Look Me in the Eye...

     There was a piece in Orion in which the author, whose mother was badly disabled by a mass shooter, questions a few of her decsions, one of which was to give up meat and of course, to shy away from using a gun; but then she wonders if she is merely avoiding the inevitable, that she should face something directly: ...as I first looked through the scope at the thick, gray-brown fur of the deer’s shoulder, my chest locked up.  If I pulled the trigger, I couldn’t go back to the person I’d been before.  I’d have to live with myself as someone who’d made this decision.  Someone who’d used a gun to kill a fellow animal.  I waited to feel ready for what seemed like a long time.  This same dilemma faced Robin Wright in the film Land (mentioned in the last post), her decision not to shoot sending her to the brink of starvation.  And it likely confronts anyone facing the decision of whether or not to pull the trigger...a deer, a squirrel, a human, an "enemy."  That face to face is rare in today's world, a decision now delegated to drone control rooms thousands of miles away, or to fighter jets long gone after their missiles or laser-guided bombs have been released.  Destroyed buildings, "perhaps" lives, but now comfortably back home and ready for a shower.   But what if that building was a hospital?*  I don't think I could do it, even something as "simple" as pushing a button or toggling a switch, knowing the probable results of my decision.

     This question came up because my wife noted that in Europe and the UK, gun deaths (and guns themselves) are rare; an attack by a gang or a random attack in the UK generally involves a stabbing, something that requires actually making contact with the person you're targeting.  This was the technique of ancient days, the days of swords and even guns that couldn't fire more than a hundred yards (the old powder and lead ball rifles had an "accuracy range of about 25-50 yards," wrote the American Battlefield Trust (the Abe Lincoln-type revolvers had an even smaller range).  But then with all that is going on in the world, you're likely tired of hearing about guns and bombs, poaching and wars, fleeing children and animals (although in war you have to ask, what animals?).  Somewhere in the back of your head you have to wonder (again), well what can I do, even as protesters close down streets in New York and London, and the homeless "miraculously" disappeared from the streets of San Francisco (which is where Biden and Xi met for APEC).  Our own city did much the same with our homeless, partitioning them into a fenced "corridor" away from visitors, and temporarily re-writing our state's liquor laws when the city hosted the NBA all-star game, all of which rapidly reverted back once the televised broadcast was over.  But then how cities respond may not be much different from how we respond; as Phil Collins wrote some years ago: She calls out to the man on the street, "Sir, can you help me?  It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep, is there somewhere you can tell me?"  He walks on, doesn't look back.  He pretends he can't hear her; starts to whistle as he crosses the street...seems embarrassed to be there.  Oh, think twice, 'cause it's another day for you and me in paradise...

     Here's what the New York Review had to say about why, or who, or what we consider as being "poor": Perhaps it’s because we’ve been trained since the earliest days of capitalism to see the poor as idle and unmotivated...the problem isn’t welfare dependency but welfare avoidance.  Simply put, many poor families don’t take advantage of aid that’s available to them.  Only a quarter of families who qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families apply for it.  Less than half (48 percent) of elderly Americans who qualify for food stamps sign up to receive them.  One in five parents eligible for government health insurance (in the form of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) does not enroll, just as one in five workers who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit does not claim it.  At the height of the Great Recession, one in ten Americans was out of work, but among that group only one in three drew unemployment.  Shocked to read such findings?  The article goes on to say that the half which we don't see is how much our government subsidizes in things such as student loans and tax deductions: Today, the biggest beneficiaries of federal aid are affluent families.  In total, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021...we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense...In 2020 the mortgage interest deduction allowed more than 13 million Americans to keep $24.7 billion.  Homeowners with annual family incomes below $20,000 enjoyed $4 million in savings, and those with annual incomes above $200,000 enjoyed $15.5 billion.  Also in 2020, more than 11 million taxpayers deducted interest on their student loans, saving low-income borrowers $12 million and those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 $432 million.  In all, the top 20 percent of income earners receives six times what the bottom 20 percent receives in tax breaks.

     Of course forget all that since we discard and disdain much more than the poor or the homeless or what we consider refugees.  There's also women. (what??)  Early theologians like Terrullian stated that a: ...woman is a temple built over a sewer.  He was talking about the "effluent" that emerges nearly every 28 days from a woman and what author Leah Hazard (in her book Womb) described as: ...yet another example of language denigrating and diminishing women's bodies: a dismissal, an insult.  The "discharge" they're talking about is the near-taboo topic of menstruation, or what are more commonly called periods.  And it turns out that once again, we know little of what we speak.  Author Hazard goes on to write: Before we can consider the importance of period blood, we need to understand what's in it.  The truth, in fact, is that only part of what flows out in a period --in some cases, less than half-- is actually blood.  One of the few comprehensive studies of this material found that, on average, only 36 percent of menstrual tissue is blood, with the other 64 percent comprised of a rich mixture of endometrial cells, mucus, native bacteria (that microbiome, again) and vaginal secretions...the same study found that the composition varied widely,  with blood comprising as little as 1.6 percent in some women and as much as 81.7 percent in others.  But here's what's interesting -- scientists are only now discovering that this menstrual flow is far from just "dead and useless tissue," as many early medical publications defined it, but rather is filled with biomarkers which could give a woman a 7-10 year jump on the possibility of her getting endometriosis, infertility, adenomyosis, fibroids, cancer, and a host of other conditions.  Indeed, scientists are only now (as so frustratingly noted by the author, a midwife) going back to study the female side of things, especially the uterus, something which is in itself "normal" in just 50% of women (the author also noted that yes, men can have a uterus).  One idea (discarded nearly 50 years ago but now being revived) is that like some other mammals, the human uterus appears to be able to store sperm for months, and possibly even distinguish which sperm to "keep" before it does so.  In a field long-dominated by men, the author also pointed out how the uterus fights gravity during childbirth since women are placed on their backs for delivery (vs. crouching, standing, or even placed at a downward tilt, something only now coming into practice is some hospitals). 

     There's another sort of hospital, one which houses the elderly, whether they're all "there" or not.  Such people can be "hospitalized" in expensive independent living facilities, or out on the street, or simply alone in an apartment.  They may be veterans who faced things we're lucky to have never witnessed, or factory workers who endured  longer hours than we'd ever have to, or grandparents in a declining body simply happy to have made it through "tough times."  As John Prine wrote: You know that old trees just grow stronger, and old rivers grow wilder every day; ah, but, but old people, they just grow lonesome...waiting for someone to say, "Hello in There."  So if you're walking down the street sometime and you should spot some hollow ancient eyes; don't you pass them by and stare as if you didn't care.  Say, "Hello in there. Hello."  This came up for me because I took a moment to find a place that would fix my old CED disc player, one which plays large optical discs (think of it as a LP record that plays video), a big advance for the days when video tapes were either non-existent or were just beginning.  That said, finding a repair shop that even knew what the heck sort of machine I had was itself a challenge.  But back then, grainy images were more than acceptable (think of how poor the images of VHS tapes are when compared to the images of today); since such discs were plentiful and fairly affordable, the average consumer could now actually own movies and concerts to view whenever.  And I had a lot of concert discs, many of which I'd never watched; one of those happened to be Bette Midler's first special in which she sang that song, Hello in There (John Prine was only 22 when he wrote that song).  I should also note that many of those concerts never made it to a DVD, and often times all that is left of them to view are a few clips on YouTube (scenes often copied from an old CED disc).  Many of these concerts were of singers and bands in their heyday, which for many was nearly 50 years ago.  James Taylor with long hair!  Hello in there...yes, I'm old, but then not nearly as old as Trump or Biden who will face off in an octogenarian race for another presidency.

     But there is a lot to be said about being older, however, one of which is simply being fortunate enough to still be around and able to look back at things.  From the slide rule to the Space Shuttle, items almost forgotten, we have built more and more onto what we as humans could accomplish (quick tidbit: the slide rule dates back to the 1600s and is based on logarithms, all of which helped to put a man on the moon, wrote NPR).  The movie Million Miles Away tells the true story of farm worker Jose Hernandez who dreams of becoming an astronaut; as his cousin tells him, "Who better than a migrant to be among the first people going to space?"  The story showed the tendency we have to label people and cultures, almost automatically.  When The Sun interviewed Anders Carlson-Wee (who lived for a year just dumpster diving for his food) it asked: In “The Salmonella Special,” you write about the cultural taboo of trash: a book on someone’s shelf is innocuous; put that same book in a garbage can and “almost no one will touch it.”  How embedded do you think that perception is in our society?  Anders replied: I think it’s deeply embedded.  I don’t know if you remember the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza takes a bite of an éclair that he’s taken out of a garbage can in the kitchen.  The joke is about the definition of when the éclair becomes trash: Was it below the rim of the can?  Was it touching other garbage?  Once something has been put in a trash can or dumpster, it gets a label, and people don’t want to be associated with that label. (The Sun titled their interview: An American Disease).

     “The eyes are the window to your soul,” wrote William Shakespeare.  And if that is the case, maybe we need to look a bit deeper and look at what we don't have.  For most of us, we don't have to wonder if we'll be shot or killed in a war; or if we'll be cold or hungry, or whether we'll have to leave our home in order to save our lives.  Maybe our lives today are not ideal, but can we look ourselves in the eye and say that we really want to keep fighting, or to keep being angry at one another and to push people away, or that we want to actually hate someone, or some country, or some culture?  Really?  Ric Elias was a passenger in the front row of that plane that landed on the Hudson River.  There was a loud explosion and the plane went silent as the captain shut off the engines and announced "brace for impact."  Elias remembers the face of the flight attendant in front of him: "I could see in her eyes, it was terror.  Life was over"  In his TED Talk he said this: I learned that it all changes in an instant.  We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn't, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did....I've lived a good life.  In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried.  But in my humanity, I also allow my ego to get in.  And I regretted the time I wasted on things that did not matter with people that matter...As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "I collect bad wines."  Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it.  I no longer want to postpone anything in life. 

     David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker: In an era of darkness and blood, it is nearly impossible to remember that, from Moscow to Jerusalem, there was once a time of promise.  Not resolution, not paradise, and certainly not the end of history -- but promise.  Between 1989 and 1995, the following things happened: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe; the collapse of Soviet Communism and the (seeming) end of the Cold War; the brief, but startling, appearance of a pro-democracy movement in Beijing and other Chinese cities; the end of South African apartheid; and the signing of the Oslo Accords by the Israeli leadership and the Palestine Liberation Organization.  In other words, in many nations, political leaders, dissidents, and social movements, having exhausted so many rotten ideas and endured so much oppression and tragedy, began to push the world in a direction of decency, democracy, and compromise.  Of course, there is much that is oversimplified in that sentence --euphoria and triumphalism obscured some of the dark currents that persisted in those countries and in human nature itself-- but the promise was real, and it ran deep.

      So one more, the interstituim.  The what, you ask?  Turns out that right below our skin is a honeycombed network that runs a clear fluid, a life-giving fluid as important as our blood.  This underground "network" was never noticed until 2018 when a camera was created that could peer into living tissue.  Wrote Orion: Strangely, this body part wasn’t missed because it was invisible; it was overlooked because of what our belief systems wouldn’t let us perceive...fluid rushing between a fractal, honeycombed network...The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales.  It’s unified.  While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body -- just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes.  It’s juicy.  It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does.  The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and “pre-lymphatic” substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered...In short: it’s very important.  And it’s wild that, although the interstitium can be seen with the naked eye during surgery, it wasn’t really noticed until now.  There is an entire scientific revolution set to unfurl as more studies are peer-reviewed and more science books and classrooms integrate its existence into their cosmologies.  We are at the beginning of it all.

     So we've come full circle, the circle of life.  Perhaps as we age we see both the end and the beginning.  As we ask with puzzlement over how quickly time passed, we may also begin to see an understanding.  When my wife encountered a homeless person deep in a path where she feeds feral cats, she saw him huddled in a sleeping bag, his hands knotted as if shriveled and unable to move much.  His name was Roger, and he just wanted a Coke.  She brought him something to eat, something hot, and a Coke, and a blanket; the next day she took him one of my coats...he was there, still in the bag (he thought he had the flu or something, that he was cold -- nights were in the low 30s).  The food and Coke were untouched.  He couldn't open the plastic bottle.  By the third day he was gone, the coat and blanket left behind, as well as some of the food.  As James Taylor wrote: And something is never quite right, ah, but who would want to listen to you...Any other man stops and talks but the walking man walks on by.  

     There are things we'll never understand, but this upcoming holiday is a reminder to give thanks in the U.S.  We all have much to be thankful for simply because we are able to see bright yellows and reds in leaves instead of operating rooms or on the streets.  Perhaps this is also a reminder to look differently at things and at people overall.  To acknowledge not only those close to you but also those who you perceive as "different"...the homeless person curled up in a bag, the soldiers and the innocents each wondering what is happening, the migrant (farm worker and astronaut Jose Hernandez told a press conference "we pick your food;" he also co-invented digital mammography imaging which has saved countless women by detecting breast cancer at an early stage).  What we consider trash or garbage or effluent --be it things or people or cultures-- may instead be filled with things we've yet to discover, things just waiting to be acknowledged.  The unseen interstitium runs through each of us.  The windows to the soul.  We have the ability.  We may just need to look...

*Recent reports have at least 20 of the 35 hospitals in Gaza either destroyed or disabled enough to not be operating.