The Quad

     Wait a minute, didn't you just read about bird flu (and the flu in general) in the last post?  Well yes, but as Scientific American wrote, there may have been a bit more to our severe flu season because of what researchers began calling the quad-demic.  Norovirus? (hand sanitizers won't work with the norovirus, wrote Discover)  RSV? (which hits children more than adults, although one of our adult friends got it)  And now a new Covid strain found in bats?  And what about all those "resistant" bugs going around, the ones seemingly able to avoid our antibiotics and our normal remedies of rest and lots of liquids?  Add to all of this the likely return of polio, measles, and tuberculosis?  What the heck?  Where's the good news?

     With spring around the corner and many of us feeling that we've finally turned the corner, hearing about diseases is likely low on the list of things we want to hear about.  But there's some truth to our burnout when it comes to hearing about our bodies and the "health" of our planet.  Wrote The Atlantic: ...political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities.  One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership.  This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s...A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the “lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.”  In the past decade alone, young Americans’ trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent.  

      So was all of this because of Covid?  Wait, remember Covid?  Lockdowns, face masks, paranoia?  It was over 5 years ago when that word first arrived...Covid. "The terror of that year can sometimes feel like a distant memory," said Bloomberg Prognosis:  But within a year and a half, Covid-19 would be buried into our vocabulary as it spread across the world, killing over a million people and hospitalizing another 40 million (estimates put the unreported totals much higher).  Wrote the Bloomberg piece: New data from the Pew Research Center shows that 56% of Americans say Covid-19 “isn’t something we need to worry about much today,” and just 4% are still wearing a mask or face covering in stores all or most of the time.  The data come from a survey of almost 10,000 adults in the U.S., conducted over a few days in October.  Some interesting findings: 38% said there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity during the pandemic, while 18% say there should have been more, and 44% said the response was just right.  Looking forward, 40% said the country would do better in responding to a future health emergency compared with Covid-19. (It feels important to note that this poll took place before the election...).  Would do better?  Really?  I bring this up because we are now in a world of increased skepticism about vaccines...but I digress.  

      In my day, the "quad" referred to the central courtyard on my college campus, a large grassy area surrounded by buildings on all four sides.  It was a place to relax, a place to convene, a place to cross through when changing classes.  It was also where I witnessed my first student riot, complete with police firing tear gas and choppers flying overhead.  It was exciting to see the transformation of the everyday ordinary to the adrenaline-filled pulse of trying to figure out what was happening.  So when the word quad-demic entered the vocabulary, it felt a bit like going back in time, only now we were all much older and this new "quad" had the potential to affect a lot more people than those gathered on a college green, especially for someone such as Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the US and married to a US citizen.  As Amy Greer, one of his attorneys told NBC: He was taken by plainclothes federal agents, transferred in the middle of the night across state lines, and has been detained for over a week now, all because of his advocacy for Palestinian freedom.  Hmm, so much for my memories of the quad...but along those same lines, I happened to watch the 4-episode Netflix series, Adolescence, and saw something similar as police arrived at a typical residential house early in the morning, but with guns drawn, breaking down the door then handcuffing the parent's young son and hauling him away...the son was 13.  Beside being a parent and witnessing that, what would any of us think? (of note was the technique used of filming in one take, giving it a you-are-there feel; think of the timing and choreography required of the cast when the camera just keeps filming, never stopping,* particularly when filming in a crowded middle school or a large market).  More than the changing times and the break from the ordinary was the struggle to understand what was happening between generations.

      Jump from there to Mr. Rogers ("it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood").  Wait, who?  Yes, it was my "era" but truth be told, I had never watched an episode, not even one of the nearly 900 (Tom Hanks did an excellent job portraying him in the movie version).  Then I picked up a book of Mr. Rogers quotations, and it turned out that he had more than enough to fill a book.  Here are just a few samples:  It's not always easy for a father to understand the interests and ways of his son. It seems the songs of our children may be in keys we've never tried.  The melody of each generation emerges from all that's gone before.  --Forgiveness is a strange thing.  It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends.  --The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings.  Some people have many blessings and hoard them.  Some have few and give everything away.  Or this: --It's hard for us, as adults, to understand and manage our angry feelings towards parents, spouses, and children, or to keep their anger toward us in perspective.  It's a different kind of anger from the kind we may feel toward strangers because it is so deeply intertwined with caring and attachment.  

   

      Being older adds another chunk to that generational divide, what I would somewhat view as the quad of aging: childhood, to teen, to adult, to old age.  Broad categories I admit, but each seemingly with a defined point of entry and departure in our minds.  And now that I was in the latter group, much as I didn't feel like it or want to admit it, I could tell where I was by the shows and books that now drew my attention, not so much the format or the subject as much as it was my "processing" of what I saw or read or heard.  In the book, The Inevitable, author Katie Englehart raised some interesting questions of when to call it quits in this life.  For some, it is simply a decision to end a life of pain or debilitating functions, physical or mental.  But for others, there was a feeling that their life had been fulfilled and that they had accomplished pretty much all that they wanted; for them, most of their friends and family were gone and life was little more than a waiting game in a rest home.  Most of those interviewed we as sharp as ever, and often not suicidal.  But the desire to end their life was there.  As the British physician Michael Irwin wrote in 2009: I may still not suffer from one serious specific illness -- but perhaps, from numerous, increasingly annoying health problems.  When the burdens of living exceed the joys of being alive, I will then be close to the tipping point in wanting to die...surely this final decision should be mine, not made by anyone else.  Added the author: That was a peculiar thing: the way a young woman's pain sometimes made her more interesting, but an old woman's pain just made her tiring.  The former suffers, the latter languishes and complains.  The economy of sympathy never favored the elderly.  Perhaps that was the thinking of billionaire Howard Lutnik, US Secretary of Commerce, when he implied that seniors wouldn't mind if their Social Security check didn't arrive, wrote Axios.    

 

Photo: Samuel Brown/National Geographic

      But if you didn't catch any of the bugs, or didn't have your 13-year old arrested by armed police at 6 in the morning, or simply woke up this morning and felt alive instead of one day closer to the "inevitable " consider yourself blessed.  We will likely continue to go through some tough times, and likely have another period of Andrew Jackson's groundhog day, but we will also likely get through it.  For those of you who may have served or lived through the Vietnam War and witnessed the endless destruction, the defoliants being sprayed over lush jungles, the millions of air-dropped landmines (most made by Motorola) still taking away limbs and lives, then look at the picture of how Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) now looks?  We humans tend to be resilient, even after a war's devastation (although this is difficult to picture in both Gaza and Ukraine).  All of this may require a new way of thinking -- about our parents or our children, about our governments and their "leaders," about our seemingly insatiable thirst for control, about our prejudices, and about our fading display that all are created equal.  

     We may also need to revamp our thinking that things tend to come in threes.  Things may come in fours...or fives, or numbers which we can't yet visualize.  Time itself may not fit any "set" definition (time is an invention of humans, after all).  Author Priya Subberwal had this thought in Orion: In Hinduism, we’re currently in what’s known as the Kali Yuga, a time cycle of war and conflict, but one that will turn, like a wheel, into something new.  The Wheel of Samsara turns over like a dog rolling onto his back, angling his soft white belly to the sun.  Potawatomi ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that, instead of a river, time might be a lake, ancestry and futurity swirling together in the same soup.  As I wade deeper into the depths of adulthood and spend more time talking to people younger than me, I’ve been reaching for more language like this.  I’ve been thinking about how we can talk about our future without describing a brick wall, how we can walk toward it without crumbling under its immensity....Here, at the edge of late-stage capitalism and climate catastrophe, our sense of the shape of time feels very important.  We’re told it’s the end of the world, the apocalypse.  And it often feels like it.  I have to keep reminding myself that humans have often felt like the world was ending.  I have to keep reminding myself that the world is still here.

Photo of pyramids of Giza: Shutterstock

                                Photo of pyramids of Giza: Shutterstock

      Her words reminded me of ancient times, especially in structures such as the great pyramids of Giza.  Only now, with all of our "sophisticated" technology, have we discovered yet another tunnel inside.  It's amazing to me that some 4000 years later we continue finding more about the engineering and planning that evolved under this mountain of 2-ton stone blocks, as shown in the video from Al Jazeera.  In Machu Picchu it was much the same, the engineers there recognizing that the bottom of the mountain had to be stabilized before any building could begin on the top,.  Workers there continue to discover stone terraces as large or larger than those at the site on top (stunningly photographed in the documentary, The Lost City of Machu Picchu).  Massive civilizations with their rulers and monuments, vast empires with untold riches...all gone. .History has a way of both building and erasing out memories, not only those of ancient structures, but also diseases.  So jumping back, here's a quick refresher of those diseases we felt we had eradicated (or were about to do so).  MEASLES: highly contagious and often doesn't display any symptoms until 4 days later; now at its highest resurgence in Europe since 1997, wrote the BBC (15 states in the US have now reported measles outbreaks); POLIO: also highly contagious among the unvaccinated and can cause paralysis within hours; one in 200 will suffer permanent paralysis, wrote the Pan American Health Organization; TB or tuberculosis: still one of the leading infectious disease to cause death, about 3 people each minute, wrote Sophie Cousins in the London Review; highly contagious if untreated and TB continues to become antibiotic resistant, wrote The Conversation (current treatments with toxic drugs can last 6-9 months); and a new form of Covid is back, wrote Bloomberg,  and candida-auris (said part of the article: There were 7 million confirmed Covid-19 deaths during the pandemic, though estimates of the actual death toll range as high as 27 million).   It reminded me of the Staple Singers song: If you're walking 'round think'n that the world owes you something 'cause you're here; you goin' out the world backwards like you did when you first come here (many versions of this song but this is my favorite).**

      Throughout history our world has been surrounded by all sorts of threats and unexpected villains, if we choose to look at it that way.  Take this from The NY Review on what our ocean holds: “Ocean life” sounds like it means parrot fish and coral and manta rays, sea stars and sponges and octopuses.  And it does.  But it also means microbes, lots and lots of microbes.  “We humans,” Czerski [Helen Czerski, author of The Blue Machine] points out, “are incapable of even seeing 61 per cent of ocean biomass.”  Microbes—the invisible and the barely visible—amount to 90 percent of the biomass in the ocean.  Their actual numbers are staggering.  Estimates range from 3.6 nonillion (1030) to 100 million times the septillion (1024) stars in the sky, a population kept within limits by a no less immense number of aquatic viruses.  What are the microbes doing there?  Among other things, they’re making at least half, and perhaps as much as 80 percent, of the oxygen we breathe.  But it's not just the ocean.  Again from the book, Air-Borne: It's possible that antibiotic-resistant microbes are especially good at thriving in the clouds...the stress of life in a cloud may cause bacteria to produce toxic waste that they need to pump out quickly as well.  Clouds may be able to spread these rsistance genes father than contaminated meat and water.   Once in a cloud, bacteria can travel hundreds of miles in a matter of days before seeding raindrop and falling back to Earth.  When they reach the ground, the microbes may then pass along their resistance genes to other microbes they encounter.  Every year, Amato [doctoral microbiology researcher, Pierre Amato] and his colleagues estimate, 2.2 trillion trillion resistance genes shower down from the clouds...

     But as author Zimmer added: ...we don't have to look at it as an incoming rain of biological weapons.  We can try instead to treat it as an atmospheric garden...In an age in which we are heating the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, polluting it with smog, and fostering new pathogens, it may be hard to envision this kind of harmony.  But it is worth trying, because the aerobiome is not going away even if we stop thinking about it.  As long as there is life on Earth, it will fly, and as long as we are here, we will breathe.  As hectic and perhaps as insurmountable as things may seem of late, take solace that you are still here, still enriching this world and life...your life.  And quite likely you're benefiting from that invisible world around us.  And that world is far, far larger than anything making the news.  As Mr. Rogers once said: The media shows the tiniest percentage of what people do.  There are millions and millions of people doing wonderful things all over the world, and they're generally not the ones being touted in the news.

*A good example of how such one-take filming is done came from the popular Back On 74 video from the music group Jungle; this particular video was synchronized so that you can see both the "making of" and the actual released video.  **And speaking of videos, my memory of that song comes from the Zazu Pitts Memorial Orchestra version, a "local" group at the time that brought a fresh face to how entertaining a band could be.  Each of the women could sing with a unique style, and the jostling horns and female bass player only added to a lively time.  Even at the time --and to this day-- I remember thinking why more bands weren't like this...ah, but such are memories of old (and a thanks to one Bobby Valdez who apparently made the only viewable copy of one of their concerts).