What's (Who's) Essential

     Boy, one sure did hear that word quite a bit not too long ago, a word that was applied not to necessary items (such as what to take on a space flight or a long trip) but to people, as if during the various phases of the pandemic lockdown we didn't have enough to think about.  Sort of like work (or the changing face of work).  Any long-term job (or even just the routines of home) tends to make people feel as if they are doing something few others can do as if they have somehow gained a bit of intimate knowledge of something; each of us knows what pleases or irritates our spouse or child, or where your sprinklers are when mowing, or just how and when to solve a complicated situation...that sort of thing.  But as any office worker (or executive) knows, no one is irreplaceable.  

     It was by chance that a friend dashed off an earlier book by Michael Lewis titled The Fifth Risk.  And at first I doubted that I would read it since it dealt with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, something which the majority of people feel has long passed.  But one interesting part was the complicated details of manning each department when a presidency changes, who goes and who stays, who's really needed to run things, and who could be basically considered non-essential by the incoming office holder.  Here was but one example Lewis cited during the government shut down in late December, 2018: The airport security people who make sure that the toiletries in your carry-on can't be turned into a bomb were required to show up for work.  The FBI agents working undercover inside terrorists groups were told to go home.  So were the Food and Drug Administration's food safety inspectors, the people at the Environmental Protection Agency assigned to stop poison from leaking out of power plants, the people inside FEMA who issued flood insurance policies; three hundred immigration court judges who would decide the fate of thousands of immigrants being held in detention facilities, and the National Transportation Safety Board's investigators who otherwise would have just then been looking into a car crash that killed five kids on their way to Disney World.  In a lineup of civil servants, it was harder than you might imagine to identify the inessential ones.

     Not so for former Texas governor Rick Perry who at one point in a pre-election debate with Trump (among others), completely forgot that we had a Department of Energy...only Perry was now appointed to run that department.  With the nuclear physicist who understood the DOE perhaps better than anyone else on earth, Perry had spent minutes, not hours.  "He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change," a DOE staffer told me in June 2017.  "He's never been briefed on a program -- not a single one, which to me is shocking,"  Meanwhile, Frank Klotz, a retired three-star air force lieutenant general in charge of our nuclear weapons program was asked to leave before Trump arrived in office (panicked Senators quickly worked to reverse his dismissal).  

     So why bring up this rather old news?  Just jump back a bit further to the Cuban missile crisis and a new book by Sergei Plokhy.  A Russian submarine loaded with nuclear torpedoes and in Cuban waters during that time period, surfaced only to find U.S. planes overhead firing tracer bullets and flares; convinced that war had broken out, the commander ordered the sub to submerge and prepare to fire the torpedoes, only two pieces of fate stepped in: a commander of a nearby American destroyer realized what was about to happen and flashed an apology to the sub, something that would had never been seen except that the sub's signal officer got stuck with his searchlight while going down and the task force commander behind him happened to notice the apology and called off the order.  As the review in The Economist noted: If the nuclear torpedo had been fired, Kennedy would have had little choice other than to order a strike against Soviet targets with the inevitable consequence of escalatory retaliation.

     Regardless of your political leanings and views on such events, the overriding factor of such "close calls" can be attributed to some unrecognized heroes, everyday workers who didn't really want notoriety or praise but were just doing what they felt was right.  There are of course many more examples, cases where envy and prejudice came to a head.  100 years ago in the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, ten thousand angry white people joined in a planned attack on the prosperous black town within known as Greenwood.  Bombs fell and black owners and residents were murdered as they answered doors or defended their shops.  Said a piece in Smithsonian: After the fires burned out, Greenwood, known at the time as the Negro Wall Street of America, on account of its affluence, resembled a city flattened by a massive bomb.  The mob had burned more than 1,100 homes (215 more were looted but not burned), five hotels, 31 restaurants, four drugstores, eight doctors’ offices, a new school, two dozen grocery stores, Greenwood’s hospital, its public library and a dozen churches.  In all, 35 square blocks were destroyed.  Most of the area’s 10,000 residents were left homeless.  Estimates are that 300 people were killed but still, even a hundred years later, searchers are looking for the bodies.  Just as with our history, the bodies were purposely dumped somewhere, meant to be buried and hidden.

     Then there's the quirky Italian town of Bari (or so said a piece in National Geographic).  During WW II, a German bombing of Bari's port exposed a weakness in the Allies defenses; said Smithsonian: The attack on Bari, which the press called “a little Pearl Harbor,” shook the complacency of the Allied forces, who had been convinced of their air superiority in Italy.  All told, the Nazis sunk 17 Allied ships and destroyed more than 31,000 tons of valuable cargo.  More than 1,000 American and British servicemen were killed, and almost as many wounded, along with hundreds of civilians.  What followed was a series of military survivors who began showing all the symptoms of nerve gas.  “Individuals that appeared in rather good condition in a matter of minutes would become moribund and die,” the doctors told him.  The British doctors were mystified.  The symptoms did not correspond to case histories of mustard gas poisoning from World War I, or to manuals issued by the Chemical Warfare Service.  If the toxic agent was mustard—named for its unpleasant garlicky odor—respiratory complications should have been more prominent.  Several days later, patients with no previous respiratory problems became congested and developed very sore throats, making it hard to swallow.  These patients died not as a result of broncho-pneumonia, as might have been expected, but from cardio-circulatory failure.  The end result was that it was indeed a nerve agent, only it was on one of the destroyed American ships.  Wait, the U.S. was going to use a type of nerve agent?

     Said a piece in The London Review of Books: After the war ended, Germany’s main nerve agent production facilities were taken over by the Soviet army, as was the chemical weapons laboratory in Berlin.  US forces intercepted barges carrying tabun (a precursor to sarin) down the Danube.  Some of it was shipped to Utah, where it was stored until the 1980s.  The British army recovered depots containing nerve agent munitions, and sent samples back to the Chemical Defence Experimental Station at Porton Down.  More than 70,000 tabun bombs were shipped to Britain and piled up on disused runways in North Wales.  In 1954 they were towed out into the Atlantic and sunk.  But far from giving up on chemical weapons, the British government launched its own programme....In the US, nerve agent weapons were produced on a predictably larger scale.  Sarin was mass-produced in Colorado and more than a million artillery shells, half a million M55 rockets and a large number of bombs were made to deliver it.  They tended to leak.  In Indiana, the US army manufactured VX and the munitions to put it in, including tens of thousands of landmines.  In testing facilities in Maryland, soldiers were subjected to experiments with sarin and VX.  Some of the vast stocks of American sarin and VX weapons were held in Japan and Germany but –unlike napalm, Agent Orange, depleted uranium and nuclear weapons– they were never used.  Small numbers of nerve agent munitions remain in US army depots.  A soil engineer friend of my neighbor told her that people would not want to know what still remains buried in our state, things far worse than the nerve agents publicly "destroyed" some years ago; an accident or a weapons strike at the right place and almost all of this part of our state "would be toast."  Yikes...something else not being taught in our history classes.

     One of the more interesting books I've read recently was titled Pandora's Lunchbox by Melanie Warner, part of which reads: "All food additives are carefully regulated by federal authorities and various international organizations to ensure that foods are safe to eat and are accurately labeled," the FDA states on its Web site.  Yet the truth is nowhere near as reassuring...The truly astonishing thing about today's five-thousand-additive figure is that it comes not from the FDA or some other government body, but from Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit group that did a first-rate report on food additives in 2011...There's no government Web site, for instance, you can go to that will list all those five-thousand-plus substances.  There's a database called Everything Added to Food in the United States (EAFUS) and you might assume thus would do the trick, but not only does this absurdly titled compilation not include everything that's added to food, it contains no real data on the substances it does list.  Due to heavy lobbying by the food and chemical companies, Congress has basically retracted much of its protective regulations and decided to let the industry patrol itself with GRAS, a term the industry uses as "generally recognized as safe."  Said Warner: Since 2000, there have been formal FDA "food additive petitions" for only four new substances.  The other 4,996 additives --such as BHA used in "Tang, tropical punch and lemonade Kool-Aid, DiGiorno pepperoni pizza, and MxDonald's sausages and breakfast steak"-- are generally considered safe.  Not so fast, said Scientific American: ...some laboratory studies have shown BHA to be carcinogenic in rats and and other animals, and the National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program concludes that BHA can be “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.”

      Said The New York Review of Books on a piece on President Biden: There is an ecosystem of social decency in which a sufficient income, a right to timely and appropriate health care (regardless of income), access to education from pre-K to college, a safety net for unemployment, ill health, and old age, and the sense of having an equal voice in public decisions are as essential as breathable air and clean water.  To those who lack these basics are added the millions more who live in dread of losing them.  I'll add to that what I think is "essential" -- grandmothers, good friends, smiles, and touch.  Said an article from The Washington Post about massage therapist Jen Williams: Clients tell her that they're desperate to be touched...In July, after the initial shutdown ended, the first person on her table, a single woman in her 60s, ended the session in a puddle of tears.  "No one has touched me in months.  Not a handshake, not a hug, not an exchange of coins since March," the client said.  "People cry all the time when they come to me," says Williams, 47.  "They have a little easier time crying since all of this."

     Another couple who go by the name of Two Wandering Soles are living their dream traveling the world (47 countries and counting) and making a living writing about it.  What's so refreshing is their urge for everyone to go out and find their own dream, and that it can be done (as Katie & Ben write in their blog: No, we don’t come from rich families.  No, we’re not drug smugglers, nor did we win the lottery.  We have earned every single penny that has funded our travels.  We actually have a buttload (pardon my nerdy curse word!) of student loans that we have been paying since we graduated from university.  Yes, even while traveling.)  And a big difference in their travels is their taking of time...to meet people, to eat local food, to hike the trails and explore a bit of the back roads (did I mention that for a year they lived out of a van?)   And the plus side?  They are willing to share everything...how they did it, how you can do it, but most of all how important it is for you to also just go for it.

     Greta Thunberg said "no one is too small to make a difference."  I think of those words often, even in a field of "weeds."  A close examination of a single weed reveals an intricate beauty few of us could replicate; and yet each one of them is essential to the field.  We are all humans, but not all of us are humane.  Perhaps this is a good time to realize that we don't need politicians or governments to tell us who or what is essential...we already know the answer in our hearts.  Humanity has a good ring to it.  Maybe now is a good time to start making our way back...