Other World/s

     In these chaotic (or quixotic, depending on your point of view) times, it may be good to step back a bit and try and see the big picture, in this case, the view from satellites.  In the book Overview*, authors Benjamin Grant and Sandra Markle relied on Maxar Technologies and their four satellites whose cameras have lenses 4 feet wide, sharp enough to detail a basketball while circling Earth at nearly 18,000 mph, a speed fast enough to circle our planet 15 times per day.  And with all that is happening, at an almost equally fast pace, reading this book can be a mixed bag to see both the beauty of our "home" side-by-side with the evidence of our destruction and our virus-like growth.  As one author wrote, aliens looking down at the same sights might tend to wonder, "what are they doing down there?"  

Deforestation in the Amazon.  Photo: NASA

                   Deforestation in the Amazon.  Photo: NASA

     So briefly, ignore the flurry of tee shirts now appearing, the ones with Trump's distorted smile and the caption "Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me."  Or the tee that features a similar photo of Musk on one side and a rat on the other with the caption "Which One Is Really Vermin?," a creative and apologetic take on the muskrat.  It can make one agree with another tee that says "Losing Faith in Humanity, One Person at a Time."  When one tries to push aside Trump's pardon of the Silk Road founder who was serving two life sentences for peddling "illicit substances, including heroin and cocaine" on the Dark Web, or to also push aside Elon Musk  calling the UK's prime minister "utterly despicable" and asking his 212 million followers on X/Twitter whether the US should "liberate" Britain from its "tyrannical government" (wrote Jill Lawless of the Associated Press), one can sort of understand this op-ed from the Canadian magazine, Macleans: America has come off of 70 years of failed imperialist adventures, in which it discovered it couldn’t hold onto Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere else...America wins every battle and loses every war.  They can perform military actions perfectly but they can’t recognize the ultimate consequences of those actions.  War, for them, is a kind of hobby.  They only enjoy it on foreign soil, when the stakes are on the other side...Trump is a rage-attention machine.  That’s how he has accumulated power.  That’s how he is.  But now that he has overtaken the Republican party and the U.S. political system, he must keep the rage machinery pointed outwards.  Otherwise it will turn inwards.  

Civil war within his own base is already waiting in the wings.**

Statue of Liberty from above.  Photo: Overview

     But Musk is also quite present in Germany and apparently attracting women to his views.  Wait, what???  Wrote Bloomberg: As campaigning picks up for Germany’s national election on Feb. 23, just about everyone is bracing for a sharp rightward turn in the results...women are hastening the shift...There’s little doubt that the AfD will see a surge in this year’s election, with polls predicting it will receive about 20% of the vote, almost double what it got in the last national election, in 2021.  But with its extremist views—some AfD members openly praise the Nazis—many women are reluctant to admit their support...Although the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian whose partner is an immigrant—born in Sri Lanka and raised in Switzerland—the party’s nativist program says a woman’s place is in the home, caring for her children.  “Mothers only count in ‘woke’ society if they are employed and place their children in state all-day care, preferably as early as infancy,” the AfD writes in its election manifesto.  Added The Conversation: In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right nationalist and völkisch party, is using the “urban-rural divide” to polarize and mobilize an electorate that is attracted by romanticized notions of purity, tradition, nation and rurality.  Just reading such conflicting stances and views, and their apparent attraction to a diverse crowd, seems to be a gelatinous blob of...what?  How does one describe such seemingly successful rallying cries of discontent?  Aliens aside, we here on Earth might also be tempted to ask, "what are they doing down there?"

Red sand dunes in Namibia.  Photo: Overview

     One answer, at least temporarily, may be escape, that is, if one can afford it.  The average ticket price for a "good" World Series seat was over $700, with Super Bowl tickets going for over 3X that amount.  And if you're wondering who can afford such prices, especially when the stadiums all appear full, the answer may be that most people can't, even those attending.  The rallying cry of "charge" may actually be one of "charge it" as recent data shows Americans plunging further and further into debt.  Wrote Bloomberg on consumer debt rising to the most on record: Outstanding credit-card and other revolving debt increased $22.9 billion in December, more than reversing the prior month’s decline.  Non-revolving credit, such as loans for vehicle purchases and school tuition, climbed $18 billion, the most in two years.  The delinquency rate has risen, too, with some 3.5% of card balances past due by 30 or more days and 1.8% of accounts delinquent.  Both figures are more than double the post-pandemic lows recorded in 2021...The share of borrowers who are only making the minimum payments was the biggest on record.

     David Brooks wrote in his book, How To Know A Person: We live in an environment in which political animosities, technological dehumanization, and social breakdown undermine connection, strain friendships, erase intimacy, and foster distrust.  We're living in the middle of some sort of vast emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis.  It is as if people across society have lost the ability to see and understand one another, thus producing a culture that can be brutalizing and isolating.  Depression rates have been surging since the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Between 1999 and 2019, American suicide rates increased by 33 percent.  Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" rose from 26 percent to 37 percent.  By 2021, it has shot up to 44 percent.  The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020.  In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well.  Brooks noted that the journalist Studs Terkel once said: Listen, listen, listen, listen, and if you do, people will talk.  They always talk.  Why?  Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives.  Perhaps they've not ever even listened to themselves.  Brooks also mentioned the words of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, saying: ...you ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.  And, alas, it's seldom successful. 

 Okay enough; but there was a reason for introducing some of that depressing news and that was to expose an answer to it all...to step back.  As the book Overview makes so clear, our world is so full of beauty and wonder that our petty fights throughout the centuries seem to be little more than irritants to our planet.  But our growing presence and our continued fighting and our harvesting and our disrespect and disregard may be turning a small sore on this planet into quite a wound.  Ponder just a few of the wonders described in the narrative: --Great Barrier Reef: It stretches for more than 1400 miles like a string of beads, and is made up of 2,900 separate coral reefs, plus 900 islands.  --The Amazon River: ...the Amazon is the world's largest river, carrying nearly one-fifth of all the freshwater draining off Earth's surface.  In fact, it dumps so much freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean, the Amazon makes the ocean water less salty as far as 100 miles from the shore.  --Uluru /Ayers Rock in Australia: Estimated to be 600 million years old, Uluru is 1,142 feet high and 6 miles around at the base.  Like a land iceberg, Uluru also extends underground another 2 miles.  --The Everglades: The Everglades is the largest tropical wilderness in the United States.  The national park stretches across 1.5 million acres in Florida.  --The Empty Quarter: The Empty Quarter is the world's largest stretch of sand.  It covers parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emerates.  Roughly 250,000 square miles. it's just a little smaller than Texas.  On our human imprint: Port of Singapore, the 2nd largest in the world: The port is so busy that one ship enters or leaves every two to three minutes and about a thousand ships are docked there at any one time.  --Angkor Wat, Cambodia: ...the 500-acre site features a moat and a forest that surround a massive temple at its center.  The main temple area alone is four time the size of Rome's Vatican City.  And it is constructed of massive sandstone blocks joined without any cementing mortar.  --Pyramids of Giza: ...the Great Pyramid is the largest of the three pyramids at the site and is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to remain intact...Oddly enough, the super-strong mortar that holds those stones together has been studied, but no one has yet been able to re-create it.  Hoover Dam: Construction on the dam began in 1930 and was finished in 1935.  In total about 3.3 million cubic yards of concrete was used to build the massive 726-foot-tall dam -- enough to pave a road from New York City to San Francisco.

The Empty Quarter, largest stretch of sand in the world.  Photo: Overview

    Perhaps David Brooks put it nicely in his book: The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.  George Bernard Shaw for it right: "Life isn't about finding yourself.  Life is about creating yourself."  As Staff Sergeant Justis MacKinsey told Marketplace, the creation he discovered was when he realized that the rock "hits" he was playing to help assimilate Afghan refugees was going nowhere, which is when one of the refugees jumped up on stage and began playing him some rock music.  Playing by ear, the pair soon got both the band and the crowd going, and tensions immediately eased.  It was a process of finding and creating, of working together, and of discovering that there was always more to learn.  A similar tale emerged in The Keeper, the true story of former Nazi soldier, Bret Trautmann, who became accepted and admired as the lead goalie for Manchester United.  We can forgive, we can find ourselves, we can create and turn our lives in a new direction.  Perhaps rulers such as the Caesars and the Ghengis Khans, the Stalins and the Mao Zedongs, the Trumps and the Netanyahus, truly believe that they are working to better the world.  Personally, I admire more the ordinary people such as doctors Richard Cash and George Berci, people who made an impact on millions, but felt no need to take credit.

     So after all of this back-and-forth, this bickering and bantering, I took to heart the words of Riley Black as she wrote in Sierra about entering her own re-creation, moving on to a new part of her life and saying goodbye to her times of walking alone through Arches National Park: So much loomed ahead -- the move, shifting plans, the end of the trail.  All I could tell myself was that I was lucky to have had the time at all.  The ravens and rocks, the cacti and the arches -- they didn't need my sentiment one bit.  I was a fleeting near-insignificant part of their story, while even a few brief hours here were volumes in mine.  It seemed a fitting description of how we view our time here, however short or long that may be...

View of a poor neighborhood of Dehli, India, showing the lack of parks or greenery.  Photo: Overview

*I was looking at the "young explorer's" version, of Overview, a slightly-shortened version of the original, but still presented in the same large picture book format, a format that lets the pictures do most of the "talking."  The snippets of the photos shown here, at least those taken from the book, don't come close to showing the immensity of each satellite photo, nor to the research the authors put into piecing it all together.  Whether you grab a copy at the library, or decide to add a copy to your own library, the books make you realize what a beautiful planet we live on, and also how we are so wantonly destroying it in many areas.  Perhaps the various virus strains and weather events we're experiencing are nature getting ever closer to saying --like the movie The Burning Sea-- stop!

**In all fairness, a recent CBS poll of about 2175 Americans showed that 1152 of those polled approved of Trump's actions, while 1023 disapproved.  And yet here is how many in the media announced those results -- "53% of Americans approve of Trump in recent poll."  Bear in mind that 2175 people represent just 0.0007% of our population so releasing a press release declaring this to be 53% of how our country feels seemed a bit presumptuous.  And also bear in mind that this poll came out just 5 days after Trump sued CBS for editing footage of an interview with former VP Kamala Harris...hmm, was this "majority" poll a compromise to have Trump dismiss the lawsuit?   And perhaps more importantly, was this poll an accurate one, or as Trump would say, fake news?  One has to wonder?  When one does the math, do you feel that 1152 people represent the mood of 308,000,000?  And if you feel that the number is accurate (that those 1152 represent 53% of our country), put yourself in the opposite camp and have the poll show that 53% did NOT approve of Trump.  Would you then question just how accurate it is to have 1152 voice your opinion?  Just saying...