the ingrained bias may affect how the cop viewed me as a person.
What does white America lose to admit the obvious about systemic racism? What are we desperately trying to hide and deny and cover up here? This one is a clear-cut, no brainer. I don’t see any neutral ground. I don’t see but one right side. This issue really is black and white.
What a beauty. Listen closely, you can hear it’s trying to say something. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
It occurred to me this morning that you cannot lie to a tree. Please allow me the attempt to explain.
Since beginning The Overstory, by Richard Powers, trees have become my heroes among creation. I know that seems strange, but my fascination has only grown as I marvel at their presence on this planet and I ponder what they are up to. As one of the characters in the book might say, ”What they do?”
The more I learn about them, and even as I try to share what I’m learning, the more I realize that my learning is taking me backwards so that I can properly start at zero. My preconceptions have to be shattered and laid aside. They are obstacles. I am like a guitar student coming to a Master. ”I’d like to learn to play guitar,” I say. ”Show me what you can do,” says he. I begin to strum through chords I’ve learned, pleased to show off a few rudimentary elements. ”Stop!” he shouts, before I complete 4 bars. ”This is not guitar! We will need to unlearn these mistakes before we can begin.”
This is how it is with trees. To borrow a concept once more from the book,
”You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”
The Overstory, p. 439. From Adam Appich, a character who is a psych professor.
Thinking you understand trees, you don’t see them. I mean, you see the shapes, but you don’t see them. It’s the same with the people you race each morning to get to work. You see them just enough to avoid hitting their cars when you change lanes. But you don’t have time to see the people. You don’t have time to look. You understand them. They are going to work just like you are. Knowing that tidbit is enough to stop the quest for any deeper enlightenment.
You see trees about as much as you see people in these cars. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
A weird thought that just wouldn’t go away
I was thinking on these things when I realized that you cannot lie to a tree. I know, that’s a weird thought to have. But you cannot lie to a tree in the same way that you cannot lie to God. Lies will not impact either one. They will remain unmoved, unbent, unbowed, unswayed. The wind will move a tree more than your lies will. Go ahead and try to prove me wrong.
Which of your lies will either impact or impress a tree? (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
I find that so satisfactory to contemplate. You can senselessly cut down a tree. Or you can treat it like a cash crop. You can scorch it with acid rain and blight. You can foolishly clear out the undergrowth that makes up its nutrient bed. But you cannot lie to a tree. In every conceivable way, a tree is above you. It is unmoved. It is unflappable. A tree is nothing but living, breathing, branching, spreading, sharing truth. No liars need apply.
Juxtapose that with what we call civilization. On the one hand, a forest is a collection of beings so willing to give and receive truth from one another that they become one thing. A Douglas Fir cannot fool an Aspen that it is something else. The Aspen does not pretend to be a Maple. The Oak has leaves that sample and absorb the off-gassed, chemical condensates of its neighbors, and shares with them in turn. Every tree in the wood shares carbon with every other tree underground through the mycelia of their root structures, assisted by fungi, the most un-heralded, unseen, world-class mediators and facilitators of the planet. The network of sharing is so complete, so entwined, that the forest becomes an organism in its own right. Trees have nothing to gain from pretentious self-centeredness. They have everything to gain from being exactly what they are.
This collection of varieties alone proves the social superiority of trees to humans. There is no murder, no isms, no inequality…makes ya think. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
The veneer of civilization and culture is sophisticated fabrication
By contrast, human civilization is hardly anything but lies. Lies that appear in facebook posts, instagram stories, and snaps. Tweeted lies. Spoken lies. Documented lies. How rare to find someone not trying to be more than they are, or not trying to be someone else – or wishing they were. We drive cars we can’t afford to pretend we have more money. We mortgage our lives to dwell in houses that are shoddily and hastily built; they have no architectural finesse, or aesthetic beauty, or soul whatsoever. They do fit neatly on the 3rd of an acre lot sandwiched between two neighbors you smile and wave at, but whose names you do not know. But for God’s sake can they just please keep their lawn mowed?
No, human culture is a polished veneer of appearances. Its strength is not deep connection, but deep deception. You are more deeply committed to your favorite celebrity (who you will never meet) than to your neighbor. We cannot share life the way trees do because we cannot be trusted to share equally. I wish I had the talent to paint in words the absurdity of the tree-equivalent of Elon Musk, or Marc Zuckerburg, or any one of the despicable Kardashians.
This? This is the height of human civilization? Please! Give me a forest! (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
Here’s a thought: If you picture the canopy of trees in a forest having an average height that represents their individual net worth, the average height would be 88* feet tall. The Elon Musk tree would tower 23,525,920** feet above the average height of the forest. That’s a large number. Correction. It’s an obscene number. It is twenty-three million, five-hundred twenty-five thousand, nine-hundred twenty-three feet above the eighty-eight foot ceiling of the forest average. In other words 800 Mt. Everests stacked on one another, or 800 times higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial jet.
See anything sticking 23 million feet above this? No? Didn’t think so. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
That Elon tree aberration is 4455.66 miles above the average tree. That’s a mutation! (That is farther than the distance from New York, New York to Anchorage, Alaska). The Bezos, Zuckerburg, and Buffett trees would also tower way above the ”average height” canopy. Can you even imagine what that would look like from space?
[This deserves a WaitButWhy illustration from Tim Urban. Like the ones in this excellent piece on AI. (C’mon Tim, discover trees!)]
Trees aren’t greedy – They’re more honorable than people
No tree would be so ashamedly greedy. Humans have no such limitations on either shame or greed. Trees are way more honorable than people. Trees exist to scrub poison out of the atmosphere, turn it into biomass and energy, and give it back in the form of life to everything else on the planet. The immorally rich exist to squeeze life out of everyone ”beneath” them, use them for their own ends, and excrete the poison of selfishness with its envy, lust, and competition, all while being loved and praised and enamored for doing so. Talk about insanity writ large…
You will live your entire life and maybe know one or at most two other people. I mean really know them. But you will be coldly calculating to make sure you get as much as you give in every transaction with everyone else. You will cultivate a persona for work, for your kids, for your spouse. Then you will put on a face for the public at large. You will go to church and put on a religious face for the members, and for God. While there, you will have the uneasy feeling that God sees through your piety. He sees beneath the veneer. The degree to which you allow Him to see, will be the degree to which you experience the unfathomable bliss of love undeserved.
A classroom for a better way
Go to the woods. The trees will release pheromones to bribe you into carrying pollen for them, or maybe just to get you to stand nearby and breathe for a while. But go there and tell them your stories, and show them your curated life with its glamorous photos of the vacation that will take you ten times longer to pay for than the time you spent enjoying it. Show them your checkbook register, or your stock portfolio.
I’m just here to learn. I have a feeling there’s so much you can teach me. I hope I’m not too late; for your kind, or for mine. (Adobe Stock Image: licensed to Author)
Go to the woods and look. See if you can spot a tree trying to seduce its neighbor. See if you find one trying to impress. Find one that is hustling its neighbor, or conning it. Especially, look for the trees trying to oppress and exploit and abuse and use their surrounding, neighbor trees. You know, the ”hard-working” trees just trying to climb the ladder and get ahead.
You won’t find any. No, they just stand still, wave in the breeze, reach and stretch, and branch, and take in what’s there, and give back to everything around them, and practice being invisible.
The Takeaway: I learned these truths by reading fiction
You cannot lie to a tree. But you can lie to yourself and to others. You can tell yourself there’s nothing to learn here. Trees aren’t people, you say. No, thank God, they’re not. I learned all these things about trees, their essential truths, their fundamental importance, and the dire emergency they truly face, by reading a work of fiction. That’s the power that fiction has to reveal truth and change lives!
NOTE:
*The dataset for tree heights found the average height was 87.6 feet (88′).
** Elon Musk’s net worth is approx. $185B, the average American net worth is the whopping, $692K (which seems very high). 185B/692K=267,341 (this is how many times more Musk’s net worth is than the avg. If $692K = 88’, then $185B = 88 x 267,341 = 23,526,008’ (the height of the Musk tree) 23,526,008 – 88 = 23,525,920’ (The height in feet of Musk’s tree above the canopy average height)
So, I’ve had Covid for a week now. I caught it from my girlfriend. We believe we know where she got it but we cannot know for certain. We now have firsthand knowledge of and experience with Covid we did not want. I am sharing some of our experience and some of my thoughts about it for your consideration, and in the hope you can avoid it. I am not a doctor. This story is not any attempt to give medical advice or even offering a medical opinion. Nor am I suggesting that either my own experience, or that of my girlfriend is normative. This is just a personal, anecdotal account of our firsthand experience with Covid.
For over a year, we have followed every protocol. We have always masked up in public. My girlfriend has been masked around her 90 year-old mom this entire time. She has not entered her home for more than 5 minutes, and has not ridden in a car with her. With the exception of an Extreme Experience driving event at Charlotte Motor Speedway on March 28th, we have engaged in no public activities not necessary for life. (The event did an outstanding job of implementing and enforcing mask requirements, distancing provisions, and sanitization between each driving session).
Climbing in to that sweet Ferrari. Notice the masks and sanitizers.
How It Started
My girlfriend started showing symptoms, notably a dry cough, on Saturday, April 3rd. We were driving home from a family gathering to celebrate her mother’s 92nd birthday. The weather was beautiful and mild. We ate a pot-luck picnic lunch outdoors on the back deck of her sister’s home. Of the 18 attendees, we were part of a small group of 5 or 6, not yet vaccinated. 2 of those had already received their first vaccination shots. My girlfriend and I wore masks, even outdoors, out of abundance of precaution. (This turned out to be wise. I can report that everyone present is fine.) When her cough started, accompanied by a pretty severe headache, we chalked it up to having been outdoors, in pollen, in a breeze, in dropping temperatures for more than five hours. It had to be some sort of allergy, right?
But the next day, and especially Sunday night, she knew something wasn’t ”right”. She lay curled on the couch, coughing frequently into her pillow, suffering with a headache she couldn’t quite get to fade even after 24 hours and the normal headache meds. Because of our precautions, we did not consider that it was Covid. After a decent night’s sleep, she went on to work on Monday. She has a separate office where she was able to remain distanced from co-workers.
The test and result
When her cough was persistent and more frequent on Tuesday, April 6th, she went in for a test. The positive result surprised us both. While waiting for results from the test, the doctor who saw her also ordered a chest x-ray. He wanted to rule out bronchitis or pneumonia due to her cough and the difficulty he observed in her breathing. Thankfully, her lungs were clear.
I’m sure we aren’t the only ones to feel surprise and dismay at a positive result during their Covid experience. The fact is, there are many like us, who have followed every protocol. Like us, they never wanted an experience with Covid. The news, and the side effects of social disruption were more than compensatory for the effort to avoid any firsthand experience with Covid infection.
Still, our lives are now impacted by those who did not take the virus seriously, did not take precautions, and who could not be bothered to inconvenience themselves. To some degree, we are all victims of all the far-reaching effects of this pandemic. There’s no sense whining about it. But, when you believe the science, try hard, act consistently, and persevere in the effort to stay healthy and to keep from making others sick, you feel surprised and angry when you get this damn virus anyway. It’s a kick in the guts. A Covid experience was definitely not on my bucket list.
We followed all these measures, and yet…It only takes one infected person not following every measure, all the time to give the virus a transmission point.
When the test confirmed Covid, she left work to begin the doctor and CDC recommended home care and the 10 day quarantine (from the onset of symptoms). Which should technically end today or tomorrow. But, she has not had a straight line recovery. The first couple of days looked very good. On Wednesday, she was wracked by coughing fits, a bad sore throat, muscle aches, and malaise that kept her in bed until 4:30 pm that afternoon. She only got up for a couple of hours to eat a light snack and then went back to bed. It was well past noon on Thursday before she felt like getting out of bed again. Over-the-counter TheraFlu or DayQuil helped suppress her cough, though these undoubtedly contributed to her fatigue.
How it’s going and what we’re doing
From Friday through bedtime last night (Sunday), she is improving. But we have arrived at the 10th day since the onset of symptoms, and she is not symptom free. She is still sick. I can hear her coughing in bed as I write this. The coughing isn’t as frequent or violent as the worst days, but a 10 day quarantine is clearly not applicable to her. Day 10 is not a magic threshold. She would have no business driving a commute to sit in an office for full day. So, our Covid experience reveals some potential discrepancies in the official advice. To be fair, the CDC guideline of a 10-day period is given as a minimum in the absence of a fever for at least 24 hours and when exhibiting improvement in symptoms. So, there is some flexibility. And, thankfully, her office is not pressuring her yet.
My girlfriend’s youngest daughter is a nurse who has served and treated hospitalized Covid patients, and has seen some die. And her own Covid experience wasn’t limited to her role a a front-line health-care worker. Early this year, she lost her grandfather to complications from Covid infection.
She encouraged us to use a cocktail of vitamins C and D along with Zinc to help boost and support our natural immune responses. Emergen C Immune + is a product ready-made with those components, so we take two packets each daily. We are taking a low-dose aspirin every day to counter-act Covid’s blood-thickening effects. Other than that, as I mentioned my girlfriend has used a cough suppressant. Two nights ago, I took 2 Alleve before bed for relief of what felt like swallowing shards of broken glass. So far, the sharp pain of that sore throat has been the worst of the experience symptomatically for me.
This could have been much, much worse
Thankfully, even though my girlfriend has lingering symptoms 10 days in, both our cases are on the mild side of the scale. In comparison to millions who have been hospitalized and the nearly 600,000 in the US whom Covid has thus far killed, we are lucky! We don’t need a hospital. We won’t need funeral arrangements. But we most certainly could have. And this virus that is still in both our bodies, if transferred from us to other unwitting hosts, could produce drastically different symptoms and drastically different outcomes. My symptoms this morning are the same as I’d usually have in mid-April since I battle seasonal allergies. I’ve been able to keep up a walking regimen of a couple miles a day for most days.
If I didn’t know I had Covid, and if I worked in an office, I would have been there. I’ve coughed maybe 30 times total during the week. In contrast, my girlfriend has had multiple coughing-fit episodes. She may rattle off 30 or more coughs per event. Thankfully, her breathing has remained steady and unimpeded (if you don’t count the times she can’t stop coughing for a minute or two). But her energy level is a 3 on a 10 point scale. 3 days ago, she didn’t want to get out of bed at all. So a 3 is improvement. As I write this, every few minutes, she coughs a few times to try to clear her throat and the top of her chest.
Asymptomatic spread still a thing
As I mentioned above, if I didn’t know for a fact that the mild scratchy throat, rare cough, and barely noticeable muscle aches I’ve experienced were from Covid, I would not think twice about it. That’s the insidious thing. This study shows that almost 6 in 10 Covid cases are coming from spreaders who are themselves asymptomatic. Like me, those asymptomatic spreaders would have no cues to either be tested or quarantined.
Masks make sense in a shared environment when 6 of 10 cases is transmitted by an asymptomatic carrier. Since certainty is that elusive, is a mask too much to ask?
I’ve spoken to one doctor who believes these asymptomatic spreaders represent millions more Covid cases that will never show up on any database. Hearing this in the beginning, and believing it, I acted as if I was a carrier. As mentioned above, my girlfriend and I both did. We didn’t act that way because we were afraid we would get Covid, we acted that way because we were afraid to ”give” it, unknowingly. The safest, least intrusive, most humane, and most loving thing we could do for our families, neighbors, front-line workers, and strangers was to act like we could infect them, and behave and distance accordingly. Now, unfortunately, our Covid-induced behavior is not an act.
Next for us, vaccines
I see this as a moral imperative: I’d rather die trying to save other’s lives, than live and risk inadvertently killing them.
Still if there was a guarantee that our experience is the worst Covid can do, getting vaccinated would be a foolish and unnecessary risk. Almost any reasonably healthy person can tolerate a week of aggravating cold symptoms. But there are no guarantees. This same virus, or some variant of it, has killed millions around the globe and 600K here at home. In my view, that makes vaccination a moral imperative. Not because I’m worried about what it may do to me, but because I don’t want to be the nexus point in a contact tracing sequence that eventuates in someone else’s death. Being an accomplice in the death of another human being is not a firsthand experience I ever want to have.
Without a doubt, there are millions of asymptomatic carriers in the United States who are implicated in tens of thousands of deaths. They just don’t know it for certain, or don’t want to admit it. The lack of anything more than circumstantial evidence is not an acquittal.
”Don’t put that on me!” you say. Where should I put it? And if you don’t want that “put on you”, get vaccinated. Simple.
The takeaway
Now that I have violated my girlfriend’s HIPA privacy and given way too much information about my own health status, what, you may ask, is my point? Am I just trying to elicit sympathy over a tickling cough and a sore throat?
These are fair questions. I’m sharing our Covid experience with you, in the hope you will to think about what it feels like to have an experience forced upon you that you not only did not want, but tried your best to avoid. That feeling is not a good one. It feels like a violation. I want to blame someone, even though I know that won’t roll back the clock and it won’t make me or my girlfriend recover faster.
I am angry and concerned, or maybe angry because concerned, about the potential long-term effects this bout with Covid may be setting us up for down the road. What other future firsthand experience might some careless person have seeded into us that won’t bloom for months or years down the road? This study from London’s Oxford University raises concerns about neurological and psychological effects. Our Covid experience may extend well past the CDC quarantine period. The Covid experience for some is already of an indeterminate duration.
Long term effects of COVID 19 brochure template. These are what have been identified as potential threats down the road. Fun, huh?
I’m guessing if you’ve made it this far in my account, you’re at least somewhat concerned about Covid yourself. You probably wear a mask. Social distancing feels normal to you now. You may already be vaccinated or you’re leaning that way. I hope all of that is true. I also hope you will use your influence and your example of good and loving decisions to help instruct, guide, and persuade the unconvinced. This pandemic can still be a catalyst for positive, constructive change.
Covid changed my political views
It has certainly changed me, most notably my political views, in some very good ways. (Although now it has changed my medical chart for the rest of my life, in a very bad way). For me, the pandemic moved fuzzy ideas about the shared, inter-connected aspects of health and sickness, (and therefore of health care,) out of the abstract, and into sharp-edged, practical reality. Politics gets very real and very personal when your own life is on the line. Politics is the crucible where the ideal meets the practical and the necessary.
Here in the real world, where 99% of us don’t have a private Island or a floating city where we can retreat and hide out away from the great unwashed, teeming masses, we share air. We share spaces intimate enough, compact enough to make each other sick. Some of those shared spaces and experiences are voluntary acts of will. At other times, proximity to other humans is part of a job description, the income of which cannot be forfeited just because symptoms appear. And that person who cannot afford to stay home when they might be coming down with something, might be patient zero for the next viral assault that makes Covid-19 look like a trip to Disneyland.
Starting to see Health Care as a different kind of right…
I had unsuccessfully tried to get my head around the notion of health care as a right before the pandemic. I had always thought of rights as those entitlements to which we are born, simply for being born. Thinking this way, I could not see how the right to health care is something one is born with. Most of the rights we typically consider inalienable are those we believe to be ”ours,” possessed by the individual, and not to be taken from them. Liberty, for instance, is much easier to take from a person, than to give to them. It is impossible to give someone the pursuit of happiness, as any parent knows. You want your child to be happy. You give your child opportunities. Good parents encourage their children’s interests and pursuits. But no one can give another the pursuit of happiness. That pursuit can be taken away, however.
So, I thought of rights in this way, as possessions. And thus thinking, I reasoned that while health can be taken from a person, health care is not something a person is born possessing, and therefore not a right that can be taken away. I thought of it as a privilege – a useful one, a humanitarian one, even a desirable one – but a privilege, nonetheless, and not a right. And from the standpoint of the individual, that may still be an accurate way to look at it. However, if considering the question from the view of the public good, the entire equation changes.
…One with a different primary beneficiary
My experience with Covid, began as a witness and observer. Now, I’m numbered among the human flotsam swept up in its flood. The watching, and now, the experiencing, have produced a new conviction. I now believe Universal Health Care is primarily for the public, social, and national good.
It is not primarily for the individual at all. Of course, the individual benefits. But that is a proximate end to the ultimate goal of protecting society. I am now a born-again advocate for immediate, universal, mandatory health coverage (to the extent allowable – while maintaining personal and privacy protections). Every member of society deserves protection from whatever sickness any one member may contract, thereby endangering all. A single, uncovered member places society’s health at risk, through lack of access to care, treatment options, or at-home, out-of-work, sick pay. If we are willing to pay taxes to a government that buys state-of-the-art weapons to defend us from military enemies as a social good, then we should be willing to pay taxes for the government to defend us from biological, viral, molecular enemies.
A common objection, the product of bad thinking
Many are opposed to universal health care, or socialized-medicine, or single-payer systems (or whatever politically charged label can be slapped on) because they believe a person is being freely given something of value (health care) that is not free to provide. They feel the common and understandable disdain that many of us share over handing out goodies to people who won’t or can’t earn the goodies for themselves. And not content to stop there, paying for those goodies by taking the costs from the people who are working and earning the same goodies for themselves, but are involuntarily forced to pay for someone else’s too. It doesn’t seem fair. That view, once entrenched is hard to dislodge.
We should be able to talk about this so we can prepare for the future
But is it fair to subject workers and earners (and therefore taxpayers) to sickness or death, because one person cannot afford health care to treat a sickness that exposes all the taxpayers, who together, could have afforded to pay for the treatments, thereby protecting not just that individual, but all of themselves? What is fair about that?
We will botch our way through this pandemic…limping all the way to the finish line. Although, according to our last President, we’ve been ”rounding the turn” for what amounts to the world’s longest-running, continual Nascar race in the effort. But, what happens when the next pandemic hits? Wouldn’t you rather some of your taxes go to protect you from an uninsured person coming to work sick and killing you or a loved one? These are at least issues to talk about without accusing each other of wanting to turn the country into the Soviet Union, for God’s sake.
How it’s going…and what’s ahead for many of us
Our firsthand experience with Covid is soon to involve the battle my girlfriend is going to face with her work over the timetable for her return. She’s coughing now. She’s still sick. She is certainly still symptomatic from the same viral murderer that is going to kill as many of us as we allow to do so. Thankfully, she has work provided health insurance. But she has no mechanism to appeal to paid sick-leave, or an allowance for full-time work-from-home until there is a complete cessation of symptoms and production of a negative test. She has hit the 10 day mark, and she is still coughing. Hers is an individual case, but is not likely to be unique in those terms. Her duplicate could be the cough you’ve been hearing in the cubicle next to yours all morning.
Disinformation spreads when people become overly dependent on supposedly authorized sources for truth. Confusing authorized with authoritative makes the disinformation spread worse. Authorized is not the same as authoritative. To be authorized simply means to be endorsed or to hold an official position. To be authoritative means to be trustworthy and reliable for accuracy. These are not the same thing. Anyone authorized to dispense information ought to be authoritative. Then, disinformation would disappear. Herd immunity to lies would be a done deal. This is not the case.
An example from the typical church experience
People obtain information, curated and packaged for consumption, with too little investment in its gathering, and therefore too scant a regard for its veracity. I often think of the words of Luther who famously said, ”Don’t tell me what the Bible means, tell me what it says.” He was insistent to work out the meaning on his own. Today, many a churchgoer is content for their ministers to tell them not only what the bible says and means, but also how they should think, feel, and act as a result. It is apparently more agreeable to be spoon fed divine nuggets of scriptural insight, than be personally responsible to crack open the big, dusty book with the red letters. Having somebody else do all that bible study and prayer, and report the findings is so much easier. Especially when the somebody is a paid, authorized professional.
I’m only being half-facetious. People are that way with all types of information, not just the spiritual variety. We look to authorized experts to tell us what is what. But we never fact-check the ones who tell us what we want to hear, or already believe. A talking head’s popularity with our social clan is more important than their reliability. We are contented to accept that which everyone else like us embraces. The fear of ridicule is far greater than the fear of personal poisoning from swallowing falsehoods.
Consider this hypothetical
Here, where truth matters, do you want authorized, or authoritative?
Imagine yourself dropped into the Amazonian Rainforest. How do you stay alive? How do you know what will kill you if you eat it? Not, truth or dare; but, truth, or die. In the jungle, you’d be better off watching one monkey’s dietary choices than to read ten books about the Amazon from award-winning authors who have never spent a night alone in it. There, swallowing a lie may be manifest as swallowing a deadly mushroom. In matters of life and death, since authorized is not the same as authoritative, which one will you trust with your well-being? Do you want authorized, or authoritative?
This female capuchin monkey in the Ecuadorian Rainforest is more authoritative about safe vegetation than 10 authors of books on the Amazon.
And therein lies the problem. Our protected lives make us soft. We live at ease. Truth, for its own sake, isn’t seen as a matter of life and death. We come unglued if a lover lies to us, or friend betrays our trust, but we look the other way in the face of lies of national proportion. What is it that makes us like those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel? Are we really too lazy to think for ourselves, research for ourselves, listen for ourselves? Or do we just believe the authorized can be trusted to do all that work for us? Are we their beneficiaries? Aren’t we sheep vulnerable to fleecing when we don’t demand accountability from the authorized?
I believe authoritative, verifiable Truth is everywhere. It all comes from the same Source, though it presents and resounds from countless outlets. It wants you to find it. But you have to want to find it like your your life depends on it.
“I was blind all the time I was learning to see” ~ Grateful Dead, Help On The Way
I’m listening to the Audible version of The Overstory during my daily walks. Yesterday, I heard the Bullhorn of Truth in the dialogue of two characters on page 430:
”What keeps us from seeing the obvious?”
Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull’s horn. ”And? What does?”
”Mostly other people.”
[Before proceeding with my remarks. Here is a fun tidbit. I just pulled a bookmark randomly from a pack I received from Amazon a couple days ago. Each has a quote from a famous person. The one I selected (without peeking) to mark the passage I quoted above, says:
”Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.” ~ Steve Jobs]
These aren’t exactly the same ideas, but are next of kin. Other people influence what we pay attention to, and therefore what we see and hear. Their opinions hold the power to silence and shelve our own opinions.
I could spend a month searching the psychological literature to find supports for those sentences above. I’m not going to do that. They are self-evident to me. I’m sold. I just wanted to package it up for your consideration.
To look below the surface, you have to know there’s more to see
None of us can see everything. We have to be selective. And we are constructed in a way that we cannot simultaneously see what is in front of, and behind, us. Unlike an owl, which can spin its head around, or a fly, with eyes that allow 360° vision, we can look in only one direction at a time. And often, we don’t really know what we’re looking at. To truly see a thing requires some idea of how much there is to look for, does it not? Who decides where we look? Who tells us how long to look, or much to look for? Who tells us what to pay attention to? Where do these impulses come from, if not other people?
(For God’s sake do not get me started about the algorithms Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms use to restrict what you see and hear about in order to capture your attention for sale to advertisers. The truth asserted above is the basis of their business models, by virtue of which, they are the richest companies in the history of the world.)
Who have you permitted to determine what you get to see? And who decides what you get to say about it? There is more going on friend, than the carefully curated world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth. (with my tip of the cap to Morpheus’ quote in The Matrix.)
