Getting It Out There
The past few days have me thinking about our world of information, and you can add to that the mis- and dis- prefixes. A quick glance through almost any library reveals the weekly arrivals of books that made the grade (and budget), which meant that thousands of other titles from smaller presses, those both educational and scientific (and throw in poetry, literature, foreign and the rest of the skipped titles while you're at it) were bypassed. Okay, maybe books aren't your thing but click over to Netflix or Amazon or even better, the "apps" menu and you'll be bowled over by the selection of movies and shows that also arrive weekly, most of them already dated and destined for the dustbin but many new choices both in movies and in series (500+ new series were added in 2019 alone). And I won't even try to pretend that I keep up with the music since I am reaching the point where the most-streamed songs and concerts are by artists I don't recognize (its a generational thing). But a few quick spoilers about those movies...my wife and I have watched several escapist films in the weeks since putting down our dog, distractions really, mindless action or psychological films that apparently didn't do all that well at the box office or faced a limited audience: The Oldenheim 12 (kept you guessing until the end and yes, 12 episodes and in Dutch with subtitles), The Cry (starred Jenna Coleman of Victoria fame and presented a true psychological puzzle that also kept you guessing up to the final moments); Crypto (like me, the character is clueless about Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies), Night Hunter (the twisted mind of schizophrenia coupled with an interesting solution to treating sex offenders), and Edge of Darkness (an early 2010 Mel Gibson movie that made you question government contracts, both monetary and assassin).* And then there's all the rest, including podcasts, radio shows, hard copy print and yes, blogs such as this...
So as a reader (think Dr. Google and how quickly you search for "answers" on the Web) you have to wonder just where does it all end and how accurate is such information? It's one thing to read about recipes or travels and such; but to take just one example there is now emerging the screening at some airports for the new SARS-like virus that has affected a few people in China. Some reports make it seem almost Ebola-like while others, such as that of Live Science, are trying to present a more balanced approach by saying that the risk of transmission is low. Even with my earlier post on vaccines, this report from the National Institute of Health showed that not only were there only a few doctors spreading the anti-vax message, but also celebrities, opportunists, organizers, and "mommy-bloggers," all of which totaled millions of readers; said the report: Many of these “influencers” rely on the internet to spread their message (together, the individuals and organizations included in Table 2 have more than 7 million Facebook followers, although some overlap in followers may be expected). Recent work has demonstrated that approximately 80% of individuals use the internet yearly to search for health information, and relatively few discuss these findings with a healthcare professional. So real quick, making a vaccine proved to be a much longer process than I imagined as a friend in field explained to me by sending this brief summary from STAT on the convoluted but eventually successful development of an Ebola vaccine. Here's how the article opens: In the spring of 2014, as Ebola exploded across West Africa, a scientist named Gary Kobinger was following the news intently from Canada. Kobinger was the head of the special pathogens unit at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. He and the team he led had a well-deserved reputation for their work on Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers; Kobinger himself had led development of a promising Ebola therapy. The Winnipeg lab also had been working for years on an Ebola vaccine, one that looked tremendously effective in animal models. The lab had even produced human-grade vaccine in the hopes of testing it in people. But as of April 2014, that still hadn’t happened. The vaccine had never been deployed in an outbreak. No major pharmaceutical company had expressed interest in developing it. With Ebola appearing to spread rapidly in a country that had no experience trying to control it --Guinea-- Kobinger contacted the World Health Organization to offer the vaccine. The WHO declined the offer. It's a fascinating read since getting the vaccine out there, even after it was offered for free (most vaccines take upwards of $1 billion to develop), almost never happened.
So let's say you feel that you've written a hit song, or written a terrific book, or spent a ton of money and made your independent film. How do you get it out there and get people to read or see it, much less believe what you are saying? How do you throw this droplet of yours into a massive ocean and get it noticed? Okay, the reality is that it just doesn't happen for most; but let's say that now you have something that is important enough that it can help to solve many problems: women's rights, animal cruelty, ocean acidification, air pollution, sex trafficking, drug killings, war...and maybe, a vaccine? You write letters or make calls, you protest, you sign a petition, you write a blog or a song or a book. Or you shoot or stab someone (apparently always someone innocent and unrelated to your "cause"). Or maybe you just give up. Imagine being caught even in something as highly publicized as the fires in Australia (an earlier post of mine gave you some groups needing your help in that effort). Here's how Tim Flannery put it in The New York Review of Books: To date, some 17.8 million acres have been burned, with no state spared. With the worst of the traditional fire season, which is normally from December to March, still ahead of us, and with little rain forecast, it will be months before the danger is over. To date, twenty-eight people have died, and for those surviving in the fire zones, fearful suspense has become a feature of their lives. The fires are like some hidden beast, toying with the fates of entire communities for weeks on end, before pouncing with deadly effect. For some, the dread becomes so unbearable that they say they want to “bring it on,” just to end the agony of uncertainty and waiting. It is very difficult for anyone living outside Australia to comprehend what the last few months have been like. The great cities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra have been smoke-bound for months now, the air quality frequently as poor as that in Delhi or Beijing. On January 6, the smog was so thick in Canberra, the national capital, that it forced the closure of government departments and the national university. The smoke is inescapable, and more or less acrid depending on whether it has burned buildings, forests, or flesh. The smell of burning insinuates itself into houses—there is no way to keep it out. Opening the front door and being confronted with its intensity has become a daily reminder that something has gone terribly wrong in the country. Doctors are warning of an epidemic of ill-health triggered by smoke exposure, and on the worst days they recommend that children, the elderly, and the infirm remain indoors. Australians pride themselves on their natural surroundings, and as, week after week, people emerge from a swim besmirched with ash or struggling to breathe, the sense of outrage and terror has grown. Flannery also notes this at the end: Australia is the world’s fifteenth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and at the back of the pack for climate action, as its emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue to grow...I’m fairly certain that Australia’s bushfire crisis will not change this system. The next federal election is two and a half years away, and there’s just too much self-interest—too much money to be made pandering to the fossil-fuel industry—even if the cost of it is to send the country up in smoke.
Sound familiar? Coral "forests" in the deepest sections of our oceans have been destroyed by drag nets; palm oil "forests" take over jungles in Indonesia and Malaysia (said Rainforest Rescue: At 66 million tons annually, palm oil is the most commonly produced vegetable oil. Its low world market price and properties that lend themselves to processed foods have led the food industry to use it in half of all supermarket products); birds are perishing by the millions and billions, even in the ocean; our planet had the second hottest year in recorded history in 2019 according to NASA and NOAA. Does any of this matter? And if so, at what point will the global population get concerned? For the many people, groups and organizations doing their best to convey such messages that we need to do something now, one has to wonder if we're entering a world of alexithymia, "a word made from Greek parts meaning, roughly, 'no words for emotion,' said The Conversation.
In an emotional TED Talk, psychologist Susan David said this: Life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. We are young until we are not. We walk down the streets sexy until one day we realize that we are unseen. We nag our children and one day realize that there is silence where that child once was, now making his or her way in the world. We are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees. The only certainty is uncertainty, and yet we are not navigating this frailty successfully or sustainably. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally -- outstripping cancer, outstripping heart disease. And at a time of greater complexity, unprecedented technological, political and economic change, we are seeing how people's tendency is more and more to lock down into rigid responses to their emotions...You might think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities. She describes her talk as recognizing our emotional "courage." This frsutration, this anger, this feeling of helplessness. It's okay and actually good to acknowledge those emotions.
Poet and philosopher David Whyte** told Krista Tippett in the podcast On Being: Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you. For me, I still believe that there is more good than bad in this world, that people still do care about each other and about our planet, that despite all of the bad news taking up the bulk of the headlines that our earth will survive (with or without us) and that if we had the ability of Lucy we would be able to see our history in a glance and realize that time moves on (with or without us) and perhaps even more important, how absolutely amazing life --all of life-- truly is. And maybe the biggest realization for me, especially with our dog physically gone but still ethereally here in our hearts, are that the words of John Lennon may ring truer than ever...All You Need Is Love.
*What I found interesting about this movie is the premise that smaller countries can be bullied and manipulated by larger countries, certainly through economic sanctions and such; but imagine being blamed for an attack or bombing that really wasn't yours. If the reporting was distorted or entirely false, or the coding (as happened in the recent Olympic games) or even weapons were just made to look like yours, what chance would you have? So yes, it's a typical Mel Gibson-being-shunned-by-Hollywood movie, but it did bring up some interesting points (another movie along the more Deadpool format is the Ryan Reynolds take on the same idea, 6 Underground).
**If you've never heard of David Whyte (I hadn't), the podcast will expose you to a rather interesting person, one who seems could be as casual a dinner guest as he is an observer of our place in this world. Here's just one portion of his conversation: I began to realize that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you, that whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it. But the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier. But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown both inside you and outside you. John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world, letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.
So as a reader (think Dr. Google and how quickly you search for "answers" on the Web) you have to wonder just where does it all end and how accurate is such information? It's one thing to read about recipes or travels and such; but to take just one example there is now emerging the screening at some airports for the new SARS-like virus that has affected a few people in China. Some reports make it seem almost Ebola-like while others, such as that of Live Science, are trying to present a more balanced approach by saying that the risk of transmission is low. Even with my earlier post on vaccines, this report from the National Institute of Health showed that not only were there only a few doctors spreading the anti-vax message, but also celebrities, opportunists, organizers, and "mommy-bloggers," all of which totaled millions of readers; said the report: Many of these “influencers” rely on the internet to spread their message (together, the individuals and organizations included in Table 2 have more than 7 million Facebook followers, although some overlap in followers may be expected). Recent work has demonstrated that approximately 80% of individuals use the internet yearly to search for health information, and relatively few discuss these findings with a healthcare professional. So real quick, making a vaccine proved to be a much longer process than I imagined as a friend in field explained to me by sending this brief summary from STAT on the convoluted but eventually successful development of an Ebola vaccine. Here's how the article opens: In the spring of 2014, as Ebola exploded across West Africa, a scientist named Gary Kobinger was following the news intently from Canada. Kobinger was the head of the special pathogens unit at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. He and the team he led had a well-deserved reputation for their work on Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers; Kobinger himself had led development of a promising Ebola therapy. The Winnipeg lab also had been working for years on an Ebola vaccine, one that looked tremendously effective in animal models. The lab had even produced human-grade vaccine in the hopes of testing it in people. But as of April 2014, that still hadn’t happened. The vaccine had never been deployed in an outbreak. No major pharmaceutical company had expressed interest in developing it. With Ebola appearing to spread rapidly in a country that had no experience trying to control it --Guinea-- Kobinger contacted the World Health Organization to offer the vaccine. The WHO declined the offer. It's a fascinating read since getting the vaccine out there, even after it was offered for free (most vaccines take upwards of $1 billion to develop), almost never happened.
So let's say you feel that you've written a hit song, or written a terrific book, or spent a ton of money and made your independent film. How do you get it out there and get people to read or see it, much less believe what you are saying? How do you throw this droplet of yours into a massive ocean and get it noticed? Okay, the reality is that it just doesn't happen for most; but let's say that now you have something that is important enough that it can help to solve many problems: women's rights, animal cruelty, ocean acidification, air pollution, sex trafficking, drug killings, war...and maybe, a vaccine? You write letters or make calls, you protest, you sign a petition, you write a blog or a song or a book. Or you shoot or stab someone (apparently always someone innocent and unrelated to your "cause"). Or maybe you just give up. Imagine being caught even in something as highly publicized as the fires in Australia (an earlier post of mine gave you some groups needing your help in that effort). Here's how Tim Flannery put it in The New York Review of Books: To date, some 17.8 million acres have been burned, with no state spared. With the worst of the traditional fire season, which is normally from December to March, still ahead of us, and with little rain forecast, it will be months before the danger is over. To date, twenty-eight people have died, and for those surviving in the fire zones, fearful suspense has become a feature of their lives. The fires are like some hidden beast, toying with the fates of entire communities for weeks on end, before pouncing with deadly effect. For some, the dread becomes so unbearable that they say they want to “bring it on,” just to end the agony of uncertainty and waiting. It is very difficult for anyone living outside Australia to comprehend what the last few months have been like. The great cities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra have been smoke-bound for months now, the air quality frequently as poor as that in Delhi or Beijing. On January 6, the smog was so thick in Canberra, the national capital, that it forced the closure of government departments and the national university. The smoke is inescapable, and more or less acrid depending on whether it has burned buildings, forests, or flesh. The smell of burning insinuates itself into houses—there is no way to keep it out. Opening the front door and being confronted with its intensity has become a daily reminder that something has gone terribly wrong in the country. Doctors are warning of an epidemic of ill-health triggered by smoke exposure, and on the worst days they recommend that children, the elderly, and the infirm remain indoors. Australians pride themselves on their natural surroundings, and as, week after week, people emerge from a swim besmirched with ash or struggling to breathe, the sense of outrage and terror has grown. Flannery also notes this at the end: Australia is the world’s fifteenth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and at the back of the pack for climate action, as its emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue to grow...I’m fairly certain that Australia’s bushfire crisis will not change this system. The next federal election is two and a half years away, and there’s just too much self-interest—too much money to be made pandering to the fossil-fuel industry—even if the cost of it is to send the country up in smoke.
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| Credit: NASA GISS/Gavin Schmidt |
In an emotional TED Talk, psychologist Susan David said this: Life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. We are young until we are not. We walk down the streets sexy until one day we realize that we are unseen. We nag our children and one day realize that there is silence where that child once was, now making his or her way in the world. We are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees. The only certainty is uncertainty, and yet we are not navigating this frailty successfully or sustainably. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally -- outstripping cancer, outstripping heart disease. And at a time of greater complexity, unprecedented technological, political and economic change, we are seeing how people's tendency is more and more to lock down into rigid responses to their emotions...You might think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities. She describes her talk as recognizing our emotional "courage." This frsutration, this anger, this feeling of helplessness. It's okay and actually good to acknowledge those emotions.
Poet and philosopher David Whyte** told Krista Tippett in the podcast On Being: Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you. For me, I still believe that there is more good than bad in this world, that people still do care about each other and about our planet, that despite all of the bad news taking up the bulk of the headlines that our earth will survive (with or without us) and that if we had the ability of Lucy we would be able to see our history in a glance and realize that time moves on (with or without us) and perhaps even more important, how absolutely amazing life --all of life-- truly is. And maybe the biggest realization for me, especially with our dog physically gone but still ethereally here in our hearts, are that the words of John Lennon may ring truer than ever...All You Need Is Love.
*What I found interesting about this movie is the premise that smaller countries can be bullied and manipulated by larger countries, certainly through economic sanctions and such; but imagine being blamed for an attack or bombing that really wasn't yours. If the reporting was distorted or entirely false, or the coding (as happened in the recent Olympic games) or even weapons were just made to look like yours, what chance would you have? So yes, it's a typical Mel Gibson-being-shunned-by-Hollywood movie, but it did bring up some interesting points (another movie along the more Deadpool format is the Ryan Reynolds take on the same idea, 6 Underground).
**If you've never heard of David Whyte (I hadn't), the podcast will expose you to a rather interesting person, one who seems could be as casual a dinner guest as he is an observer of our place in this world. Here's just one portion of his conversation: I began to realize that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you, that whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it. But the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier. But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown both inside you and outside you. John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself in the world, letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.
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