Pus 'n Boots
For some reason I didn't view the war in Ukraine as a WW II-type war, picturing it more as one of sophisticated drones and distant strikes being run by remote facilities far away. Certainly the missiles and shells devastating the buildings were evident, their damage seemingly a mix of precision (infrastructure and hospitals) and randomness (apartment buildings and market squares). But this piece in The New Yorker brought home the reality of how much of the war is being fought in the trenches: Many foreigners, no matter how seasoned or élite, were unprepared for the reality of combat in Ukraine: the front line, which extends for roughly seven hundred miles, features relentless, industrial-scale violence of a type unknown in Europe since the Second World War. Here was just one exchange between the reporter and those he and his photographer were embedded with when one reconnaissance soldier's store-bought camera drone had its signal jammed and subsequently crashed in a field: “We’ll be all right, boys,” Herring said. He sparked his lighter and held the flame under his face to show us that he was smiling. At first, I was annoyed by what seemed like a juvenile display of bravado. Then I realized that Herring was trying to put the photographer and me at ease. “I feel safe!” he said, as half a dozen more shells detonated outside. Doc came over the radio. The Russian tank was homing in on them. He said of the rounds, “They’re walking up the tree line. The next one will likely be on us. So please try to find it.” "We’re getting stuffed up here pretty good right now,” Herring told him. When Doc didn’t answer, Herring said again, “I gotta get that drone.” Another munition rocked the house. Somewhere, a machine gun had begun to fire. I urged Herring not to go outside. “Yeah, but they need me,” he said. “Like, if I don’t do this . . .” He picked up the radio. “Doc, this is Herring.” No answer. A few seconds later, thirteen rockets, some landing almost simultaneously, caused more of the house to crumble.
Somehow these two very different pieces of life seemed related for both were operating silently in the background and both were taking casualties of good and bad...and both were barely noticed by most of the world. Again we see what we want to see, even if it is something that may be silently helping us. Of course, what we are actually able to see is quite limited (the BBC did a good job of explaining part of this), the energy department being more blunt by saying that the portion of visible light we are physically able to "see" is a mere .0035 of the spectrum (yes, that's 35/10,000ths). As Dr. Henry Marsh wrote in his book: Vision in all creatures depends on molecules called opsins, which change their shape in response to light, and trigger a nerve impulse. Different opsins respond to different wavelengths of light. The iridescent dragonflies, which in summer I can see flittering across the water of the pond I dug in my cottage garden, can have up to thirty opsins in the retinae of their enormous eyes. We have only three, which respond to certain wavelengths that the brain then interprets as being red, blue or yellow. Our brains combine these three primary colors to produce the other colors of the rainbow. A few women are thought to have four opsins. Astronaut Scott Kelly wrote in his book Endurance of sleeping (weightless) and his closed eyelids constantly being flashed with specks of light, the result of the solar radiation coming through the capsule in space, our planet's magnetic field no longer blocking it (other changes occurred to his eyes after Kelly's year in space, said CNN). Our ears are little different, our audible "range" also being quite limited and diminishing with age (explained a bit more in a piece by Audiology Research). Which begs the question: if our eyesight and hearing are so limited compared to other life, should we expect our brains and mental abilities to be any exception?
Dr. Henry Marsh noted this about our brains (his own having "shrunk" substantially due to his age): In 1953 two researchers discovered --almost by accident-- that there are periods when we sleep during which we rapidly move our eyes beneath our closed eyelids. Subsequent work has shown that sleep is strictly choreographers into REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep, with characteristic EEG patterns. There are typically five cycles of approximately ninety minutes each. The earlier cycles are mainly NREM, but REM comes to predominate as the night wears on There are usually four stages of NREM sleep, of increasing depth, where EEG shows that all the brain's waves of electrical activity are synchronized, often in a slow-wave form. With REM sleep, the EEG is desynchronized, highly active and irregular and indistinguishable from the waking state. If people are woken from it, they usually report coherent dreams --stories-- whereas if woken from NREM sleep they report disjointed thoughts...There is much learned dispute about what all this means, and it is not even universally accepted that REM sleep is synchronous with dreaming. What is clear, however, is that sleep, and probably dreaming, in involved in learning and also in unlearning. Recent research implicates NREM sleep in decluttering and consolidating memory and REM sleep in reordering it, perhaps in new and creative ways. But the most interesting question to me remains unanswered -- do my dreams mean anything?*
Then came this from the James Webb telescope, massive galaxies that defy most of our theories of physics and the universe, said Smithsonian: Just 500 to 700 million years after the big bang, the potential galaxies were somehow as mature as our 13-billion-year-old Milky Way galaxy is now. The mass of stars within each of these objects totals to several billion times larger than that of our sun, according to the research. One of them in particular might be as much as 100 billion times our sun’s mass. For comparison, the Milky Way contains a mass of stars equivalent to roughly 60 billion suns. Okay how the heck are we supposed to grasp something like that (that dang 209 Seconds video I keep mentioning was enough to make me feel like a dunce). But what about our own nuclear arsenal; did you have any idea that we regularly test our stockpiled nuclear arms at a place in California called the National Ignition Facility? Said Scientific American: Construction on this massive fusion research facility, the size of a sports stadium, began in 1997 and took more than a decade to complete. The NIF possesses 192 laser beam lines, each more than 100 meters long. The lasers are aimed in pulses of 20 billionths of a second and 500 trillion watts—roughly 1,000 times U.S. power usage at any given instant—at minute samples of deuterium and other substances. Compressed by pressures of more than 100 billion times Earth's atmosphere, the target implodes, generating a fusion reaction with temperatures more than seven times hotter than the center of the sun. These and other experiments provide information on materials science and fusion energy. Most important, however, the data they yield, along with information from nuclear tests conducted before the ban, are fed into sophisticated simulations that conduct virtual thermonuclear explosions in a supercomputer. NIF researchers say such experiments are necessary to understand how the U.S.'s more than 5,000 nuclear warheads, most of which were produced in the 1980s, will behave in the event of a thermonuclear exchange. Then there were those Chinese "spy" balloons that came close to the Kármán Line (the what??), said The Conversation. And those autonomous (non-human) AI weapons such as Orca, Kargu-2, and SGR-A1, said a piece in Fortune; and we should note the new 50-kilowatt lasers on tanks, as mentioned in Defense News. Hmm, well I don't understand any of those things either...billionths of a second, autonomous weapons, incomprensible masses of whatever?
I have no idea how any of this works or how such things are discovered, those explosives and artificial intelligence and those shrunken brains on MRIs...but they apparently exist. They are all working parts of an engine (or our bodies) that we accept in our lives, even if we have to shrug our shoulders and admit that we don't understand any of it...sort of like religion. Here's how Marilynne Robinson wrote about the two "belief" systems in the New York Review of Books: ...look at the world as well as you can in any way that you can. There is no risk of unweaving the rainbow—which we must consider safe from the coldest analytic eye at least until we understand anything at all about the nature of light. In any case no serious theologian can put aside Genesis 1:1. The six-day creation is an issue for those who think time is the same for God as for ourselves, though we are told, by Moses no less, that for God “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past”—incommensurable, like now and then, like the moment in which we can make a choice and the years after the choice is made. We could possibly begin to resolve anomalies like this one if we knew anything at all about the nature of time. Space, time, light, gravity—all of these elude understanding, radically and profoundly...In light of the fact that science and religion are two major pillars of our civilization, it seems there should be some effort at rehabilitation. I haven’t noticed any. Science has felt the consequences of all this in budget cuts and controversies in schools and the refusal of important segments of the population, in critical matters of public health, to accept the views of scientists as offered in good faith. Religion, meanwhile, has been largely overtaken by a belligerency darker and cruder than obscurantism, the very antithesis of theology, whatever it might have to do with faith. At the end of this hard-fought and meaningless struggle nothing was resolved, but there was grave loss on all sides. All of this in-house fighting and clashing reminded me of John Lennon's words: Imagine there's no country; it isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for...and no religion too.
So back to pus, and back to the war in Ukraine, and back to we, the people. Somehow I still think that it's all connected, the basic goodness in people and those other things which work silently in the background, not looking for headlines or credit or taps on the back. Most people --the majority, in my opinion-- are working for the good because it's the right thing to do. Maybe they don't have the angry and loud voice, or the money, or the power, or the big house or the offshore accounts, but they have the determination. They have the courage. They have the gut feeling that in the end, even if perhaps centuries later, a belief that justice will win out. No more killing, no more country, no more religion: Imagine all the people living life in peace, said Lennon. You may say I'm a dreamer; but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us...and the world can live as one. The movie sequel, Puss 'N Boots, The Last Wish had a simple message: You don't need 9 lives if the one you are living is the right one. Now imagine that...
*One interesting point Marsh makes throughout the book is how so much of today's research comes from working on primarily WEIRD people. Yes, I initially thought that the capitalized wording meant exactly what you'd think but it is actually a term for the many psychology students who were and apparently are used in such studies (the studies Marsh mentions in particular were on testosterone and the role it does or doesn't play in our bodies). Turns out that WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic...and let's face, there are WEIRD people throughout the world.
**I tagged this valiant United Nations world effort to get rid of racial discrimination because while little progress is being made in our Westernized countries, who would have thought that such discrimination might be happening in parts of Africa. Take this recent story by assistant editor Moina Spooner of The Conversation: One of my close friends is a Kenyan who currently lives and works in Tunisia. So I was very concerned for her safety when I saw Tunisian president Kais Saied’s negative comments about migrants in the country. Among other things, he accused sub-Saharan migrants of “violence, crime and unacceptable acts”. His comments led to violence against migrants, as well as detentions. Many have since fled the country.
***The crucial 38th vote (a majority of the 50 states) came only in 2020; here's how the University of North Carolina chose to mark the occasion: In February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8, 1980, as National Women’s History Week. He stated “…the achievements, leadership, courage, strength, and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well…” Women’s History Month officially began in 1987 and recognizes all women for their valuable contributions to history and society. At the time, Carter urged the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; however, it took decades to reach ratification. In January, 2020, Virginia ratified the ERA, becoming the 38th state to do so and, in supporters’ eyes, clinching the necessary benchmark for addition to the US Constitution nearly a half-century after the amendment began making its way through state legislatures. My own state of Utah has yet to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, choosing instead to become the first state to designate an official state gun...priorities.
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