Can You (Or Anyone) Hear Me Now?

    On occasion I read a host of magazines that feature a "youthful" feature, generally those with titlles such as "30 Under 30" or the "50 Most Influential People Under 40."  I tend to do this because it gives me hope to read about what is coming on the horizon, well out of my view.  As one ages, it becomes  more and more difficult to keep a fresh perspective of things, the technology and views and attitudes virtually whizzing by; and admittedly after years of being on the "treadmill," I have found that settling back and letting the world just mosey along seems fine and allows me time to now give help in other ways.  My "time" has passed in my opinion, which makes it all the more frustrating that so many others my age (and older) simply refuse to let go of their "control" of things.  In my view, this is a time of compassion and empathy and of recognizing that as one rabbi told a reporter, when we bury or cremate a person we're not burying or cremating a body, but a life.  How much are we losing as those "in charge" sit back and watch the world revolve through darkened glasses?  But wait, this post isn't about politics...really.  

    What caught my attention were several things as I breezed through some issues from Fast Company,  Inc., WIRED, and a host of others.  The news was good, the people featured being full of energy and making advances on issues I hadn't considered (more on that later); but then came this from the podcast On the Media: We are utterly awash in terrible news: the mounting death toll, rising unemployment, a hunger epidemic, an eviction crisis, and surging infection rates.  Experiencing the full magnitude of this news each day is likely an unfeasible task.  It may also be detrimental to our health.  But what's the alternative?...feeling the pain of others is necessary to holding the powerful accountable.   The segment had reporter Micah Loewinger coming to the realization that he was growing numb, that the constant barrage of vaccines and shootings and elections and deaths from coronavirus was too much...until he read a piece that slapped him awake.

    The article appeared in The Washington Post, and came from a resident "trapped" in a nursing home, one now on lockdown: I’m trying not to panic, but where am I supposed to go?  It’s not like I can jump up and make a run for it.  I’m in a wheelchair.  I haven’t been outside for months.  I’m trapped, just like everybody else in this place.  We’re at the mercy of this virus.  We sit in here and we wait.  That’s been the story of the last nine months.  It’s boredom and then dread.  They stopped allowing visitors in March, so we lost that contact with the outside world.  Then it was no more group meals in the cafeteria — just eat everything alone in your room.  No more trips to physical therapy.  No more access to the lounge or computer area.  My world keeps getting smaller.  I have my little room.  I have my old nine-inch TV.  I play Sudoku and watch Turner Classic Movies and stare out the window at the woods...I keep reading about how more than 100,000 people have died in places just like this, and I don’t want to be one of them.  I make it from one sunrise to the next.  I keep breathing.  That’s it.  That’s the whole goal...It feels like I’m on the Titanic, and we’re sinking, and I’m trying to make contact with the outside world using two soup cans and a string.  “Hello? Hello?  Can anybody hear me?  Is anybody going to do anything?”

    That phrase of "can you hear me now" came from an old campaign by Verizon that advertised their extended cell phone coverage, that more people could "hear you."  But it would seem that now we are all in on that ad, calling for help in a variety of forms...the rent is due, my kids are hungry, it's cold outside, I'm feeling sick, my bills are overdue.  Can anybody hear us?  As the late Marvin Gaye sang: Rockets, moon shots; spend it on the have nots. Money, we make it 'fore we see it; you take it.  Oh, make me want to holler the way they do my life...This ain't livin', this ain't livin.'   

    In a prelude to their article on the vast differences in attitudes and feelings between the generations, Bloomberg New Economy wrote: How are shoppers driving the environmental agenda of the world’s biggest consumer products companies?  Alan Jope, chief executive of Unilever, whose brands range from Dove to Axe and Ben & Jerry’s, broke it down by generation.  Baby boomers are uninterested, he said.  Members of this aging cohort “don’t even pretend that brand choices are driven by sustainability considerations,” he contends.  Generation X is hypocritical, Jope said.  They talk up environmental awareness but “don’t really change [their] behavior.”  Millennials are on the fence: On the whole, Jope argued they are “very interested but don’t want to pay more.”  And then there’s Generation Z.  The executive said they are all-in.  “Almost the only thing that’s driving their brand choices is the positions of the companies and the brands on environmental and social issues.”

     Wait, I care about the environment (my boomer rebuttal) although my 50-gallon recycle bin does seem to fill up each week (all those pet food cans and almond milk jugs and miscellaneous items; and yes I do indeed bring my own shopping bag...but still).  And apparently many others care about the environment, such as 85-year old Hansjörg Wyss who told The Nature Conservancy:  I am optimistic by nature.  I feel confident we will, collectively, rise to the occasion and protect far more of the planet.  I think my grandchildren and their grandchildren will live in a world where half the planet is conserved for nature.  We have a lot of work to do, and we don't have a great deal of time.  We must act quickly to protect what's left.  Still, I'm very confident that, working together as part of a global effort, we can get there.  

    The same issue had a story of a different bent, a mother facing Columbian rebels who made a decision, saving not only her and her family's life, but also a share of the planet: Guerrilla leaders told Murillo (Mercedes Murillo Gutierrez) that her son and two teenage daughters would be forced to join Front 27 and that she could only keep her youngest daughter, who was 7 years old.  "God gave me the strength to say, ‘Over my dead body you’re taking my [children]!’  And they told me, ‘That’s what we are thinking.  We will kill you and take them,’” she recalls.  “Today I don’t even understand how I had the strength to say that and do what I did after that.”  The next day she woke up early and walked two hours to the next settlement, where her son was working as a day laborer.  She says, “I got there and my son hugged me and said, ‘God bless you, Mother, for coming.  They are going to kill me. Let’s go.’  

    Most of us probably don't have to inner strength or the money to make such a differences as Gutierrez or Wyss, but we do have the power of the pocketbook.  The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that as of the end of 2017, our personal spending for outdoor recreation was nearly double that which we spent on pharmaceuticals, cars and gas, and even our utilities (the $887 billion figures was just below the leader of $921 billion spent on "financial services and insurance").  Here's what the editors of WIRED had to say about the many people they highlighted in a recent issue: When Sartre said hell is other people, he wasn’t living through 2020.  Right now, other people are the only thing between us and species collapse.  Not just the people we occasionally encounter behind fugly masks—but the experts and innovators out in the world, leading the way. The 17-year-old hacker building his own coronavirus tracker.  The Google AI wonk un-coding machine bias.  A former IT guy helping his community thwart surveillance.  There are people everywhere, in and out of the spotlight—in tech, science, food, culture, politics­—who aren’t deterred by disaster.  Their wish: to make things better for all of us.  Sounds like heaven.

   Fast Company featured additional players, such as those who created bubble barriers for capturing plastic waste (think of your aquarium bubble stick on steroids; tested on a canal in Amsterdam the "bubbles" redirected 86% of the plastic waste into a collection area); and Mel Spigelman whose nonprofit developed and got registered approval for a new drug to battle the ever-resistant strain of tuberculosis; and creators Ben Volk and Jane Fraser of Amazon and CITI respectively, who recognized that cash isn't necessarily king but is sure used by a lot of people who don't have a credit card (or credit, for that matter).  Said the short profile of Fraser: Mexico runs on cash -- some 90% of transactions in 2018 were settled in cash, vs. 26% in the U.S.  Volk helped design Amazon's PayCode (in certain countries outside the U.S., Paycode is used by nearly 1/3 of Amazon's customers) and Fraser designed Cobro Digital (CoDI), "a platform enabling anyone, including the 38% of Mexican adults without bank accounts, to make cashless payments."  And there was Paul Steinberg who created APX Next for first responders who need immediate backup and can't access a smartphone.  And Jeffrey Whitford who's team created a greener solvent called Cyrene (the European Union was so impressed that it awarded the company a grant to build a Cyrene plant in France).  And civil engineer Lauren Gardner who created the Covid-19 tracker for John Hopkins (and now named one of TIME's 100 most influential people); said Gardner: While it is super time-consuming and distracting, I feel like it’s my responsibility to share things that I know, rather than just watching [celebrities like] Jenny McCarthy tell people they shouldn’t get vaccinated.  You have to put yourself out there.  Added the article about Gardner: Now more than ever, she believes it is critical for scientists to use statistics—the right, contextualized statistics—to paint a picture that the public can understand.  “Why isn’t there a national vaccination data set at a county level?” she asks.  She recently built one, for measles.

    And finally there's this from China (what??), whose Alipay, a mobile payment app, let's users join in on an initiative they call Ant Forest.  Users gain "points" by avoiding or reducing carbon emissions such as by biking to work or by recycling, and as their points accumulate a tree "grows" on their phones, all while Alipay matches the digital growth by setting aside land and planting a real tree.  Don't laugh...they now have over 500 million users and a forest the size of Manhattan --no, make that the size of EIGHTEEN Manhattans-- has already been planted.  The United Nations gave Ant Forest a Champions of the Earth award.  

    If you're at all thinking "who knew" about any of these accomplishments, well join the club.  For one, I had no idea that birds such as owls and hawks are scorched and often killed by colorless invisible flames coming from our landfills (as reported by writer Tina Deines in National Geographic).  Or that HIV/Aids has taken (and continues to take) more lives that the first wave of the bubonic plague (30 million vs. 25 million during the plague's first pandemic; later surges of the plague with increase that total to over 50 million), said Smithsonian.  And speaking of which, Dr. L.S. Dugdale reminds us that bubonic came from the Greek βουβών meaning groin "because infected individuals developed large lymph nodes, or "buboes," in the armpits and groin.  She also notes in her book, The Lost Art of Dying, that we should remember the Latin term memento mori, a term she translates as "to remember, to bear in mind," and "we will die."  Another review of the book in Psychology Today put it this way: COVID-19 has brought into relief the threat of mortality in a way that few Americans have ever experienced it.  Daily mortality counts and mobile morgues have made death a reality...As a society quick to embrace the cutting edge, what we have failed to realize is that one of the best tools we have for pandemic preparedness is more than 600 years old.  That tool is called the ars moriendi, which is Latin for the “art of dying.” ...According to the ars moriendi, preparing for death was an art that was meant to be exercised over a lifetime.  Practicing the art meant living intentionally and wisely.  It required taking stock of and attending to relationships, possessions, anxieties, and spiritual beliefs.  People of the late Middle Ages wanted to die well and thus strove to live well, measuring the tasks, goals, and behaviors of any day against mortality itself.  “If we are going to die, how then should we live?” they asked one another.

    I find that I tend to read about younger people not so much to keep up with technological or scientific advances as much as I do to remind myself that there are all sorts of people doing good, especially among the younger folk, despite what many in my generational age group may feel (admittedly, I likely felt that same way about older folks when I was but a young "whippersnapper").  We older folk aren't all bad by any means, and neither are any of the other age groups, or races, or religions.  With a new year on the horizon it's a good time to cast away our locked-in stereotypes and to unite, to recognize that we are all humans underneath these skins, and overall but a small part of life on this planet (as this coronavirus is perhaps showing us).  But while we may be huddled in our rooms and wondering when that "light at the end of the tunnel" will appear, we may need only to look up to the sky; in just a few days time (on Monday, December 21st) Jupiter and Saturn will come so close together in the sky that they will appear to our eyes to be close to a single, bright star.  National Geographic writer, Andrew Fazekas, put it this way: The event on Monday—just after the sun sinks below the horizon—will be the closest conjunction of these two planets in nearly four centuries.  This celestial snuggling has not been as easy to see since 1226.  Binoculars and backyard telescopes will readily show off both planets in the same field of view and can reveal their retinue of moons, too!  But don’t wait too long after sunset, as the two planets will sink below your local horizon rapidly as darkness falls.  

    Added Scientific American about the event: The last time Jupiter and Saturn appeared so close was July 16, 1623, back when Galileo was still alive, a little more than a decade after he first used a telescope to discover Jupiter’s four largest moons that now collectively bear his name.  The odds are low, however, that Galileo or anyone else on Earth managed to witness that great conjunction, which was virtually impossible to see because of its apparent position near the sun.  The last great conjunction to appear as close and as visible as the upcoming one occurred on March 4, 1226.  “For perspective, Genghis Khan was still roaming Asia then,” says astronomer Patrick Hartigan at Rice University in Houston.

    It's never too late.   As life goes on we will miss things, we will ignore things, we will be shocked and disappointed and awed by things.  But it is never too late to change perspectives, to see how things can come together and how smiles can return and how we can find something new where once we thought there was nothing.  The virus may be teaching us that, forcing us to dive deeper into ourselves and question if we are still alive, for buried in that word is what we should perhaps be telling ourselves...live.