Stop Bugging Me

     Oh the ads, the blitz of "deals" and retailers understandably worried about consumers (note the word "consume" in there) and profits and such.  Not like China, where Xi Jinping is now the lifetime head of the Peoples Republic of China; and according to the recent report on 60 Minutes, he really is more for the people and, as one person put it, the peasants.  Tech monopolies?  Not so fast.  Break them up and distribute monies back to the people.  Kids watching too many video games?  Limited them to 3 hours a week and only on the weekends.  Time to hit the golf course?  Xi considers this a game for the bourgeois and wealthy so rip up 10 courses and replace them with a game everyone can play....soccer fields.  Is this where the U.S. is headed, the dreaded path of government socialism as one Congressional party is so fond of using as a rallying cry?   Then we'd best forget about the socialistic practices here in the U.S. such as Social Security, or Medicare, or police forces and fire departments, or libraries and schools, and on and on.  But wait, this isn't what this post is about.  What caught my eye were the definitions of words such as socialism, and how we seem to have such preconceived definitions in our heads.

Editorial drawing: Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Constitution Journal

     The controversial comedian Dave Chappelle brought this subject up in his recent Closer routine (the end of six Netflix specials for which he received a reported $50 million).  He asked his audience if they had ever looked up the definition of the word feminist.  Prior to his show, he hadn't done so himself, and neither had most of his audience (including me).  Here's one definition from Merriam Webster's dictionary: a person who supports or engages in feminism (which in itself is defined as: the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities).  What Chappelle pointed out was that the word wasn't defined as a "woman" but rather as an all-inclusive "person."  So what is the definition of socialism?  Again, here's how Merriam Webster put it: In the many years since socialism entered English around 1830, it has acquired several different meanings.  It refers to a system of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control, but the conception of that control has varied, and the term has been interpreted in widely diverging ways, ranging from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal.  In the modern era, "pure" socialism has been seen only rarely and usually briefly in a few Communist regimes.  Far more common are systems of social democracy, now often referred to as democratic socialism, in which extensive state regulation, with limited state ownership, has been employed by democratically elected governments (as in Sweden and Denmark) in the belief that it produces a fair distribution of income without impairing economic growth.  Communism, socialism, capitalism, and democracy are all among our top all-time lookups, and user comments suggest that this is because they are complex, abstract terms often used in opaque ways...Communism and socialism are both frequently contrasted with capitalism and democracy, though these can be false equivalencies depending on the usage.

    Yikes.  Calm down, because this post isn't about China or socialism or feminism...it's about bugs (sort of).  Wait, what??  Remember way back when basic biology taught us to separate those six-legged creatures (insects) from the eight-legged ones, which are termed arachnids and are not insects? (quick, what's the category for a mosquito?)   Dang bugs, except that "bugs" (bed bugs, mealy bugs, etc.) are really only a small sub-group of insects.  In other words, you can't really say that all insects are bugs.   A primer from the old school Scholastic (don't laugh, they were the first U.S. publisher to accept JK Rowling's Harry Potter series) answers many of your dusted off questions: why six legs, why three body parts, how long do they live (50 years for one type...what??) and on and on.  And in case you're wondering, there are over a million insects that entomologists know of, with estimates of many millions more still waiting to be discovered (and that's not counting those arachnids).  Taken together (but excluding the microscopic world) insects are considered the "dominant lifeform on this planet," according to NPR fact-checker, Kee Malesky.

     A recent episode of Hidden Brain brought up this conundrum of how we can often see one viewpoint or another, but can rarely see both at the same time.  This was initially brought up with optical illusions, the classic being the Rubin's vase illusion where your mind can shift from seeing a vase or, if you stare at it in a different way, the profiles of two faces.  But sometimes we need to be thrown off of our comfortable seats and understand that what we fear might be only in our heads, something that became evident when viewing this Smithsonian video of a researcher "swimming" in the wild with orca whales (which, as mentioned before, are not whales at all).  Or this one from the same magazine that showed shark eggs being removed and revived from dead sharks being sold in open-air markets.  Perhaps, as Malcom X wrote during his conversion from atheism to Islam, "the hardest thing for any human being to do is to accept that which is already within and around him."

     That mention came from John Francis, Ph.D. who embark on a 22-year mission of walking in silence, eventually crossing the U.S. from coast to coast and doing the same in both Cuba and Brazil, and visiting Alaska and Antarctica.  Along the way he earned his doctorate in land resources.  As he wrote in his reflection-filled book, Planet Walker: There is no question in my mind that walking is in me to do.  Besides, more than two-thirds of the world's people still get around under their own power.   Such a reality is somewhat difficult to grasp.  Just as with the vase illusion, in a world filled with clogged freeways and crowded streets, it is real but yet unreal.  Such thoughts emerged as I somewhat uncomfortably watched Chappelle's special for I realized that I not only didn't know, but would likely never know the reality of what a black person goes through.  Or a gay or transgender person.  Or a devout Muslim.  Or a Chinese or Korean person.  Or for that matter, an American.  We are all unique in our own way and try as we might, the best we can do is to listen and listen and listen, although as the Norwegian series Outlier pointed out, men rarely do this with women. (gulp, there's me feeling a bit guilty again).  And I kept coming back to those quoted words of Malcom X, of the difficulty of accepting what was within and around me.

     Hakai's editor-in-chief, Jude Isabella, wrote: Writing is hard and—like life—you can’t hurry the process or fully control it.  Writers research, interview, outline, and, above all, think before ever sitting down to write, and it’s disconcerting to have the story unfold in ways never imagined during preparation.  I often feel as if a story is a long, powerful snake, and for weeks on end, I’m holding onto the tail as the snake slithers, writhes, and thrashes to where it wants to go, dragging me along...Good writing is proactive and deliberate, requiring a generosity of thought.  You can become faster through practice, but you can’t rush it.  And maybe that’s the problem for some writers: racing around has become second nature...This constant simmering threat of disaster and death running in the background is distracting.  It’s logical that we’d be instinctively hardwired to care more about our mortality than a deadline.  We live in uncertain times.  Stocking our closets with toilet paper at least makes us feel prepared: we’re doing something.  It doesn’t take much thought either; it’s a fast, reactive, and selfish action.  Spend almost two years with a chronic fight or flight response hovering in the amygdala and it’s easy to spend your day rushing and reacting to the most innocuous events and overreacting to threats, real or imagined...some writers managed to dig deep, focus, and produce amazing writing even about the pandemic—Atlantic writer Ed Yong won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the pandemic, for instance.  But the malaise seems so pervasive—everything just feels “off”—that it’s no surprise that many writers find it difficult to follow up on an email, file a story on time, or write at all.

     For me, along with realizing that my relation to the world around me was much more limited than I thought (even as I realized that my age had caused obvious things such as today's music and comedy to have sailed out of my demographic), I struggled to understand the coming and going of life.  Take flies, for instance, an insect which has somehow fascinated me for ages, gaining my empathy as it buzzes with frustration around the window screen.  To me, that screen becomes a small prison for the fly because within the span of a day it will expend "years" of its life just trying to figure out a way to escape.  The house fly's eye must see a multi-faceted screen that may as well be a monstrous net.  Yet it never gives up.  Said a review in the New York Times about Jonathan Balcombe's new book, Super Fly (a book which is next on my reading list): The littlest fly is the size of a flake of pepper.  Among the largest is the robber fly, which can grow to nearly three inches and is capable of taking down a hummingbird, though its brain scarcely weighs a milligram.  Flies have evolved to occupy some of the planet’s most extreme environments.  One kind lives in pools of crude oil, another in the excretory organs of a land crab. Alkali flies dash across a lake’s topside, creating wavelets that then engulf them, encasing each fly in a silvery bubble that permits it to dive and feast on algae below...Learning that fruit flies suffer from insomnia may well give us cause to reimagine just what that dot, dizzily circling the ceiling, is doing.  Or thinking.  Is a fly a torment to itself, despairing of sleep?

In memoriam: Bear

     But life comes in many forms, even in flies.  Our recent rescued long-haired German Shepherd reached a point where our home had become that monstrous net.  His back legs, already faltering, now hurt even more, his eyesight basically gone due to his hereditary affliction of pannus.  He was nearly 12 when found wandering aimlessly on a roadway in rural Wyoming; by then he was nearly blind, emaciated, and already plagued with wobbly hips.  But a rescue group took him in and fostered him back to health, spending a month searching for the owner, to no avail.  Which is when we were contacted.  He needed daily meds, they told us -- no problem.  His back legs were pretty shaky -- no problem (we had a doggie wheelchair and support from our earlier rescued dogs).  He was 95% blind with little chance of improvement -- no problem (we had had a blind English cocker rescue years earlier).  Needless to say, in the nearly 20 months we had him, he put on some 20 pounds, returning to his sleek and elegant self.  Cats, chickens, children didn't seem to bother him, as if he had grown up on a ranch and lived outdoors; he must have been quite the looker, a dog my wife said should have had the name King (we named him Bear).  But the agonizing decision was here, to send him out of a beautiful life with dignity.  As he passed in our home, I couldn't help but wonder just what life --and death-- was really about.  In this case, the definition of life encompassed both.  And while he may have taken a part of us with his leaving, he brought so much more into our lives while he was here.  We will miss him...and it bugs me.