It Might Get Messy

Is it just me, or do things seem to be spiraling into anarchic wackiness? Apart from the lethal and potentially lethal components of being, at the very least things are certainly entertaining. Making me doubly glad that I’m still around to read Google news compilations and watch TV updates. When my cancers revived after the first round of treatments, I was pretty much scheduled to be toast by now. It is a tribute to the health care teams at Greater Baltimore Medical Center that I’m still here to be astounded by the “swirling mass of grays and black and whites” (Rolling Stones, Salt of the Earth) that our world finds itself in. Indeed, Mick and Kief got it just right when they continued “it don’t look real to me…in fact it looks so strange”... . 

Let’s run down some of the global greatest hits from the recent past:

• The New England Patriots, it turns out, doctor their footballs, yielding statistical performance that is big-time outside any possibility of chance in a distribution defined by the rest of the league (http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/01/ballghazi_the_new_england_patriots_lose_an_insanely_low_number_of_fumbles.html). At one point, somebody on HuffPost yesterday reported that Tom Brady was asked “if he liked to have his balls rubbed before playing with them”. I must admit I’ve avoided watching the full video of Brady’s press briefing in case it’s not true.
• A bunch of cartoonists for a failing French weekly tabloid were hunted down and killed by a sleeper cell of Islamist extremists who believed they were speaking (and acting) for God (don’t these people ever ask themselves why the all-powerful gods they posit as the foundation of their religion would need to have his/her/its being protected by fundamentalist whack jobs dragooned off the streets of impoverished Paris suburbs? This issue is far from restricted to the Muslim world, the same question should be asked by megachurch protestant preachers across the American heartland, and their believers in the impoverished rural villages across the corn belt).
• An incredibly dangerous virus breaks out in the remote west African countryside, arising from the quasi-ceremonial consumption of “bush meat”, which consists of everything from pythons to tree squirrels to chimpanzees and gorillas. Pretty much by luck and the generous application of laundry bleach, the outbreak is halted before reaching the larger world. The actual major diseases of African hinterlands—malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis—continue to hold disproportionate sway over local people, eliciting the same marginal response from the rest of the world that they have for years.
• With 2 years to go until the presidential election, the field of potential candidates looks like a bad black-and-white 1960s television comedy rerun, perhaps something from the Lucy Show or maybe The Honymooners.
• The United States government is paralyzed by a congress that looks like a bad black-and-white etc.
• Western Asia, at the southern border of the Soviet U…uh, I mean, Russia…is coming apart at the seams, closely akin to the long Cold War that dominated global discourse for decades. With this difference. Nikita Kruschev and JFK were willing to act as responsible adults and pull the world back from the brink of thermonuclear devastation (pretty much by agreeing that the Castro brothers in Cuba were nuts, and that their own trusted advisors couldn’t be trusted). In today’s world, massive nuclear arsenals are also in the hands of the Ukraine, Pakistan, India, and Israel. None of whom strike me as patient, deliberative, cautious, and responsible entities when a crisis is careening down the highway in their direction
• The Middle East is a crisis careening down the highway, with failed states ranging from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the European borders and beyond. Which condition leaves lots and lots of room for fundamentalist whack jobs to operate in.
• Rhinoceros and elephants continue to be hunted to the brink of extinction in the weird belief among Asian men that consumption of ivory (which is basically keratin, that is, a tough, stringy protein like fingernails) provides aphrodisiac activity. My optimistic belief that the wide availability of pharmaceutical products like Cialis and its competitors would take the pressure off pachyderms has proven to be completely wrong. Similar concerns attend to populations of tigers (whose bones are used in folk medicine), except that habitat loss probably dominates tiger issues. BTW, you would think these contretemps would give pause to the legions of ethnobotanists who, to a person, believe in the talking point that” “native peoples” have extensive natural pharmacies at their fingertips”. But no, unfortunately. Ethnobotanists believe, also to a person, that if only we followed more and more remote Amazonian tribal priests into the most remote corners of the rain forest, we could put scourges like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, et al. to bed, not to mention malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis. 

Well, we could play this game for as many pages as I could type and far more than you would want to read. My point is simple (and yes, I’m aware that this was far from the most direct way to get to the point!). My illness and the technical, financial, social, and personal complexities of treatment have made me incredibly grateful that I live in the clean, wealthy, western world (actually, having traveled some in dark corners of the developing world, I should say I’ve been REMINDED to be grateful). And I am also thankful that I’ve been able, in admittedly and unfortunately small ways only, to contribute to environmental quality in general and specifically in some particularly unfortunate places. I entreat you to spend some time thinking about your own circumstances, and how lucky we are to live where and how we do. And in addition, of course, make sure you live ‘em while you got ‘em. Because the unfortunate reality is that they are NOT forever.

Thanks for being here, everybody. I’m not doing too badly these days. Basically this means that the residual cancers salted throughout my body from liver to lungs and beyond, have yet to make themselves known symptomatically. And the longer this condition pertains, the better I like it!

Finally, and I know many of you have seen these already, I attach below a few photos of additional bird species photographed at our feeders. To get much more biodiversity documented in the winter avifauna here, I’m gonna need some serious winter weather to push some of the more unusual species south. Rest assured that I’m on the case, with my Canon Powershot SX50HS with the 50X optical zoom, at the ready!