Nobody's Ever Clean

Still, domed shell shudders

Tongue, tail, head slowly slip out

Ponder if it's safe

He had a vague sense that trees gave birth to dinosaurs.

The first is my attempt at a haiku that is about nature but also about where we are with the pandemic. The second is just nonsense from a Random Sentence Generator.

Here's Heather Cox Richardson from a few days ago with more about the turtle.

March 29, 2021

The other big news today is the coronavirus. The increasing rate of vaccinations appears to be racing against increasing infections to see which will win.

While the Biden administration is administering vaccines at a pace that seems likely to have us at 200 million vaccines in arms by April 20, Biden’s hundredth day in office, the highly contagious variants of the disease along with loosened restrictions are driving numbers of infections back up again. On Sunday, the average from the previous week for vaccines administered hit 2.7 million a day—an impressive uptick— and today Biden announced that by April 19, more than 90% of Americans over the age of 16 will be eligible for a vaccine and will live within five miles of a vaccination site, including 40,000 pharmacies.

But the average number of new cases of Covid-19 per day also increased. More than 30 million of us have been infected since the pandemic began. And 549,892 of us have died.

Today, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned that she had a sense of “impending doom” and begged people “to just hold on a little longer,” wear masks, and get vaccinated. President Biden recorded a message urging governors who have gotten rid of mask mandates to reinstate them and to slow down plans to reopen. “Please,” he said. “This is not politics…. Reinstate the mandate if you let it down, and businesses should require masks as well. A failure to take this virus seriously — precisely what got us into this mess in the first place — risks more cases and more deaths.”

I've written before about how views on masks and guns seem to go together, the more someone favors one the more they dislike the other. This captures my feelings quite nicely.

We’re all in This Together — Unless You’re a Republican

If today’s Republicans had lived through World War II, it’d be hard to picture them banding together for the common good, as Americans did then to support the troops overseas. Wearing a mask doesn’t seem like much to ask compared with gas and food rationing, limiting consumption and other sacrifices Americans experienced on the home front.

Aside from that intro, the link provides a few cartoons juxtaposing their talking points with WWII efforts. Poignant and succinct.

A couple mornings ago, before the alarm, our five-year-old woke shaken by a nightmare. He immediately told me about it: "an army was invading our country and we had to hide in the closet at school because there were people with guns coming." He was terrified. We don't watch anything like that on TV. We're pretty sure it was precipitated by drills like this at school.

A friend on Facebook left a brief comment on another friend's share of the Washington Post link that they recently heard a talk that framed the debate as "responsibility culture" vs. "rights culture." That sounds right. I'd love to see it expounded.

I, of course, have trouble being generous enough to see merit to their side, as I find it completely lacking in responsibility and concern for others.

Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms. That's from the first book below. It was presented as a quote from a sociology text and wasn't unpacked, and I like it without context. And I see "rights culture" as doing their best to turn delusions into societal norms.

Now, to books.

First, The Overstory by Richard Powers.

The brief description: A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

My review:

I've been waiting nearly three years to read this book, ever since I read an excerpt in Nautilus in spring 2018. I've checked it out from the library numerous times, and each time it came due before I could get to it, knowing it would be a big time investment. This time I finally managed (though it's now a bit overdue and others are waiting their turn). I'm glad I did.

As I try to with nearly every book I read, I went in with as little knowledge of its contents as possible, only what intrigued me so much in the first place. I like to be surprised and enjoy the journey of discovery. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't quite this. I knew it would be about trees; I didn't realize just how much it would be about people. The characters are imaginary, but it's a true story, based on events that have taken place the past 50 years. It chronicles how our society's collective awareness of trees and the natural world has changed during that time. Only it's not a singular story. Powers tells it through the lives of a cast of characters. The first big chunk of the book is a collection of short stories introducing each of them. The rest brings them together to a pivotal series of events, followed by a lengthy aftermath. It's a fragmentary story, regularly switching perspectives as it hops from character to character, place to place, piece to piece. It's built, in its way, to resemble the structure of trees, a community of trees, and convey their perspective.

I often wondered just what this story was, what tale it was telling and where it was going. Even as I did, I was compelled by it. In its quiet, seemingly random and aimless (at times) way, it was thrilling. Evocative. I didn't know why I should care about these characters, but I did. I felt their passion. Just as it can be hard to fully grasp the grandeur of trees, in all their diversity and variety across the globe, with over half their mass and activity below the surface, so is this book. It impacted me. And, maybe not for many more years, it's one I hope to read again.

"I never knew how strong a drug other people are."

"The strongest. Or at least the most widely abused."

"How long does it take to . . . detox?"

He considers. "Nobody's ever clean."

A couple of other quotes that amused me:

If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

-----

All of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

Needless to say, I am completely taken with the book's reverence for trees and am fascinated by everything science has learned about them in recent years. See more, for example, here and here.

This footnote tickles me to no end.

One of the biggest, baddest, most relentless, and best-known alpha males in American history was a woman: the writer Ayn Rand. I have raised my children to be an unlike her as possible.

Me too.

It is from My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts by Resmaa Menakem. A description:

The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology. He argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans -- our police. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

My review:

This is unlike any other book I've read on racism, and it's a good, refreshing thing.

Menakem is a therapist, and his perspective starts with the body. He sees the trauma induced by racism as a physical thing and posits that we need to address as such. Specifically, in the vagus nerve, "which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate. It establishes one of the connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract and sends information about the state of the inner organs to the brain via afferent fibers."* The vagus nerve activates what Menakem calls the lizard brain, the automatic, instinctive part of our brain that precedes and can override the cognitive brain. The distinction, I believe, that Daniel Kahneman prominently makes between fast thinking and slow thinking. It's where things like implicit bias take place. Unthinking reactions. Gut reactions. So to heal the trauma of racism we don't need to address our slow, cognitive brain so much as we need to get at the lizard brain and the parts of our body in dialogue with it.

When I saw the words "racialized trauma" in the subtitle I assumed this would be mostly addressed to a Black audience. It's not. Menakem explicitly speaks to three audiences in turn: Black, white, and police. Each holds onto a different type of trauma associated with racism, and each has different needs to heal it. He gives a good overview of the history of racism through to the present moment, made all the more interesting for his body-centric perspective; he not only covers familiar ground, he adds to it. He has some wonderfully powerful anecdotes from his experiences and finds ways to make everything personal. And the core of his book is the "body practice," simple steps each audience can take to calm and heal their bodies.

Menakem is a therapist first and writer second, and I see many ways a good editor could have made this book stronger, but he always communicates clearly and effectively, and the content is invaluable. This is a fascinating book that I recommend to anyone who spends any time reading about and working on racism.

That's all for today.

Spring is here.