That's On We (or US)...

     Remember that classic scene in the movie Never Cry Wolf, the timid inexperienced biologist being flown into a remote corner of Alaska by a seasoned and somewhat crazy bush pilot.  The land is SO remote that the idea of calling for help, much less receiving it, seems almost futile.  And then the single-prop plane they're on begins to stall, its alarms and bells telling both riders what they already know, that they're in trouble.  It's at this point that the pilot turns to the scientist and asks him, "you know what's wrong," to which the panicky biologist nervously shakes his head no.  "Boredom," says the pilot.  Boredom.  But what exactly IS boredom?  Wrote Wikipedia: ...boredom is not well defined [and] is distinct from depression and apathy.  Yet in my opinion, boredom isn't that at all, because boredom can indeed be both apathy and  depression, and probably exhaustion.  And this "ennui" spreading across the world in people's lives is now so prevalent that well, it's become boring in itself, an image perhaps mirrored by cover shots of young stars such as Billie Eilish in ELLE.  And who can blame her (full disclosure, I don't know her music) since one does have to wonder when or if we will ever run out of FOX News hosts to serve in our government?           

                        
                         

     So here's a quick test for your own ennui.  How excited or interested are you to see this in a headline or text? -- Ukraine (its war With Russia has now lasted longer than WW I).  Israel.  Gaza.  Lebanon.  Ebola.  Marco, Pete and junior.  Peace deal with Iran (as of June 12th, Trump had announced such a deal 39 times).  Another white felon pardoned by Trump (not counting that drug lord of color from South America).  Congress voting away more of your $$ for an arch, wrestling match, Trump statue, or a gold toilet?  Another billionaire running for office.  Truth is, all of the above have left the realm of the outrageous and moved into the world of the everyday, and thus have turned --dare I say it?-- boring.  Even to respected journalists.  It's as if we're saying "yawn...again?"  Take the words from Professor Charles Glass in the LRB recently: The young people I am trying to teach believe, as I did once, that telling the story will rouse the Western public that pays for this and most other wars to persuade their leaders to stop the killing.  Would anything I write compel the arms dealers and ultra-high-tech digital warfare providers to deprive their managers and shareholders of the profits accruing from their wizard new methods of taking human life?...Whenever we are in Beirut, we hear explosions that kill our neighbors and endure the relentless hum of the Israeli drones that watch us.  I hear and sometimes see this war, but I'm not covering it.  What good would it do?  You, dear reader, don't give a damn.  Nor do the Israeli invaders, their American enablers or Hizbullah's aspiring martyrs.

     So now step back, sip your coffee (or coffee martini) and ask yourself how any of us, including me, can shuffle and mutter on about all these terrible things happening in the world, feel bad for a few seconds, then go on to watch a movie or head to a nightclub?  This isn't meant as a guilt-inducer or a do-something finger point; but on another side of the world there sits, truly, another side of the world, one showing what we humans are capable of (advanced warning: the following will be difficult to read and is likely the reason so many journalists and reporters have been killed or have had their stories not published because apparently the powers-that-be feel that there are things you're not supposed to know...again, this is difficult to read but is what Professor Glass saw in the Lebanese town of Tel el-Zaatar): Doyle McManus of United Press International and I went there that morning and witnessed the annihilation of unarmed women, children and old men.  A population that had lived there since 1949, the year after their expulsion from Palestine by the Israelis, had ceased to exist.  Their dismembered and crushed bodies covered the camp's streets and alleys.  Blood surged down the gutters.  Looters from nearby Christian quarters drove over the corpses in their haste to steal furniture, refrigerators, clothing, anything they could carry.  A bulldozer scraped bodies from the ground and dumped them in pits.  The air was filthy from the smoke of burning shacks, cars and flesh.  When Doyle and I walked out of the ruins, we saw a Maronite priest on a balcony blessing looters on their way home.

     Is it any wonder that we can feel overwhelmed when we discover that common decency and morals seem to now be things from the past?  And the idea of having one more thing placed on our shoulders would indeed feel as if we were carrying the weight of the world?  It's as if the shootings by ICE of US citizen-protesters had become old news and worse, accepted.  Think back to those charging over Capitol police, breaking the windows of Congress, and then hearing a sitting President say that taxpayers needed to pay them $100,000 or so for doing so.  What in the world has happened to civility and our definition of right and wrong, something which we once felt was rock solid? 

     When I dug into the book Lost Worlds by Patrick Wyman, it had readers question the history of civilizations of earlier times, as in the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze ages (for reference, dinosaurs were in the Mesozoic era, but still, what??).  And as you know, history is nowhere near my strong suit so I make no pretense about knowing these periods.  Yet what struck me, beyond the buried cities and caved in pockets of life (half a dozen or more cities are often uncovered on the same location since it was generally easier to just bury and build over an existing city) were his closing remarks about humanity in general: Imagine, if you will, what the world might look like 5,700 years from now.  In that distant time, what will survive of your life to tell future generations that you, your family, your community, or your country ever existed?  Certainly not your clothing or the many other perishable organic materials from which we make much of our material lives...What do you want them to make of your life and the world in which you lived?  What should they take from our world, which will one day be every bit as lost as those of the distant past?  Will they marvel at our technological ingenuity, curse our environmental follies, shake their heads at our misconceptions of the universe, or struggle to understand why we did the strange things we did....Whether our descendants number in the billions or our legacy ends, whether our languages sprout whole new family trees or go extinct, whether our monuments still tower to the heavens or are erased from view, we were here.  We can hope that our lives teach them something about the human condition, just as we can learn from the thousands of generations that preceded us on the Earth.  We are no better than they were or will be, but no worse, either. 

     On reading that last sentence, I had to both wonder and only somewhat agree with him because even with all the horrors of war, many of my conservative friends continue to feel that the path we're on is the right one and is being led by the right leaders.  Videos seem to verify that Israel has been using white phosphorous against civilians in Lebanon (white phosphorous burns through skin on contact and is considered a crime against humanity by the Chemical Weapons Convention if used against civilians; the CWC was signed by 193 countries including Israel however Israel did not ratify their signing).  And I'm not picking out Israel since Russia has itself bombed hospitals and apartment buildings.  And the US continues to blow boats out of international waters for no reason other than what they allege is drug running (no evidence has ever been offered for any of the 63 boats destroyed by our missiles, wrote the NY Times).  Have we really become so callous that we find such behavior acceptable against other humans?  Again?  And again?  Is such behavior so repetitive throughout human history that we may have to admit that this side of our "nature" may actually reside within all of us?  Stepping back less than 75 years, historians tend to see that what is happening is straight out of Hitler's playback once he became Chancellor...first take over the press and control the meida, then take control of the courts, then the government, and the people will have no choice but to fall in line (the Nazi party was officially the German workers party, wrote Wikipedia).  What can any of us do?  Wait, ICE is at the door (Congress just authorized another $70 billion for ICE, bringing that total to $170 billion, all while Medicaid subsidies end for millions here in the US in less than 6 months.  It does make one wonder just how many illegal immigrants can there be?

      Matt Haig, the popular author of turning life's reflections into best-selling novels, opened one of his books with this from his fictional character: I am in a pattern, like a number pattern, a Fibonacci sequence --0,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 etc.-- and like that sequence things get less surprising the further I go on.  But instead of realizing the next number is found by adding the two before it, you realize that everything ahead of you has already been decided.  And as I get older, as I pass more numbers, the pattern becomes more predictable.  And nothing can break that pattern...I look at what is happening in the world and I see that our whole species is on a path to destruction, like it is programmed, another pattern.  And I just get fed up with being a human, being this tiny thing that can't do anything about the world.  Everything gets impossible.  As Marvin Gaye sang: Money, we make it.  'Fore we see it, you'll take it.   Bills pile up, sky high...panic is spreading, God knows where we're heading.  Makes me wanna holler...

     I'm no different, I think, from the guy down the street two generations ago, who may have felt that the world was moving a bit too quickly without thought.  My parents didn't really grasp the internet, even the simplicity of early word processing programs that allowed for easy corrections and a stylish (and readable) letter to mail.  No need, they told me, we'll just stick to our old ways of writing, as in handwriting cursive letters now and then.  But there's a world of information out there, I would tell them, even as I knew that once I left, little would change.  But with Google basically announcing that search engines and web pages and www-links were the way of the past, I could suddenly relate to what my parents must have felt.  No more searching, said Google, we'll just provide you the answer (according to their studies, 60% of their users accept this without further questioning, reported On Point).  Really?  Are we that bored or apathetic to question things or to look further on our own?  Said BBC technology reporter, Tom Germain on the show: One of the big things that's changing here is this old world where everything was free online; that is going away.  You've certainly noticed that there are more paywalls going up, and that is partially because the old system where Google would send you traffic and you could make enough money showing those people ads is dying. 

      Asked the host of the show: What happens inside our brains when we're just fed answers, like a Google AI-synthesized one?  And for that perspective, she sought out Tina Grotzer, a cognitive scientist on the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education: What our brain does when we're learning is it creates synapses, and those synapses become stronger and stronger every time we retrieve a concept, every time we revisit a concept...When you're asking a question, you have a reason why you're asking that particular question.  So mapping the problem space around it and knowing this is connected to that or this is connected to something else or here's where my question fits within other things is really important.  It's an important part of learning...if you're struggling with something, you are really creating the brain structures to support deep understanding and durable, robust understanding.  But will that that sort of "robust understanding" soon become as irrelevant as those links and web pages, sort of like cursive handwriting.  Mom??

      Maybe all this que sera, sera was how my folks eventually felt, that there was little they could do at that point in their lives since they had already lived through several actual wars, faced hard economic times, and had been through a litany of politicians, slick-talkers all who promised the world and by the next election, vanished like expensively blown dust.  Your turn, here are the keys.  Today's politics seem to also offer few options.  As Alan Allport noted in what he felt was a distorted view of the greatness of Winston Churchill during WW II: ...the tug of party discipline, the feebleness of his opponents, and a fear that show of discord would undermine Britain's international standing had ultimately come together to save Churchill.  Hitler, Churchill, Trump.  I admit to starting to have that feeling of "whatever" with the announcement that the anti-public lands Steve Pierce had been approved by Congress (along with a blanket approval of 49 other Trump appointees) as the new head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).  Wrote the Center for Western Priorities: The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has published a final rule rescinding the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, also known as the Public Lands Rule.  The Public Lands Rule was finalized in May 2024 and clarified that conservation is a use of national public lands under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which governs how the BLM lands are to be managed.  After the rescission of the rule was proposed by the Trump administration in September 2025, an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities of the public comments on the proposal found that 98 percent of commenters opposed rescinding the rule.  To reiterate, those comments apparently meant nothing.  The rule was rescinded anyway.  Goodbye Gates of the Artic National Park as an 800-mile gas pipeline may be approved through the protected area, along with additional mining permits; goodbye sacred tribal monuments as bulldozers razed one area for a portion of the border wall in Arizona; goodbye Montana's Crazy Mountains as the BLM approved a land swap limiting public access to this "billionaire's club" area.  Even in my area, two public referendums submitted by residents against Canadian billionaire Kevin O'Leary's apparently approved data center were rejected by the courts because under our state law, a commission's decision is "final" and cannot be overturned.  Wait, who's working for whom (the GOP head speaker of our local legislature owns 25,000 acres near the data center, but said he was unaware of the proposed center and that his owning neighboring land had no influence on his backing for the project).  Maybe our state of Utah will move up to the top spot as being the most corrupt state in the country (we're currently #2 according to 2026 World Population Review).  Quick side note from Gizmodo: The small town of Festus, Missouri, just removed half its city council (and is still calling for the mayor’s head) after the council ignored the public’s concerns and rammed through approval for a $6 billion center.  The Oklahoma City Council unanimously approved a moratorium on data center construction through the rest of the year.

      It's as if we ordinary folk have heard these overrides so many times --where the voting public is just ignored-- that we've become numb to even reacting.  Bored of the same futile effort to make things change.  Esquire summed up that frustration not as Marvin Gaye mellow protest music but as angry Divorced Dad Rock: Divorced Dad Rock rejects the concept of joy so completely that about 40 percent of it should come with a self-harm content warning.  It is the sound of white male ennui, of disillusionment in a time of inept American leadership, a war we'd been misled into, a vanishing middle class, the debut of The Big Bang Theory.  Because we never fully dealt with any of that, we're reliving all of it, and throwing in some measles for the kids.  The iPods became iPhones and 1,000 songs became all the information in the world.  Our Friendster accounts led to Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, which allowed us access to the most rancid thoughts of the Internet's worst minds.  The nostalgia cycle tends to run us back two or three decades, and this genre drops us right into the mid-aughts, when the burner has just been turned on and we frogs barely noticed the water heating up.  Now here we are in 2025, angry and agitated, despairing and divided, as glum as a Staind song, as trapped as Trapt.  Maybe Divorced Dad Rock really has met its moment.  And maybe objects in the rearview mirror are more complicated than they appear.   Echoed The Temptations: Can't you hear me talking to you?  It's a ball of confusion.

                       

     I threw in that older Temptations video because upon watching it, one can see that boring as it may be, history does seem to repeat itself.  Sometimes it can feel as if we are staring upwards at tall cliffs "menacingly indifferent to the world of the valley floor, far below," to quote Peter Brannen:  For me, I don't purposely seek out the terrible things happening, although the LRB report on what is going on in Gaza is indeed horrible, placing people in torn plastic tents in -5F weather, and the IDF "buffer zone" now so large that it is beyond the range of IDF snipers so grenade-launching drones are used.  To read such articles, and realize that apparently as with Cuba, it is all being done to takeover valuable coastal real estate to create luxury resorts at any cost (one compound in the new buffer zone has already been built over a Palestinian cemetery), makes me again wonder if the Geneva Convention is basically a goner (as the article reminds us: The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’.  This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them.)   How can we stand by when just 90 miles away from our own coast we're shutting off all power to hospitals and blockading fuel for ambulances, content to watch our own Gaza developing?    

     "We live in a loud, challenging world," wrote Dr. Giulia Enders: We're being barrage nonstop by external information: what we ought to achieve, how we could live, how we should look or feel -- whereas often we don't even understand what we are in the here and now...Would a body-focused perspective on life help --even partially-- to preserve the human element amid the whirl of modernity?  It's striking how many terms used to speak about our bodies are borrowed from technology, economics, and even war.  We compare the brain to a computer, our immune system "dispatches troops" to "attack intruders," when we do exercise we increase our training efficacy with "regimes" and those who don't invest enough in their health will "have to pay the price" later.  Obviously the themes/topics of the world color the way we see ourselves -- but what does this do to us?  And why shouldn't it more often be the other way around: that our bodies shape how we think about our work lives or social interactions?

 

     Author Matt Haig, in writing about his own depression and anxiety and panic attacks, wrote: Sometimes, situation permitting, rather than trying to ignore the panic or walk it off, I would just lie down on the floor and close my eyes and really focus on it.  And when you analyze fear you realize, first, that it is only a natural part of us.  And second, that it is the sister of hope.  Because both are born from the uncertain fabric of life.  In Tibetan the word re-dok is portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging they coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing   -- uncertainty.  We when analyze rather than evade our darkest fears, we learn that even our largest demons are not as invincible as they first appear...I have sincerely known more moments of contentment in my life for having gone through years of hell.  He then quoted Albert Camus: There is no love of life without despair of life.

     So maybe we need that angry dad rock and those angry body descriptions to snap us out of this boredom, to show us that behind the darkness there is light and that this lengthy solar eclipse of our part of history is ever so slowly beginning to clear.  It takes darkness to make you appreciate the light, is the old saying.  And while we can do little to change our historical patterns, there is still good and light everywhere.  People volunteering, people rescuing animals, caretakers quietly absorbing their exhaustion, people stopping to listen or even (gasp!) chat with others.   Garage sales, swap meets, outlets and clearance sections...people are somehow making do.  We may grumble about the rising prices at the grocery store but at least our eggs are still around $5, and not $130 (yes, one HUNDRED and thirty dollars a kilo) as they are in Gaza, reported the NY Times.  I continue to count my blessings as I encounter people walking dogs or stopping to ask about and pet my disabled dog, people conversing at the checkout line, neighbors waving as they drive by.  People seem to be holding up somehow, donating time and money and compassion to those people and animals and causes in need.  

     We can't save the world, or likely effectively change the nature of our species.  The horrors and atrocities we inflict on others and our planet have happened before, are happening now, and will likely happen in our future.  And I think I read and write about some of these things only as a reminder of how fortunate we should consider ourselves.  To be honest, I feel horrified when reading and writing about what else is being reported in the world.   To again quote author Peter Brannen: In summary, we're in deep shit...For better or worse, I think there's no way out but through.  We have to somehow thread the needle between supplying enough energy to the vastly expanded twenty-first century human project such that it can flourish, and do so without destroying the world.  I think we have to hope that such a thing is possible, because the alternatives are too horrible.  The Earth will do whatever is necessary to care for itself.  But it's difficult to stay upbeat for us as humans because as dire as our situation is (and as Brennan makes quite clear), our "nature" is often that we tend to not do anything until it is close to too late.  An asteroid headed our way, a fast-spreading virus or bacteria, the collapse of the ocean.  The worry in this instance is that we may not be able to change enough to save ourselves.

      So much life has come and gone before us that: There is about 3,000 times more organic carbon spread out through the crust than is available in recoverable deposits of fossil fuels.  Those fuels, that coal and oil, was once life.  And we're burning through it without a care or a thought.  So while I find that reading and writing about such is difficult, imagine authors such as Brennan who spend countless hours doing research into what must prove depressing studies and papers.  And yet, here were the words of Brannen in the closing credits: And thank you, especially, to ATP synthase, photosystem II, place tectonics, and every other miraculous component of this absurdly miraculous planet that I woke up on a a few decades ago.  Every second that any of us is alive is an unthinkable  miracle, and there's no reason ever to be bored.

     We should all count our lucky stars, no matter how few or how many we may feel that we have.  We are alive and whether at the beginning or the end of that life, the fact that we are here is alone amazing.  Imagine stepping back and planning your parents meeting, then their parents meeting, then their parents, and on and on.  Those of you investing in Polymarket, what would you guess were the odds of all that happening so that YOU could be born (not to mention that a single sperm --your dad's-- outlasted millions of others trying to make it into that egg)?  Well, the odds are so miniscule that it would be comparable to placing a single atom against all of the atoms in the universe.  Wait, what??  Here's how one site put it: Here is what 1,000 zeros looks like:

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000...now multiply all those zeros by another two thousand, six hundred, and eighty-five.  Yes, multiply all those zeros by 2685 and THAT is the odds of you being here.  Added Medium: Being alive, in the mathematically impossible way that we are, doesn’t have to be as grand and extensive as 10 to the power of 2,685,000.  Life happens in between.  In the small moments.  It is the sound of waking up to the birds, or the horns and sirens, if you live in a big city.  It is smiling as you walk pasts somebody on the street.  It’s laughing so hard that your belly hurts.  It’s crying over what feels like the greatest heartbreak you will ever experience.  Yes, our planet is a miracle, much as life itself --your life-- is a miracle.  So if you somehow feel bored or apathetic or exhausted or depressed, think of how miraculous it is that you're even here to ponder that.  You can be, and maybe already are, a beacon to others.  To quote author Annie Lamont: Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. 

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Addendum: Wow, you've again made it through this somewhat lengthy piece and perhaps are ready to consider your reading done, at least for this post.  But to finish up on author Brannen's novel-like book on our geologic history and that of our life-giving gas, carbon dioxide (he notes that our oxygen on Earth rests at about 21%, an ideal mix because having oxygen at 75% would kill us within 3 days), I decided to add this excerpt he noted on an earlier period in our US history, a time when the Industrial Revolution had made its way to our shores and introduced us to another black gold, one that would again create vicious barons, strip away mountain tops, and care not a whit for human labor...this one co-led by Ford Motor Company (what?).  It's a somewhat lengthy excerpt but will provide you a better idea of just how captivating Brannen presents the history of our planet, from twice being an icy snowball to the buried forests of the Middle East (the massive oil now being drawn out will give you some idea of just how lush and plentiful those forests were, all now buried under sand and themselves turned to liquid carbon...oil).  The excerpt: After the turn of the century, when a wave of unionization swept through the northern coalfields to push back against the inhumanity of the coal barons, the nonunion  Appalachian coalfields, many of which were effectively run as "feudal baronies," suddenly gained a competitive edge on price.  By hiding their human misery on the balance sheets, southern and central Appalachia coal companies were able to take over the market share of a rapidly industrializing Midwest, and energy increasingly flowed from these mines.  State militias were sometimes sent in to "protect" the southern miners from labor organizations, and the union organizers themselves were often murdered in cold blood by private detectives  Law enforcement was often on the payroll, and the crimes went enthusiastically unsolved.  Vertically integrating industrials behemoths like US Steel and the Ford Motor Company would come to run their own coal mines in the region -- sometimes housing workers in bizarre, totalizing company towns, forcing them to buy marked-up goods in company-run stores, with private company currencies.  This too, kept costs down, and much of this coal would find its way into the belching forges of Gary, Indiana, and the multiplying factories of Detroit, fueling the country's explosive growth.   

     As in Europe, though, groing reisistance to this overwhelming economic force of nature was registered in the swelling ranks of the United Mine Workers of America, and in the voter roles of the Socialist Party of America, whose miners sported red bandanas around their necks ("rednecks") and thrilled to the tirades of barnstorming organizers like Mother Jones.  The collision of these opposing if asymmetrical forces of the mine owners and their workers --each fighting over the flows of energy in society-- was often explosive, eventually culminating in the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War.  In the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 in southern West Virginia, coal miner owners led by a local sheriff on the payroll mustered an army of three thousand strikebreakers, giving them the direction to "kill all the rednecks you can."  Union miners marching fifty miles to Blair Mountain were met with an aerial bombing campaign coordinated by a National Guard colonel --one heavily inspired by the Tulsa River Massacre three months earlier-- as well as the indiscriminate blaze of Thompson submachine gun fire that sprayed the mountainside with a million rounds.  Fighting lasted for five days and ended only with the intervention of the US Army.  In 2010, Blair Mountain itself was delisted from the National Register of Historic Places and scheduled for mountaintop removal.   

Footnote: protests were loud and many so the mountaintop removal idea was scrapped and Blair Mountain was apparently added back to the list of historic places.  Blair Mountain continues to be owned by coal companies so things could change...