A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WORLD – A PARABLE

written 5-2-21

God created the Earth. In the beginning, the Earth was too hot and too lacking in atmosphere for life. Gradually, over the eons, it settled down and various life forms began to evolve. Life began in the oceans and gradually some creatures adapted to become amphibian and to live on land.

Millions of years later, back in the Jurassic era, dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were the top of the food chain and definitely the dominant living creatures. They had huge bodies, very small brains and were generally pretty antisocial.

God paused and assessed His work so far[1]. “I don’t think I like these critters I’ve made,” He said. “I think I’ll create a course correction and try again.” So, he sent a big comet that knocked Earth off its axis, changed the climate a good deal, and gave a little rodent-like creature a chance, for the dinosaurs were now all gone. The little rodent, over the next few million years, became the first human being[2].

Fast forward a few more thousand years. God did another progress check and said: “I’m not very pleased with how these humans, whom I had such high hopes for, are proceeding. I think I’ll get rid of all but a few really good ones, and start again.” So, He spoke to Noah and told him to gather up two of each species and his immediate family, and build an ark. God then sent a Great Flood; it rained and poured for forty days and forty nights and the lands became water. Finally, the rain stopped and Noah sent a dove to fly out and look for land. The dove came back with an olive branch, meaning land was available above the waters.  The ark ended up on Mount Ararat and all the animals and humans started over in new settlements.

God commanded the climate to be just right for humans to flourish.  This was the Holocene era, lasting about 12,000 years and ending in the 1960s. It’s been referred to as a “Goldilocks” age – not too hot, not too cold, not too dry and not too rainy[3],[4]. But it’s ended and some refer to the current geological age as the Anthropocene.

Now in the 21st century, God took another look at His creation and said to Himself: “Perhaps I overdid things, and made it too easy for these humans to be fruitful and multiply. My periodic earthquakes, volcano eruptions, hurricanes and pandemics don’t seem to be enough to keep them in check. It was OK when Earth just supported a few million of them, but they’ve been so clever at using all the minerals I provided, so ingenious in all their inventions, that they’ve created a huge unintended consequence – overpopulation and the greenhouse effect. They have taken over earth as the dominant species, are incredibly warlike, and aren’t leaving much for the rest of My creation, which is rapidly going extinct. So, I’m going to let the planet get too hot for them; this’ll be a bigger deal than with Noah, as the seas will rise for many centuries as a result. I’ll enable Earth to get back down to just a few million people, and try again. Time to look for a few new Noahs!”

[1] Some people may feel it’s blasphemous or inappropriate for me to put words into God’s mouth. However, let’s remember that the entire Bible is human recollection / interpretation of God’s word.  The Bible that most Christians know was put together at Nicaea in 325 AD by a bunch of male priests. See https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Nicaea-325. The books they left out are generally more feminist, as any Gnostic bible will show.

[2] This tale is beautifully told in Stephen Jay Gould’s story Dinosaur in a Haystack.

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-02-22/goldilocks-zones-habitable-zone-astrobiology-exoplanets/6907836#:~:text=The%20Goldilocks%20Zone%20refers%20to,Earth%20we%20also%20find%20life.

[4] In this article 3 Major Scientific Discoveries In The Past Century That Point To God (thefederalist.com) Stephen Meyer claims three scientific arguments for the existence of God, one being that the 12,000 year long Holocene age, which ended in the 1960s, offered a “sweet spot” or “Goldilocks” era climatically, in which human life could, and did, thrive.  It remains to be seen what a faith-based interpretation of the current, Anthropocene age will include. This is my personal attempt.

Save the Free Press – But only if it Starts to Save Itself!

Labor Day 2018 to the Seattle Times News Editor

 Thank you for your recent column about the role of the local newspaper and for making yourself accessible. I’m going to take advantage of that access by raising a few issues:

 1.      SIGNIFICANT WOMEN DIED THIS WEEK, TOO!

Almost 3 decades ago I wrote to the Seattle Times complaining than the national obituaries were almost exclusively of men’s deaths.  I got what I considered was an almost frivolous reply (I think it was from Michael Fancher; wish I had kept it, but this was before scanners).  He said 1) there just weren’t any women of significance in the generation that was dying – women of this vintage just weren’t achievers; 2) the Times used a national news service so it wasn’t their fault who got mentioned. 

 Well, once in a while you actually have an obituary report that contains equal numbers of men and women.  But it’s still, 30 years after Fancher’s fatuous foolishness, mostly men meeting their maker, many editions of the paper still have ONLY men dying.  Since women are 52% of the population and likely make the newspaper purchasing decisions in more than 52% of households, I think it’s time to fix this!  I found quite a few online sites that report celebrity deaths; the main challenge is they don’t seem to be kept up weekly.  I’m sure you could find workarounds if the will was there.  But here we are, 30 years later and I am still complaining, because the Times doesn’t seem to be doing anything different!

 2.      NOBODY AT FACEBOOK RISKED THEIR LIFE AS A JOURNALIST TO GET A STORY POSTED

I didn’t understand, until Mark Zuckerberg began being grilled by Congress in 2018, how the “news” that Facebook posts CANNOT be gathered first-hand because it would change the company’s legal (and tax?) status. For a long time, I wondered why Facebook didn’t just hire its own journalists, to go out and gather firsthand information like everybody else must, in order to counter the “fake news” criticism.  I even thought, since Jeff Bezos has a bunch of journalists on his payroll, perhaps some sort of collaboration of the giants might be possible.  Then I began to understand that this would totally upset the Facebook business model. I imagine this all makes true journalists absolutely furious. How many journalists have lost their lives or were imprisoned in the world’s trouble spots recently? (More grist for the Times’ obituary mill?) 

 What a solid paper such as the Times could do, is a series of reports on the difference between e-news and real reporting.  What it takes to get through journalism school, what the average reporter’s life, pay and lifestyle are……what are the rewards and satisfactions.

 On this subject, I was appalled to learn that some friends in a relatively well-educated household no longer subscribe to basic TV, just to Netflix et al.   The husband gets all his news all day long on his phone.  The wife doesn’t really get the news at all.  This looks like a scary trend.

 Let me say, I myself don’t watch local network TV.  I am sick of fires, car wrecks and national dramas.  I watch BBC World News America (1/2 hour most nights); I less and less watch what used to be my mainstay, PBS Nightly News.  They need to replace Gwen Ifill, who died the week Trump first got elected, and not just have Judy Woodruff running the show.  I feel she has no charm.  I usually watch 60 Minutes. I subscribe to The Week and to the Seattle Times, which I can now read adequately in 10 minutes most days.  I subscribe to Yes! Magazine which focuses on positive futures, unlike The Economist which I had to dump as being too embroiled in the “dismal science”.  I have a few listservs sending things but don’t always read them.

 3.      A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR LOCAL NEWSPAPERS?

I expect you saw this: www.theweek.com/articles/793309/death-local-news?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=afternoon&utm_medium=09_03_18-article_1-793309 In your shoes, and perhaps this has been done and I just didn’t hear about it, I would organize a few focus groups of people under 40 and kick around ideas for the new proper role of journalism.  It’s the “bits” not the “atoms” that are in question, to quote an old book I have just started (Negroponte, Nicholas: Being Digital, 1995).   It’s how to make money from primary data collection. Personally, I am amazed that you have any print advertising left on the books at all.  perhaps the under 40s would go for a tailored phone news report each morning? Perhaps they’d go for not having to scroll past dozens of ads like they do when online for other purposes? Could some of them be enticed to become online Times subscribers through an initial free trial that rolls automatically into a paid service after 3 months?  Etc. etc.

 4.      TEACHING THE PUBLIC TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION

Didn’t the University of Washington initiate a wildly popular course on this? Has the Times covered the outcomes? (I think this is it: https://www.polisci.washington.edu/news/2018/08/08/seeking-truth-age-cynicism-and-political-polarization-professor-mark-alan-smith)  Who else is doing what else in this genre?

 In conclusion, I think you’ve failed to reach and teach the audiences you need if real journalism is to survive. Even calling it the free “press” is a complete anachronism, as the last hot lead printing presses went out of use decades ago.

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT or PLEASE DON’T CALL ME “DEAR”!

I’ve always liked it if my man called me honey, sweetheart, dear, sugar. It made me feel I was special to him.

But one benefit of the #MeToo sexual harassment movement has been to make it clearer that I don’t have to accept such terms from men who aren’t the special guy in my life. Men who are often my colleagues, and sometimes men who are complete strangers.

One incident comes to mind from when I was very new in the workforce. Our section had an admin guy who was supposed to keep our supply closet stocked. We were out of pencils, and I asked him to get some from central supply. He replied:

“You know what you can do, dear, you can go down to central and yada yada yada”

He didn’t appreciate my reply, telling him that I thought this was HIS job. But as I look back, it was that “dear” that stuck in my craw as much as his laziness and condescension.

What is it about “dear” in this context? It feels like a verbal pat on the head, a putdown. It says the speaker thinks I’m beneath him in some way. I can’t imagine myself calling a male colleague “dear” except perhaps in sarcasm. So, the use of the word is not a level playing field.

A few years later, I had an interview for a job I really liked the sound of.  My new potential boss drove us to lunch for the interview and meal.  All was good, except by the time we were driving back, he must have called me “dear” about fifty times. He’d offered me the job and I wanted it, so I thought to myself: “Oh boy; this is a deal-breaker for me. I’ve got to tell him how much it bothers me.”  So, I told him I’d take the job but only if he promised not to call me dear.

Apparently after I’d left their office, he asked the other women at this agency, one of whom was his boss, if he’d ever irritated them by calling them “dear” …. And got an earful. These women were grateful to me for tackling an issue than had been grating on their nerves. I took the job. Ever after, he would apologize if a “dear” mindlessly passed his lips. So, my boldness, my risking that I’d blown the job offer out of the water, paid off.

Decades later, I was trying online dating and had been in a few conversations with a man who lived some miles away. We were talking about meeting for coffee, potentially a 20-mile drive for us to meet halfway. The same issue raised its head--- although we’d never met, he kept calling me “dear”. Did I want to drive 20 miles for more of this? I felt I should give things a chance. So, I said: “I’ve really been enjoying our conversations and I’m looking forward to meeting you; there’s just one thing.”  “What’s that?” he asked. I told him that, especially as we didn’t know each other, I wasn’t comfortable being called “dear”. His reply: “Well, in that case I don’t think we have as much in common as I thought.” Click.

He’d hung up on me. His way or the highway! Oh dear!

Chickens in a cage

written in 2018

In my new-ish retirement community, one of my friends died in mid-April.  I called 911 twice (accompanied her to the ER the first time) and called the hospital daily.  It was traumatic. 

This morning (4-25-18) a memory from 1984 came to mind.  This still-vivid experience happened in Shanghai.  I was in a street market, passing a chicken stand.  No refrigeration, so the meat was kept fresh by not killing the chickens until needed.  On the right were dead, plucked chickens hanging in a row by their feet.  On the left were live chickens in a cage, and they seemed to be nervously eyeing their slaughtered companions, fully aware of what was next for them.

This is how it is at my retirement community.  We all know we’ll die here.  It may be next week, or it may take 25 years.  It may be from the Independent Living floors, or we may have had to “move downstairs” (to Assisted Living or Skilled Nursing, or to Memory Care).  But no matter how long it takes, we all expect to leave here feet first.  

And so our life today is like the caged chickens’.  We see what happens to our neighbors; we hear rumors and stories (for there is no official way here of sharing about a neighbor’s illness), and we are thankful that it wasn’t us, at least this time.

But deceased neighbors are in our face every day, just like they were for the caged chickens in Shanghai.  The ambulance comes almost every day; someone dies at least once a month.  We know for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for us, here in the retirement community.

It’s not easy to stay positive in the face of this.

AN OPEN LETTER TO MARK ZUCKERBERG

CREATED 10-31-21

Mr. Zuckerberg:

In the words of the immortal Shakespeare: “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” But Shakespeare’s flip side is that Facebook renamed as Meta Platforms still smells as the same.

Nevertheless, maybe this inflexion point is a good time for you to offer a new kind of account. I wrote to you in 2018 with this idea:

There are aspects of FB that are brilliant, and I would pay $10 a month for a Facebook Lite program that would enable me to connect with friends and family without all the news postings and other huge problems of the current setup. 

The above “huge problems” means a Facebook Lite without advertising content, without mining of personal data for revenue. This would likely mean likely much less hacking, and presumably an end to the loss of millions of pieces of confidential personal information. $10 a month seems reasonable, and maybe an upgrade option at $12 a month with newsfeed – but only if you radically change Facebook’s “news”-handling algorithms. 

 And, a new idea: what about a good-news option? I don’t mean just rescued puppies and 5-year-olds’ lemonade stands, I mean substantive good news about life on this troubled planet. Yes Magazine and The Week have good-news feeds. We need much more of this.

 I puzzle about why you haven’t yet tried out a fee-based clean Facebook business model. Perhaps you could make even MORE money! And obviously nobody else can try creating such a business (except maybe Donald Trump, with whom I feel you have a lot in common) because you would sue them into extinction.

 I wrote previously because I found your 2018 testimony before the US Senate to be highly embarrassing; it made me cringe. It’s only a matter of time before US legislation starts to regulate you, with a good and necessary kick in the rear from heroine Frances Haugen. Britain is considering legislation to rein Facebook/ Meta in, as is the European Union. Australia has passed a world-first law aimed at making Google and Facebook pay for news content on their platforms. I believe Facebook Lite, if it met the standards I’m suggesting, would not face substantive additional regulation.

 In 2018 it was reported that you had a payroll of 20,000 people weeding out unsuitable news.  Recently I read that this figure is now 40,000. Holy cow! What a waste of precious human resources; what a horrible, soul-destroying job that must be.

 Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Facebook would reduce these jobs by re-writing the algorithms that exponentially proliferate such ugly stories? Then you could use the rest of the payroll money to hire or pay for real journalists to actually go out and collect primary date i.e., frontline news. Or you could make payroll grants to real journalism organizations, such as newspapers. Jeff Bezos went out and purchased a newspaper; you could consult with him about journalistic standards and what is meant by primary data collection and verification.

 How many Facebook news reports resulted in a reporter’s death this year? Zero. About 50 real journalists died out there in pursuit of stories of real news from dangerous places. In my opinion, it’s time for Facebook to man up and do the real work of journalism.

Back to the Dorm?

William Shakespeare in As You Like It said:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

So, as Shakespeare’s said so well, our lives go full circle.  I seem to be circling back to life in a college dorm.  I am 71 and had a stroke right after my last birthday.  My first grandchild is coming in August.  Olympia is only 60 miles from Seattle/ daughter/ grandchild but can take up to four hours on the ever-more ghastly I-5.  So the time has come to move into a retirement community.  I’m not wealthy and so a studio unit is my plan.  I haven’t lived in such small space since being in college.  Bed, closet, desk area and that’s about it.  Meals and everything else are in other parts of the complex.  I’ll have instant new companions, just like college – some I will bond with and some I will maybe dislike on sight!  It’s expensive, like college, even though I’m not paying for tuition this time around.  It’s back to the goldfish bowl of community living, of scrutiny and sometimes criticism by my dorm mates.

All that seems similar.  What will be different? I will be joining people at the ends of their lives, rather than the beginnings.  Some are just marking time until that end; they believe the best in their lives is past.  There will be no need for me to engage my brain as I have always done so far – no classes, no term papers, no tutorials -- lots of planned activities, but only some of them cerebral.  I may be lonely, although I don’t expect to be bored.  I will have time available (no home care; minimal food preparation & shopping) and can spend it at the gym, writing, pursuing whatever I like, including learning to be a granny. Maybe I will find a true sweetheart, either in the complex or in the wider world of Seattle;  I know who I am in a way I couldn’t have known at 18.

Despite the medical challenges I’ve experienced in retirement (a recalled hip implant, the rapid death of a beloved partner from Stage IV cancer, a stroke….) I do believe, like most new college students, that the best is yet to come.  I have curiosity, energy and continued passion to make a difference in the world.  I have hope for my future. I am not yet sans everything, but simply entering a new stage –conscious elderhood -- that Shakespeare didn’t know about!

So Call 911!

Call 911!

I am 71 and had a stroke (which I thought was just vertigo) at the airport upon arriving home from a long air trip.  A friend of mine blacked out and fell recently and got badly hurt. Neither one of us called 911, from a sense that it wasn’t important enough; it would be a poor use of public resources, not wanting to be a nuisance, whatever.

As a result, we later got into a conversation about when one should call 911.  Better machines in the hospital is one good reason. I had dragged my friend  to an Urgent Care clinic a few days after her fall, and they told her she should have called 911.  Their reasoning was, that although they had x-ray machines they don’t have CT scanners, MRI machines nor access to a large cadre of medical specialists such as neurologists, so they couldn’t address head injuries very well.  Clinics, however up-to-date, can only be expected to have limited diagnostic equipment.

What about cost? Fear of being billed later should not be a deterrent to making that call. Almost always, 911 medical service is part of a local government budget and is therefore already paid for.  I said to her  “Listen, 911 medic calls are paid for from property taxes, which your landlord has been paying for decades out of your rent.  So don’t feel bad about calling 911; you have paid for it already many times over”.  Speaking for myself, I’ve made just one 911 call in my 50 year of paying property taxes…..

My physical therapist used to be a volunteer fireman and he made a third point: even if there’s someone else there who might be able to help you, it is still better to call 911 because the people who are going to show up are strong and trained.  If you fall at home and your roommate tries to help you up, that could result in more injury to one or both of you!

When we look at national data for 911 medical calls, help with falls is the second largest category, at 20% of all calls in 2014, after the rather vague “sick person”.  

So, call 911!