The Monarch caterpillar hung itself from my trashcan, the week I forgot to take the almost full container out to the street to be emptied. So, I was sad to miss its exit Wed., but glad to find the chrysalis empty when I got home, so I could put the very full can out Thursday.
The days with the pall of CoVid19 hanging over us Americans are stretching on far longer than most of us hoped or expected back in April, when we saw the Chinese beat back the spread of the dangerous disease in Wuhan in less than two months.
I certainly do not agree with our president’s approach to managing (mis-managing) the situation, but he is correct to point to China for the source of the disease. China has long been the outstanding source of communicable diseases in the modern world, due to the intimate mixing of human waste in the human food production network, aided and abetted by migrating birds who stop in the fish farm ponds, etc. It’s time that China stop these practices, as well as the live wild animal meat markets that appear to have been the direct source of this particular disease. That said, as David Levy implies (in his book Tools for Critical Thinking: Meta-thougths for Psychology), when we are discussing human affairs, it is incumbent to consider the effects of our actions, rather than trying to fit ideas into boxes labeled true or false. So just because almost all new infectious diseases (not Ebola) start in China, it’s not a reason to call it the Chinese Virus. Because the consequences of doing that are, on American soil anyway, increases in discrimination and violence and hate crimes toward Chinese people, or people who look Chinese.
How do we gain the discernment, the wisdom, to know how to sort out the shit from the Shinola, as the old saying went. The spin from the facts. The lies from the reality. How do we gain that discernment?
We start out by acknowledging that we, as humans, take a lot of short cuts when we fill our brains with knowledge, and that some of what we think we know must have been incorporated into our beliefs before it was properly understood.
Tom Lombardo, who is now running the Center for Future Consciousness, has written a very clearly articulated and concise description of why and how we need to embrace the wisdom of looking to the future. Tom’s prescription for a better world calls for rejection (to my happiness) of the New Age concept of what he calls “Presentism.”
As a person with a very low level of cheerfulness hormones (my pen name, Shona Moonbeam, is tongue-in-cheek) I really don’t care for advice that tells me to focus on the present. The present is mostly boring and tedious, if not outright painful. But by making an effort to remember my whole life, past up to now, and hopes and dreams for the future, I feel more significant. Maybe I shouldn’t care about that, but so much of life feels dreary and difficult, that I do care to make my own edited version of my life for frequent playback. And I do hope that my struggles will ease those of some future people down the road.