Civilians
To hear the word civilian is a bit rhetorical these days, a word now relegated to the likes of "collateral damage" or disaster-recovery teams as in, "the air strike cost six civilians their lives" as if such lives were statistics only and not family members who were mothers and fathers or children. But perhaps it is simply because we are missing that word's meaning in general in our world, the part that begins its definition with all of us being civil to one another. Now we're called "tribal" or "divided" as if labeling our differences means that we need to remove our niceties and our smiles, regardless of our beliefs. To hear the term "open arms" now brings us thoughts not of welcome but of weapons, evidenced by the recent partisan language displayed here in the U.S. during the impeachment hearings (a good and easy to follow flow chart, in case you're wondering how to follow the maze of legalese, came from Bloomberg), the Republicans using such thug-like talk as "circus," "man up," and "he should be ashamed" (and they were not talking about the President in that instance). It's a bit embarrassing, even over here, to listen to such grade school language in such an otherwise professional setting; but the polls show that our country is indeed split with nearly half of it fully backs this somewhat-ruffian, almost-slanderous behavior. As the December cover story in The Atlantic asked: A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together? Said editor Jeffrey Goldberg: We don’t believe that conditions in the United States today resemble those of 1850s America. But we worry that the ties that bind us are fraying at alarming speed—we are becoming contemptuous of each other in ways that are both dire and possibly irreversible. The magazine's title cover read "How to Stop A Civil War."
There's that word again, this time associated with war instead of civilization and civilized, and of course, civilians. The people of each of those terms are somehow being pushed into the background as gated communities and money grabs seem to send short-term pleasures to the forefront. Build walls? Slam doors? For those with the power and the money, the question once again becomes, how much is enough? A piece in the London Review of Books talked of when the Ukrainian people stormed the estate of their then-president (he had siphoned off $40 billion in public funds) ...here's what they found: In February 2014, after months of protests, thousands of Ukrainians stormed President Viktor Yanukovych’s estate north of Kyiv. The Mezhyhirya Residence was filled with the fruits of years of embezzlement. In Yanukovych’s private mansion, the activists found a bowling alley, several swimming pools, a cryosauna and an indoor shooting range. Elsewhere on the 99-acre estate they discovered a full replica of a Spanish galleon; a network of heated roads; a modest decoy home to show to visiting journalists; a vintage car museum; entire houses for the president’s Tibetan mastiffs; accommodation for 400 security guards and 300 live-in staff; and a complex with Japanese, Russian and Finnish saunas, which the activists used to dry out the incriminating documents Yanukovich had dumped in a lake before fleeing. They also discovered a two-kilo gold model of a loaf of bread, given to the president as a birthday present by a businessman. Yanukovich fled to Russia, a country which is currently wanting even more than the 7% of Ukraine it invaded and illegally took over (an area equal to the size of Texas); the ongoing battle to halt the incursion has so far cost the defending Ukrainians over 13,000 lives and has left 30,000 wounded, many of those "numbers" not soldiers but ordinary civilians.* While the world passively watched a recent article from The Atlantic asked, is America feeling a bit more Soviet?: “Ukrainian people have been dying for five years in that territory, and they still do,” said Natalie (Nataliya Dudko, a 42-year-old who came to America in 2006), referring to the Donbas region, where Ukraine is attempting to fight off a Russian incursion. But in America, all that seems to matter are politicians’ personal fortunes and the next domestic elections, reminiscent of so many strongman regimes. As people die in her home country, Natalie said, all of this “is just a game, unfortunately.”
The Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mongol Empire (which Google lists as "The largest contiguous empire in world’s history")...all gone. It's a familiar pattern, perhaps exemplified by a brief summary of the Manchus who were mentioned in a review in the New York Review of Books: Imperial China’s last dynasty, the Qing, was controlled by a small ethnic group, the Manchus, who had once been nomadic warriors in the region north of Korea and had conquered the last ethnic Chinese empire, the Ming, in 1644. The Manchus were brilliant imperialists, holding sway over the vastly more populous Chinese --there were three Manchus for every one thousand Chinese at the time of the conquest-- by adopting elements of Chinese culture, especially Confucianism. Eventually, most Chinese came to accept them as simply the latest in a series of dynasties to rule the country. The Manchus expanded the empire’s borders northward to include all of Mongolia, and westward to Tibet and Xinjiang. This was a remarkable achievement, but it was also a classic gunpowder empire, harnessing the economic might of hundreds of millions of Chinese to the martial prowess of the Manchus and their allies. Confucianism and Chinese religion held together the Chinese heartland (running from Beijing in the north to modern-day Hong Kong in the south, the coastline in the east to the Sichuan basin in the west), but the rest of the empire- --more than half of its territory-- was newly conquered and contained few Chinese people.
All of this fighting and in-fighting may be moot in the not-too-distant future. Here's are a few quick stats from just a single issue of Defenders of Wildlife's magazine: ...the western monarch (butterfly) population "appears to have collapsed," according to Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. This January, Xerces released the latest results of its annual monarch survey at wintering sites along the California coast. Just since last winter, Black reports, the number of butterflies tallied fell from 192,668 to 28,428 -- an 86 percent drop in one year and a more-than-99-percent decline since the 1980s. In another story on lawns, it said this: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, lawns and garden in this country are sprayed with more than 90 million pounds of insecticides and herbicides a year. The mowers and edgers that maintain them emit nearly 27 million tons of air pollutants annually. And U.S. residents squander a whopping 9 billion gallons of water outdoors each day, (emphasis mine) primarily on landscape irrigation. Add to that a related story on urban forests that not so long ago were so popular in cities: Nationally, some 36 million trees --about 175,000 acres per year-- were lost between 2009 and 2014...Kondo (Michelle Kondo, a research social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service) has spearheaded several of the many recent studies confirming that spending time in the midst of trees can enhance the well-being of stressed-out city dwellers. Her studies, in turn, add to a growing body of evidence showing that urban forests are vital to the physical and mental health of people as well as the survival of birds and other wildlife. Said Jacob Malcom of the Defenders Center for Conservation, when speaking before a Congressional hearing on the importance of biodiversity in nature: [The last time there was a mass extinction] it happened because an asteroid hit the planet. Today, we are that asteroid.
In a stunningly exuberant Ted Talk, historian David Christian sums up our entire universe in just 18 minutes, starting with this: Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second. He goes on to talk about that asteroid, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and which opened a tiny sliver for other mammals, including us, to appear. But he reminds us that if that asteroid came just five minutes earlier or five minutes later, it would have missed Earth entirely; the consequence, he adds, is that if that would have happened we, the human species, most likely would not be here at all. Our planet is warming, said the recent 2019 Arctic Report Card; the volume of water from Greenland's melting ice sheet alone is adding the equivalent of 2000 elephants jumping into the ocean every second...and the pace of melting ice is accelerating. We are that asteroid...
So let's jump back to civilization. Lori Gottlieb, therapist and author of the book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, wrote this about therapists: People who come to therapy present snapshots of themselves, and from their snapshots, a therapist has to extrapolate. Patients arrive, if not at their worse, then certainly not at their best...So they sit on the therapist's couch and look up expectantly, hoping to find some understanding and, eventually (but preferably immediately), a cure. But therapists don't have an immediate cure because these people are complete strangers to us. We need time to acquaint ourselves with their hopes and dreams, their feelings and behavior patterns, sometimes more deeply than even they have. If it takes from birth to the day they arrive in our offices to develop whatever is troubling them or if a problem has been incubating for many months, it makes sense that they might need more than a couple of fifty-minute sessions to attain the desired relief...Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other, alone in a room? The answer is this: Because therapists know that at first, each person is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment...Some snapshots are disturbing, and glimpsing them reminds me that we all have a dark side. Others are blurry. People don't always remember events or conversations clearly, but they do remember with great accuracy how an experience made them feel. Therapists have to be interpreters of these blurry snapshots, aware that patients need to be fuzzy to some extent, because those first snapshots help to gloss over painful feelings that might be invading their peaceful inner territory. In time, they find out that they aren't at war after all, that the path to peace is to call a truce with themselves.
Added National Geographic: Our readers have reminded us that total strangers halfway across the world can be kind—without expectation of something in return. Kelly Barrett has gathered 10 reader stories of unexpected generosity on the road. They include this visit to a park in Istanbul by reader Kendall Fayle. A family “waved me over [and] insisted I join them for a delicious homegrown salad," Fayle said. "We didn’t share a language but we shared a meal, smiles, and kindness.” People travel for people as much (if not more) than for sights. Sometimes we discover a bit of ourselves in a stranger; sometimes we learn how to be a better version of ourselves by learning from a local. And Marielle Heller, director of the new Tom Hanks movie on Mr. Rogers (It's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), told ELLE: I guess I always view movies as, in their best form, connecting us more to each other and to humanity. And Mister Rogers’s message was potent. He really believed that there was goodness in all of us, and that we all had value. And we’re obviously in a political time where we are not seeing the value in many people. So I hope the message of the movie is to remember that we all have value. And to remember what a hard thing it is to be alive in this world—and that we can find ways to be compassionate with one another.
Perhaps the takeaway is this, that what we see of a person is indeed just a portion of that person. And yes, there are certainly disturbing parts of humanity as we see almost daily here in the U.S. with our random gun violence (as comedian Dave Chappelle asked, why are all the mass killing shooters in the U.S. white; and for that matter, why did Congress pass a law that shields gun and ammunition manufacturers from any liability?) There will likely always be things in this world that we don't understand, the yin and yang, the good and the evil, the kindness and the hatred. But we will always have those who have not forgotten how to be civil to one another. And while it might be good to have a title of a president or a leader or the ruler of an empire, perhaps they will never understand that an even greater honor is that of just being a simple person, someone content with what one has, someone who cares about the hardship of others...someone who is simply a civilian.
*This was the primary issue in the impeachment hearings, that military aid to help the Ukrainians in their defense (monies which had already been approved and appropriated) was ordered to be delayed by President Trump until "a favor" was granted, that of investigating one of his election rivals, former Vice-President Joe Biden and his son. Ranking Minority party leader Devin Nunes often used the term "circus" to describe the impeachment hearings, even as he billed taxpayers for his own trip to Vienna in the same period; said an article in Newsweek: Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member on the House Intelligence Committee, spent nearly $57,000 on a trip to Europe for him and his staff to allegedly investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, records show. The figures seem to confirm allegations made by Lev Parnas --a Ukrainian-born American who worked as a "fixer" for Rudy Giuliani before being indicted on criminal charges-- who said that he helped Nunes arrange meetings with various Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on Biden. Parnas said he met Nunes in a secretive trip to Vienna, Austria, between November and December 2018, and put him in touch with former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin -- the lawyer who was ousted from his position in 2016 after pressure from Western leaders, including Biden, who said he was not doing enough to combat corruption. An investigation into Nunes' intention, use of public funds, and failure to recuse himself from the impeachment hearings as related to Trump's involvement on which Nunes may himself have been a part of, has already been filed. In this new "circus," Nunes may find himself caught in his own spotlight under the Big Ring.
There's that word again, this time associated with war instead of civilization and civilized, and of course, civilians. The people of each of those terms are somehow being pushed into the background as gated communities and money grabs seem to send short-term pleasures to the forefront. Build walls? Slam doors? For those with the power and the money, the question once again becomes, how much is enough? A piece in the London Review of Books talked of when the Ukrainian people stormed the estate of their then-president (he had siphoned off $40 billion in public funds) ...here's what they found: In February 2014, after months of protests, thousands of Ukrainians stormed President Viktor Yanukovych’s estate north of Kyiv. The Mezhyhirya Residence was filled with the fruits of years of embezzlement. In Yanukovych’s private mansion, the activists found a bowling alley, several swimming pools, a cryosauna and an indoor shooting range. Elsewhere on the 99-acre estate they discovered a full replica of a Spanish galleon; a network of heated roads; a modest decoy home to show to visiting journalists; a vintage car museum; entire houses for the president’s Tibetan mastiffs; accommodation for 400 security guards and 300 live-in staff; and a complex with Japanese, Russian and Finnish saunas, which the activists used to dry out the incriminating documents Yanukovich had dumped in a lake before fleeing. They also discovered a two-kilo gold model of a loaf of bread, given to the president as a birthday present by a businessman. Yanukovich fled to Russia, a country which is currently wanting even more than the 7% of Ukraine it invaded and illegally took over (an area equal to the size of Texas); the ongoing battle to halt the incursion has so far cost the defending Ukrainians over 13,000 lives and has left 30,000 wounded, many of those "numbers" not soldiers but ordinary civilians.* While the world passively watched a recent article from The Atlantic asked, is America feeling a bit more Soviet?: “Ukrainian people have been dying for five years in that territory, and they still do,” said Natalie (Nataliya Dudko, a 42-year-old who came to America in 2006), referring to the Donbas region, where Ukraine is attempting to fight off a Russian incursion. But in America, all that seems to matter are politicians’ personal fortunes and the next domestic elections, reminiscent of so many strongman regimes. As people die in her home country, Natalie said, all of this “is just a game, unfortunately.”
The Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mongol Empire (which Google lists as "The largest contiguous empire in world’s history")...all gone. It's a familiar pattern, perhaps exemplified by a brief summary of the Manchus who were mentioned in a review in the New York Review of Books: Imperial China’s last dynasty, the Qing, was controlled by a small ethnic group, the Manchus, who had once been nomadic warriors in the region north of Korea and had conquered the last ethnic Chinese empire, the Ming, in 1644. The Manchus were brilliant imperialists, holding sway over the vastly more populous Chinese --there were three Manchus for every one thousand Chinese at the time of the conquest-- by adopting elements of Chinese culture, especially Confucianism. Eventually, most Chinese came to accept them as simply the latest in a series of dynasties to rule the country. The Manchus expanded the empire’s borders northward to include all of Mongolia, and westward to Tibet and Xinjiang. This was a remarkable achievement, but it was also a classic gunpowder empire, harnessing the economic might of hundreds of millions of Chinese to the martial prowess of the Manchus and their allies. Confucianism and Chinese religion held together the Chinese heartland (running from Beijing in the north to modern-day Hong Kong in the south, the coastline in the east to the Sichuan basin in the west), but the rest of the empire- --more than half of its territory-- was newly conquered and contained few Chinese people.
All of this fighting and in-fighting may be moot in the not-too-distant future. Here's are a few quick stats from just a single issue of Defenders of Wildlife's magazine: ...the western monarch (butterfly) population "appears to have collapsed," according to Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. This January, Xerces released the latest results of its annual monarch survey at wintering sites along the California coast. Just since last winter, Black reports, the number of butterflies tallied fell from 192,668 to 28,428 -- an 86 percent drop in one year and a more-than-99-percent decline since the 1980s. In another story on lawns, it said this: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, lawns and garden in this country are sprayed with more than 90 million pounds of insecticides and herbicides a year. The mowers and edgers that maintain them emit nearly 27 million tons of air pollutants annually. And U.S. residents squander a whopping 9 billion gallons of water outdoors each day, (emphasis mine) primarily on landscape irrigation. Add to that a related story on urban forests that not so long ago were so popular in cities: Nationally, some 36 million trees --about 175,000 acres per year-- were lost between 2009 and 2014...Kondo (Michelle Kondo, a research social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service) has spearheaded several of the many recent studies confirming that spending time in the midst of trees can enhance the well-being of stressed-out city dwellers. Her studies, in turn, add to a growing body of evidence showing that urban forests are vital to the physical and mental health of people as well as the survival of birds and other wildlife. Said Jacob Malcom of the Defenders Center for Conservation, when speaking before a Congressional hearing on the importance of biodiversity in nature: [The last time there was a mass extinction] it happened because an asteroid hit the planet. Today, we are that asteroid.
In a stunningly exuberant Ted Talk, historian David Christian sums up our entire universe in just 18 minutes, starting with this: Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second. He goes on to talk about that asteroid, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and which opened a tiny sliver for other mammals, including us, to appear. But he reminds us that if that asteroid came just five minutes earlier or five minutes later, it would have missed Earth entirely; the consequence, he adds, is that if that would have happened we, the human species, most likely would not be here at all. Our planet is warming, said the recent 2019 Arctic Report Card; the volume of water from Greenland's melting ice sheet alone is adding the equivalent of 2000 elephants jumping into the ocean every second...and the pace of melting ice is accelerating. We are that asteroid...
So let's jump back to civilization. Lori Gottlieb, therapist and author of the book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, wrote this about therapists: People who come to therapy present snapshots of themselves, and from their snapshots, a therapist has to extrapolate. Patients arrive, if not at their worse, then certainly not at their best...So they sit on the therapist's couch and look up expectantly, hoping to find some understanding and, eventually (but preferably immediately), a cure. But therapists don't have an immediate cure because these people are complete strangers to us. We need time to acquaint ourselves with their hopes and dreams, their feelings and behavior patterns, sometimes more deeply than even they have. If it takes from birth to the day they arrive in our offices to develop whatever is troubling them or if a problem has been incubating for many months, it makes sense that they might need more than a couple of fifty-minute sessions to attain the desired relief...Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other, alone in a room? The answer is this: Because therapists know that at first, each person is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment...Some snapshots are disturbing, and glimpsing them reminds me that we all have a dark side. Others are blurry. People don't always remember events or conversations clearly, but they do remember with great accuracy how an experience made them feel. Therapists have to be interpreters of these blurry snapshots, aware that patients need to be fuzzy to some extent, because those first snapshots help to gloss over painful feelings that might be invading their peaceful inner territory. In time, they find out that they aren't at war after all, that the path to peace is to call a truce with themselves.
Added National Geographic: Our readers have reminded us that total strangers halfway across the world can be kind—without expectation of something in return. Kelly Barrett has gathered 10 reader stories of unexpected generosity on the road. They include this visit to a park in Istanbul by reader Kendall Fayle. A family “waved me over [and] insisted I join them for a delicious homegrown salad," Fayle said. "We didn’t share a language but we shared a meal, smiles, and kindness.” People travel for people as much (if not more) than for sights. Sometimes we discover a bit of ourselves in a stranger; sometimes we learn how to be a better version of ourselves by learning from a local. And Marielle Heller, director of the new Tom Hanks movie on Mr. Rogers (It's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), told ELLE: I guess I always view movies as, in their best form, connecting us more to each other and to humanity. And Mister Rogers’s message was potent. He really believed that there was goodness in all of us, and that we all had value. And we’re obviously in a political time where we are not seeing the value in many people. So I hope the message of the movie is to remember that we all have value. And to remember what a hard thing it is to be alive in this world—and that we can find ways to be compassionate with one another.
Perhaps the takeaway is this, that what we see of a person is indeed just a portion of that person. And yes, there are certainly disturbing parts of humanity as we see almost daily here in the U.S. with our random gun violence (as comedian Dave Chappelle asked, why are all the mass killing shooters in the U.S. white; and for that matter, why did Congress pass a law that shields gun and ammunition manufacturers from any liability?) There will likely always be things in this world that we don't understand, the yin and yang, the good and the evil, the kindness and the hatred. But we will always have those who have not forgotten how to be civil to one another. And while it might be good to have a title of a president or a leader or the ruler of an empire, perhaps they will never understand that an even greater honor is that of just being a simple person, someone content with what one has, someone who cares about the hardship of others...someone who is simply a civilian.
*This was the primary issue in the impeachment hearings, that military aid to help the Ukrainians in their defense (monies which had already been approved and appropriated) was ordered to be delayed by President Trump until "a favor" was granted, that of investigating one of his election rivals, former Vice-President Joe Biden and his son. Ranking Minority party leader Devin Nunes often used the term "circus" to describe the impeachment hearings, even as he billed taxpayers for his own trip to Vienna in the same period; said an article in Newsweek: Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member on the House Intelligence Committee, spent nearly $57,000 on a trip to Europe for him and his staff to allegedly investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, records show. The figures seem to confirm allegations made by Lev Parnas --a Ukrainian-born American who worked as a "fixer" for Rudy Giuliani before being indicted on criminal charges-- who said that he helped Nunes arrange meetings with various Ukrainian officials to dig up dirt on Biden. Parnas said he met Nunes in a secretive trip to Vienna, Austria, between November and December 2018, and put him in touch with former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin -- the lawyer who was ousted from his position in 2016 after pressure from Western leaders, including Biden, who said he was not doing enough to combat corruption. An investigation into Nunes' intention, use of public funds, and failure to recuse himself from the impeachment hearings as related to Trump's involvement on which Nunes may himself have been a part of, has already been filed. In this new "circus," Nunes may find himself caught in his own spotlight under the Big Ring.
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