Statue of Liberty hit by lightning: Jay Fine, 2010
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CAVE OF BLUE
Over the ocean a cave of blue
holds out against the night —
an entrance to the world beyond
where it is still day.
I trace the glow of lucent green,
and you say look, that violet rim,
that lip of ripe plum purple.
The soul, we know, is tender blue,
like memory of being loved
back in the mother cave, and now,
this moment made of shades of blue,
a window of remaining light.
It’s Aphrodite’s blue-green glow,
the life that yet remains —
that kiss at mirror-edge where sky
marries the shining water.
How should we live the last of time?
Look there, you say, look, look!
I take your hand and we hope
that dark leap is a dolphin.
~ Oriana
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MARY OLIVER AND MORTALITY: A NURSE’S TALE
Instructions for living a life:
~ Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”
*
When I was a new-to-practice oncology nurse, I was a walking, talking ball of anxiety. There were endless tasks to perfect, like memorizing chemotherapy regimens, monitoring a patient during a stem cell infusion, and recognizing clinical emergencies like septic shock or hemorrhagic stroke before they progressed past the point of intervention. I quickly learned that working with cancer patients required a sharp attention to detail and an almost exhausting level of stoicism. But above all else, my greatest fear stemmed from knowing I’d eventually have a patient die under my care.
I was overwhelmed with uncertainty and dreaded the inevitable. One day, I’d have to coordinate hospice care, communicate with distraught family members, perform post-mortem tasks, and zip a body bag shut. During my three months of orientation, I asked every experienced nurse I knew to share insights and wisdom on death and dying. What if the person is suffering? How can I tell if someone is close to the end? What am I supposed to do once it’s over? In many cases, death is expected, and—from what I understood, reading from the tiny notepad I kept with my colleagues’ answers—my only real responsibility was to keep them comfortable while they are passing away.
However, sometimes death comes unexpectedly. The vital sign machine blinks its red “abnormal parameter” alarm, or the unit telemetry monitor starts beeping, or you hear a loud, gasping noise from down the hall before someone runs in and discovers the patient to be pulseless. In those cases, depending on a person’s “Code Status,” my team has to figure out what to do next. If the patient legally decided to have a warning banner on their medical record saying “Do Not Resuscitate,” we don’t intervene medically, and instead notify their family of the passing.
However, if their chart has a banner saying “Full Code,” we immediately start CPR and other life saving interventions. In these situations, an emergency call is paged over the hospital loudspeakers. A team of nurses, anesthesiologists, pharmacists, doctors and advanced care providers sprint to the bedside, and so begins the carefully orchestrated task of attempting to bring someone back to life.
Scary, I know.
In an effort to calm my anxieties, I sought comfort in reading on my days off. While browsing a bookstore, I came across a collection of prose called Upstream. I knew nothing about the author, and truly only picked up the book because I loved the cover art. From this serendipitous discovery, I was introduced to the writer and poet Mary Oliver, and her life-changing work.
Her prose and poetry resonated with me in such an indescribably strong way, and learning about her personal life made the experience even more meaningful. I identified with her complicated upbringing, her queerness, her love and worship of nature, but most of all, the way she used words to navigate hardship. Unsurprisingly, I was most drawn to her poems and essays on the topics of life and death. Her curiosity wove in and out of my own, and in much of my free time I found her words standing alone, like a bright neon sign, in the dark space of my wondering.
(“When Death Comes”)
Despite my dutiful note-taking and mental preparation, the fateful day of my first patient death came to me in an unexpected way. I had been off orientation for about six months, working as a nurse for nine in total, which was a surprisingly long time to go without a Code or patient death on my floor. Even though I was growing more comfortable in my role, the pestering worries circled in my brain, tapping on the walls of the tight container I kept them in. Will it be too overwhelming? Am I prepared? Is anyone, ever?
(“I Worried”)
I was on an overnight rotation, getting ready for a stretch of multiple shifts in a row. When I came in at 6:30 pm to look up my patient assignment, my heart sank. A small summary of one patient’s daily events were highlighted on the right side of the screen, and I skimmed and scrolled to find more information: extensive treatment history for Leukemia, now internally bleeding, multiple failed interventions, transitioning to comfort care. I found the dayshift nurse and got a report from her explaining the patient’s situation. L had extensive disease, a low platelet count, and was uncontrollably bleeding into her abdomen. That morning, a team of providers had explained to her that surgery was not an option, and that unfortunately there was nothing more that could be done.
“The last time they checked her bloodwork, her hemoglobin was unbelievably low,” the dayshift nurse started, “She looks so pale right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it drops to 1 by the end of the night.”
If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.
(“At the River Clarion”)
When I walked into the room to check on the family, I was surprised to see L sitting up in bed, smiling at me. I half expected her to be on the brink of death already, drained and unable to speak—but there she was, quietly introducing herself. I met her sister and husband, who told me they would be staying in the room overnight.
I quickly discovered L’s dynamic personality when she clearly laid out the expectations of her demise. Since hearing the news of her prognosis, she had begun to carefully and purposefully orchestrate her own dying process. She had a list of things she wanted in place, including keeping her family close by, and to be in as little pain as possible. The first mission I dedicated myself to was securing a bag of IV morphine to begin its slow drip before the night was through. She might have been terrified, as I assume anyone would be, but somehow she held up her head that night. L radiated an air of calm as I started the IV pump. She seemed at peace, sure of herself, prepared.
As the hours passed and L became too lethargic to keep up conversation, I spent more time talking with her husband and sister. Her sister told me stories about L’s life, her personality, her love of reading; and at one point mentioned that she wanted to read to L while she slept. We struck up a conversation about creative writing and poetry, and found we had similar taste. L’s sister pulled out her phone to take note of my recommendations. The first poem that came to mind was “Don’t Hesitate,” by Mary Oliver of course.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
Only a few months after I started my job, Mary Oliver died of lymphoma. This only added to the strangely long list of things that connected us.
I was at work the night I learned of her death, and something seemed so moving, so pressing about the announcement. After caring for so many lymphoma patients myself, I could so clearly picture what she may have looked like, how many treatments she had available to her, the side effects she could have experienced, and how her illness probably had progressed. Maybe she had scarred and blistered skin from radiation, or became weak and lost her hair from multiple cycles of chemo—or maybe she had opted for hospice care in the beginning, and chose to go without medical intervention.
In between trying to imagine what she may have been physically experiencing, my mind searched for an answer as to what she was feeling during the transition. Was it what she imagined, the cottage of darkness? Did she have something else she wanted to say? Was she afraid?
As the night went on, L became more pale and somnolent as her hemoglobin count dropped. Her full-sentence descriptions of pain became non-verbal cues, and before I knew it she was unwavering in her deep sleep. While she lay between us, L’s sister, husband, and I talked about Mary Oliver’s writing for a long time. I was amazed that they loved her poetry just as much as I did, and continually astonished that all of Mary’s work seemed so relevant in my life. Her observations of humanity, connectedness, and a fluid higher power came together in those quiet moments standing in L’s hospital room. Mary saw the world for exactly what it is—more deep and meaningful than any of us generally believe it to be. L and her family’s ability to connect, flow and move forward with me that night in early May is evidence enough.
In the morning, I left work thinking that L would be gone by mid-day, but when I clocked in for my second overnight shift, I saw that she was once again assigned to me. When I walked into the room to assess her, her family looked calm and exhausted, and L was barely hanging on.
When you watch someone slowly die, there are noticeable phases the body goes through. Blood doesn’t circulate effectively to the limbs, so their hands and feet become cool to touch. Feet can get “mottled” (wrinkly). Breathing can look like gasping, the whole body moving with each inhale. When it’s really close to the end, those energy-depleting breaths usually become quiet and shallow, while all the muscles in their face relax, sinking down.
We all become soft again, child-like, unaffected.
At around 9:00 pm, I lightly knocked on the door of L’s room. I peeked inside to see her sister and husband on each side of the bed, holding her hands and stroking her face.
Her sister turned to me and whispered, “She’s gone.”
against your bones knowing y
(“In Blackwater Woods”)
The rest of the night, I followed the carefully laid out instructions for post-mortem care. I called the nurse practitioner on service to officially declare L dead, called the chaplain to offer support if needed, and gave the family about two hours to say their final goodbyes and gather their belongings. Although L’s husband let himself cry, her sister never shed a tear. She looked moved and somber, but also relieved and proud of how it all happened. Perhaps this air of calm runs in the family.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, hugging L’s sister, “I can tell that she was a really special person.”
She smiled, looking at L, “She really was. And thank you so much for the recommendations. I was reading to her as she passed, and one of the poems I read was ‘Don’t Hesitate.’ I really loved that one.”
Sometimes we get this sudden urge to look up before realizing that another person is staring at us, or just seem to know when someone walks up behind us on the sidewalk. There’s a kind of energy to other people that enables spatial awareness—but when you are in a room with a lifeless body, that feeling becomes noticeably absent for the first time. As I looked down at L, motionless and cool, it was hard to imagine that this was the same woman who had bravely declared her wishes to me the night prior. In her place there was a patch of negative space; her entire presence had evaporated.
This body had been in the room all along, but L was nowhere to be found.
When we die the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill.
(“The Deer”)
L taught me about the transformative gifts we receive through acceptance. Just like Mary Oliver so often encouraged, L didn’t try to push the truth away—instead, she welcomed it, looked at it with curiosity and patience, and honored what she truly needed in those final moments. She helped me realize that despite all the fear I’d held surrounding the end of a life, it’s possible to make peace with the inevitable unknown.
L left this world exactly as she wanted, with a quiet and dignified death.
It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with it’s personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.
(“To Begin With, The Sweet Grass”)
https://lithub.com/when-death-comes-an-oncology-nurse-finds-solace-in-mary-oliver/?fbclid=IwAR0PH_h6cEl9kNkb4UJ6lBmaRS3WJEcRyV7KRzdXRSaQwAH4yC6tNHSEtfM
Oriana: ESCAPE FROM GRIEF INTO GRATITUDE
The obvious question is “Is this consolation enough?” No, I don’t think we can ever be truly “consoled” for losing everything we loved — though thanks to the extinction of consciousness, we won’t be around to grieve. But it is some degree of consolation if we focus on gratitude for having been alive. I would even say that the only escape from the anticipatory grief is gratitude. And here one of Jack Gilbert’s titles helps me: “We have already lived in the real paradise.” 
Mary: DYING IS SOMETHING YOU DO YOUR OWN WAY
"How should we live the last of time?" That is the essential question..how do we enter that "cottage of darkness?" I have consoled myself with the thought that death can't be that difficult…everyone does it, after all. The narrative of the nurse who found such truth and comfort in Mary Oliver's work, when faced with her inevitable duties with the dying, felt familiar to me. Nurses become familiar with pain and death, and find they have as many faces as people do.
Two things stayed with me from these experiences; first, dying is not passive, but active, something you do, and people do it their own way, barring most accidental catastrophes, there is a measure of control, and, of course, style. Second, the change from life to death is tremendous, a sudden Absence, an emptiness where there was something vital and powerful, even if the person was unconscious. The nurse speaks of this awareness, this great Emptiness when the body becomes an inert object. It is particularly noticeable as you do post mortem care, washing the body, preparing it for transfer. Touching this cold flesh is utterly, sensibly different from what it was only moments ago. Something particular and essential is completely, utterly gone.The change is unmistakeable and absolute. (Im not addressing bodies kept breathing and perfused mechanically to preserve organs for harvest — this may blur the transition and hopelessly muddy the waters, replacing actual life with its mechanical shadow.)
Some people, like "L," deliberately orchestrate their own dying, making the process their own, coming close to a "beautiful" death. Some hang on, despite all odds, until certain people come, or a certain date arrives. When my mother, in what would be the year she died, said to me "I think this will be my last spring." I asked her what she felt about that, and she said.."Curious." This is akin to the interested anticipation of Mary Oliver, letting go of life's amazements with attention to what comes next, and anticipation of whatever that may be...including dissolution into the great mass of dust and star stuff we came from.
I think the answer to "How should we live the last of time?" Is: fully, with attention and amazement and wonder...the same way we met the first of our time here — and with gratitude, for the richness of the world and the gifts of the body and mind, for all that unearned beauty and the joy of creation, with hands and voice and imagination...to the last hour, the last minute, the last breath, taking that last dark leap with a dolphin’s joy.
What you say reminds me of Rilke's repeated prayer that each of us should be granted our own death, and not the "mechanical" hospital death.
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We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. ~ Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings On Earth
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DOSTOYEVSKY AND 9/11
Recently I heard an interesting statement by Slavoy Zizek about Dostoyevsky's "If there's no God, then everything's permitted.” (This is inaccurate; Dostoyevsky was more concerned with what happens if we no longer believe in the afterlife.) But since the capsule aphorism has become famous, let’s examine it in the context of 9/11. Did the hijackers believe that “If there’s no God, everything is permitted? On the contrary. The terrorists believed that since God (Allah) exists, and since they were acting in the name of Allah, then everything was permitted. This pattern has been seen multiple times in history and with various religions (or religion-like ideologies, or any "higher cause") used to provide the permission to do evil.
Of course there have been other thinkers and writers who have pointed out that if there is a god (or a great cause, etc), then those who believe they are on a mission from god and doing god's will assume that everything is permitted ("We want the highest possible body count,” Bin Laden was quoted as saying).
Thus, Zizek just reminds us that reality tends to be exactly the reverse of “if there is no god, then everything is permitted.” Dostoyevsky himself almost illustrates this reversal in The Grand Inquisitor, but doesn't put it in a pithy aphorism. He also presents the figure of Christ (and Christ and Jesus are not exact synonyms) as the opposite of The Grand Inquisitor (who might be seen as a kind of high-ranking commissar or even a “dictator of the proletariat” — except that he genuinely cares for the suffering humanity).
And since the church is officially Christ's representative on earth, things get messy. Of course Dostoyevsky rejected that claim about the validity of Catholicism, so he thought he'd washed his hands of the centuries of blood. Then this otherwise brilliant and subtle writer got himself morally and intellectually compromised with "everything is permitted" in the name of Russian imperialism, but that's another chapter, fortunately not included in The Brothers Karamazov.
I am not trying to diminish Dostoyevsky’s greatness. Dostoyevsky did seem to have a blind spot with regard to seeing any any god, including Dostoyevsky's god, the all-good Christ, can be perverted into an evil-condoning absolute. Of course all writers have their blind spots; all writers sooner or later contradict themselves or put forth a questionable argument. We must beware of making anything an absolute. Let us rather assume that practically everything is a mixture of good and bad, and we must stay vigilant so that a good cause does not get perverted to serve evil.
TRANSFORMING DOING SOMETHING HORRIBLE INTO A SACRED DUTY
Zizek also brought up an interesting an interesting example: “Do you know what Himmler’s favorite book was? The one he carried with him? The Baghavad Gita.” We instantly know which section Himmler found so attractive: the passage where Krishna tells Arjuna to “do his duty as a warrior” — because death is an illusion “and so on and so on,” as Zizek has a habit of saying to dismiss what we already know about the “Eastern wisdom.” For Himmler, that meant that a patriotic German officer must be ready to do horrible things — to sacrifice himself that way — for the good of the fatherland.
Even Zen Buddhism has been used that way. Zizek points out that D.T. Suzuki used to be an ardent supporter of Japanese militarism, and has found a perfect justification in it — it’s the universal flow of things, there is no real self, “and so on and so on.”
Beware of all religions, all ideologies? Yes. It’s wise to remember they are not any kind of Absolute Truth, and to withhold a part of yourself — the part that can think critically, skeptically.
Mary:
On the question of god and permission, I see it exactly as described. The God of extreme religiosity, no matter the sect, who demands satisfaction in sacrifice, pain and bloodshed, in Crusade and Jihad, Inquisitions and witch hunts, who rewards such evils with the promise of paradise...is simply an obscenity. Far from needing such a god to encourage goodness, we can only become better by abandoning his zealous hatreds and look elsewhere for inspiration of virtue. Look into our own hearts, our own capacities for kindness, generosity and love; only there is the possibility of a better world.
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somewhat related . . . WE HOPE TO SHAME GOD
“When we deny the existence of God on the grounds that no one who is good could have thought up a world in which living beings are subjected to such tortures, we treat our denial as an action that has the power to change something; in other words, we hope to shame God.” ~ Milosz (who said “living beings” rather than “people”; he was aware of the suffering of animals as well, and often referred to nature as cruel, “everything devouring everything”)
Oriana:
What a relief when we can step out of the whole absurdity, and see nature as nature, without malice, and life as life — the way things happen, never quite what we expected. Sometimes it’s actually much better than we expected — we sometimes speak of “moments of grace.” In every life there’s room for some mystery.
“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.” ~ Franz Kafka, The Trial
One of my favorite Kafka images: a mural in Prague*
DID AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM DIE ON JANUARY 6?
~ In the weeks after January 6, an array of publications declared American exceptionalism dead, or nearly so. “American Exceptionalism on the Line,” warned Bloomberg. “The End of the Road for American Exceptionalism,” said the Washington Post. Even Richard Haass, head of the Council on Foreign Relations — once wellsprings to the cause of American exceptionalism — urged readers of Foreign Affairs to “put an end to the notion of American exceptionalism, of an eternal shining city on a hill.”
As usual, though, it seemed the only way to declare American exceptionalism dead was to use the rhetoric of American exceptionalism: shining city on the hill, beacon of democracy, defender of the free world, something about World War II. On Twitter and television, we heard things like: “This doesn’t look like America,” “This isn’t the America I recognize,” “Is this America?” Others were more direct. Marco Rubio declared that the Capitol riot looked like a third-world country. George W. Bush likened it to a banana republic. Seeing the area locked down and under military occupation, journalists began recalling Baghdad, Kabul, Benghazi, Syria.
What did it mean that even after the financial crisis and rising inequality, after the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror, after four years of Trump and the Black Lives Matter protests, it was still so necessary for Americans to believe that their country was so different from, so much better than, all others? Wasn’t this resilient belief in the country a form of supremacy in and of itself? In the past few years, Americans have been engaged in a deep reconsideration of their racist history, their damaging myths and gauzy national narratives. But to a large degree, that project of interrogation has been a domestic one, eliding the extent to which some myths, perpetuated by conservatives and liberals alike, have been constructed by America’s attitude toward the rest of the world.
THE PERIOD AFTER WORLD WAR II WAS AN ERA OF EXTREME MYTHMAKING, often in ways now invisible to the average person. The idea of American goodness, superiority, and dominance was baked into academic programs, corporations, architecture, literary journals, and films, as well as in the realm of foreign policy. American policy-makers, seeking to distinguish themselves from European colonialists, conceived of the U.S. as a country every other country could aspire to. They believed anyone could be American, especially if equipped with advisers, corporations, and military regimes that forced the American way of life on their people. (As a soldier barks in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket: “We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every g**k there is an American trying to get out.”) This worldview had another effect, too: It necessitated that all other countries were defined by what they lacked, by their failures and weaknesses, and ensured the U.S.’s supremacy within a new world system.
These ideas — some of which were known as modernization theory — were discredited long ago in academic circles. Then the U.S. endured defeat and humiliation on the world stage, particularly in Vietnam and Iran. Around this time, American exceptionalism was also declared dead. In his essay “The End of American Exceptionalism,” the sociologist Daniel Bell somberly wrote, “Today, the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation’s future.” That was 1975.
It turned out Bell was being optimistic. The rhetoric of modernization theory and American exceptionalism would return with Reagan, but most destructively with September 11, the invasion of Iraq, and the War on Terror. George W. Bush sought to modernize the Middle East, to bring the Arab people “freedom,” and people from all political backgrounds signed up for this project, enthralled and comforted by the return of their favorite patriotic myth. It was all too easy for exceptionalism to return because it is Americans’ primary way of understanding the world, their country, and themselves. There’s no reason to think that, after January 6, it won’t return again.
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A passage in James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street grasps the enormity of the task for an ailing American empire. Baldwin was writing of living in France when Dien Bien Phu fell to the Viet Minh. He notices that on the street the Parisian police became more oppressive, “more snide and vindictive,” toward people who had nothing to do with France’s loss of Vietnam: the Algerians. He writes:
‘This puzzled me at first, but it shouldn’t have. This is the way people react to the loss of empire — for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity — and I was to see this over and over again, not only in France … The challenged authority, unable to justify itself and not dreaming indeed of even attempting to do so, simply increased its force.’
Baldwin’s “radical revision of the individual identity” presents a particular problem for Americans for whom the vast complexity of the empire is rarely acknowledged, and for whom the connection between empire and the individual would have to be made in the first place. What American thinks they have been formed in any way by such a thing? As American power continues to decline, they will have to grapple with what that absence means for their ideas of themselves: their superiority, their strength, their goodness, their self-esteem. They would have to invent a new source of meaning for their lives. That goes for those who attacked the Capitol, and those who tried to make sense of it by invoking the U.S.’s superiority to the rest of the world.
All of it suggests a need not only for a new domestic narrative but also a mythless international one. There are so many delusions to dispel, so many reflexes to counter. But if younger, more diverse generations of writers, thinkers, politicians, and activists — those for whom the Cold War is a distant memory and the War on Terror a catastrophic failure — continue to be given space in political and literary life, we may be finally freed from this prison of American exceptionalist rhetoric, in which the premise that we are no longer exceptional is still based on the myth that we ever were.
Americans might also seek knowledge from those who observe us from afar, and who have been forced to know us so intimately on their own soils: foreigners. What did they see that day? I can only say what happened to me after living abroad for a decade and watching America from a distance, that I saw far less difference between left and right in America, and much more of what both sides had in common: their shared Americanness. Because, to the rest of the world, it is both those who attacked the temple of democracy while proclaiming America’s greatness, and those who sit inside it, having benefited from a century of military and economic might, whose flaws and mediocrities have been sustained and amplified because of that unprecedented power. ~
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/american-exceptionalism-insurrection.html?fbclid=IwAR0VX322r5La-QSACKRgyyGlpWMwXXJtFcW54WrWZmIWLwX2l5NZ9fZar-8
Oriana:
For me, there is something exceptional about America. I admit that my personal perspective as an immigrant has certainly colored that view. What mattered to me from the start is that “America is a country of immigrants.” Cultures from all over the world have contributed to building this nation. I expected a more European-like nation, but it’s wildly beyond that. It’s an ever shifting fusion of what the whole world has to offer. To me, America’s greatest strength derives from the country's diversity.
Capitol, 1-6-21, 5:04 pm; Leah Millis
Mary:
The myth of American exceptionalism functionally blinds us to how the world sees us. There is a saying that can be read both in a negative or a positive way: Only in America! That may seem to mean we have exceptional "freedoms" and "opportunities." Or that we are an exceptionally bizarre and violent nation, where people are gunned down daily, and the sick either can't get care because they can't afford it, or the cost of care leaves them bankrupt. Somehow we seem to remain blind to the fact that these things aren’t true of other developed nations, and continue to assume everyone in the world aspires to be and live like us.
There is a profound dissonance between the myth and the lived reality, and it's growing bigger, harder to avoid seeing, harder to deny...though many work very hard to hold onto all its props and symbols, as others try to steer us closer to the truth. Thus all the uproar over monuments, names, flags, and any challenges to the myth — like the 1619 perspective, that slavery was basic to the founding and wealth of this country from the beginning. People are wild to refute and discredit this.
The denial is the actual "revisionist history" myth. Slavery was here with us from the beginning, like original sin, and was responsible for much of this country's accumulation of wealth and power. We can't walk away from it and "move on" because it's not in our past, static and over with. It created the basis and shape of our society and economy as they are now. The thing about the past is, it's not just the past, not for us or anyone, and to refuse to understand that does us no good in moving toward the future.
All that said, we have so much going for us. Our diversity itself may be our richest treasure, our greatest advantage. In the turmoil of these most interesting times, in the struggle to improve, to become better, to live those noble words of the Declaration, there is both danger and opportunity. For all the backward forces there is yet the sense of coming to new appreciation and insistence of the worth and rights of each individual, to an end of our patience with and acceptance of brutal disregard of those rights. In my mind the massive protests responding to George Floyd's murder are a benchmark for our democracy, for what we want, and what we are now insisting it should be.
Oriana: E PLURIBUS UNUM
I don’t like any extremist tendencies. To see the American history strictly as the history of slavery would be just as insane as to see the American history strictly as the history of (say) Irish immigration. Perhaps what is most needed in schools is Civics: a basic course on checks and balances, on free press and free judiciary, and so on. This grounding in the principles of democracy would be an excellent inoculation against fascism. Another badly needed class is critical thinking.
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THE HISTORY WARS OVER THE MEANING OF 1776
~ It’s been a tough year for 1776.
On Jan. 6, rioters entered the U.S. Capitol, some waving 13-starred “1776” flags. Two weeks later, President Trump’s 1776 Commission issued its report calling for “patriotic education,” which painted progressives as enemies of the timeless values of the founding.
And in recent months, “1776” has been a rallying cry for conservative activists taking the fight against critical race theory to local school boards across the country, further turning an emblem of national identity into a culture-war battering ram.
These efforts have drawn condemnation from many of the nation’s historians, who see them as attempts to suppress honest discussion of the past, and play down the role race and slavery have played in shaping the nation from the beginning. But as planning for America’s 250th birthday in 2026 gets underway, some historians are also asking if the story they tell of the founding has gotten too dark.
For scholars, the rosy tale of a purely heroic unleashing of freedom may be long gone. But does America still need a version of its origin story it can love?
The story historians tell about the American Revolution has changed enormously since the Bicentennial. Uplifting biographies of the founding fathers may still rule the best-seller list (and Broadway). But these days, scholars depict the Revolution less as a glorious liberty struggle than as a hyper-violent civil war that divided virtually every segment of colonial society against itself, and left many African Americans and Native Americans worse off, and less free.
Today’s historians aren’t in the business of writing neat origin stories — complexity, context and contingency are their watchwords. But in civic life, where we stake our beginnings matters.
“Every nation has to have a story,” said Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian at Harvard whose new book “On Juneteenth” parses the elisions and simplifications at the heart of various origin narratives.
“We’re arguing now about the content of that story, and finding the balance,” she said. “If you think the United States was a good idea, you don’t want people to think the whole effort was for nothing, or was meaningless or malign.”
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In a recent essay about teaching the American Revolution, Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Harvard, argued that historians need to do more to shore up “our fragile democracy.” The “latest, best scholarship,” she writes, “is brave and fresh and true, all of which is necessary. But it is not, in the end, sufficient.”
And it’s a problem that Kamensky — the lead historian for Educating for American Democracy, a new cross-ideological civics education initiative launched last spring — believes has only grown more urgent.
“We as a profession are very invested in originality, which means toppling,” she said. “I think originality also means discovery and building. We ignore history’s responsibility to help plot a way forward at our peril.”
In a recent essay about teaching the American Revolution, Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Harvard, argued that historians need to do more to shore up “our fragile democracy.” The “latest, best scholarship,” she writes, “is brave and fresh and true, all of which is necessary. But it is not, in the end, sufficient.”
And it’s a problem that Kamensky — the lead historian for Educating for American Democracy, a new cross-ideological civics education initiative launched last spring — believes has only grown more urgent.
“We as a profession are very invested in originality, which means toppling,” she said. “I think originality also means discovery and building. We ignore history’s responsibility to help plot a way forward at our peril.”
WHOSE REVOLUTION?
Americans have been fighting over the history — and mythology — of the Revolution from almost the moment it ended. “There’s no one memory of the Revolution,” said Michael Hattem, the author of “Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution.” “And the way we remember it has always been shaped by contemporary circumstances.”
As its public mythology evolved, various groups laid claim to its memory and symbols, as a way of defining the nation and anchoring themselves to citizenship. It was Black abolitionists of the 1840s who first promoted the story of Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race Black and Native American sailor said to be the first to die for the Revolution in the Boston Massacre.
For Irish immigrants in post-Civil War New England, claiming spiritual descent from the Revolution became a way of claiming Americanness, while white Yankees sought to preserve the spirit of 1776 as their inheritance through blood.
Those fractures, and fears of “losing” the true Revolution, have carried forward. Today, the Bicentennial of 1976 may be remembered mostly for its explosion of commercialism and “Buy-cetennial” kitsch, as well as celebratory spectacles like a re-enactment of the signing of the Declaration of Independence that drew a reported million people to Philadelphia.
But it came at a moment of extraordinary national division, in the wake of Watergate and the withdrawal from Vietnam. After surviving “some of the bitterest times in our history,” the official commission’s final report declared, “we cried out for something to draw us together again.”
Some saw the task differently. The Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, a private nonprofit group, worked to designate new Black history landmarks, and organized events like a dramatic reading by James Earl Jones of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
And the People’s Bicentennial Commission, a left-wing group founded by the activist Jeremy Rifkin, aimed to recover what it saw as the true, radical spirit of the founding that had been swept aside by big business. At one protest, they burned President Gerald Ford in effigy. At another, Ronald McDonald was hanged from an ersatz liberty tree.
The group drew alarm in Washington. In a May 1976 report titled “The Attempt to Steal the Bicentennial,” a congressional subcommittee denounced it as a front for “organizations of the revolutionary left which seek to pervert the legitimate meaning of the American Revolution.”
The Bicentennial also kicked off a boom in scholarship on the Revolution, which sometimes spawned bitter disputes between historians focused on recovering the experiences of marginalized people and those taking a more celebratory, elites-centric view.
Within the historical profession, at least, those pitched battles have cooled. If there’s a keystone text of the current scholarship, it’s Alan Taylor’s “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804,” a kaleidoscopic synthesis published in 2016. Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, takes in actors and events far beyond the 13 colonies and the founding fathers, casting a cool, antiheroic eye on the Revolution’s costs for many.
Today, inclusion — geographic, demographic — is also a core theme for those organizing the 2026 commemoration, from the official U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission on down.
At the Smithsonian Institution, that means promoting the idea of “the many 1776s,” to quote the title of an exhibition to be held across the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Latino Center.
“Even places distant from where the Revolution was being fought still had a profound influence on the country as we know it today,” Kevin Gover, the Smithsonian’s under secretary for museums and culture, said.
Gover, a former director of the Museum of the American Indian, said he expected some partisans “would play football” with 1776, but the Smithsonian’s goal was to “treat it with respect.”
“For us, treating it with respect means telling the truth, as well as we can, and really encouraging people to embrace the complexity,” he said.
A LIVING DECLARATION
~ That may be a tall order in 2021, amid the continuing furor ignited by the 1619 Project, an initiative by The New York Times Magazine that explores the history and continuing legacy of slavery, positing the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia that year as the nation’s “very origin.” It has sparked intense scholarly and partisan debate, along with celebratory countercampaigns focused on 1620, 1776, and (in Texas) 1836.
Philip Mead, the chief historian of the Museum of the American Revolution, which opened in Philadelphia in 2017, said he hoped the 250th anniversary would help move past the perception of American history as either hagiographic or iconoclastic.
“We need to try to handle it warts and all,’’ he said, “and to make the conversation more overtly a conversation, rather than an adversarial debate.”
The museum doesn’t stint on the underside of the Revolution. One exhibit explores how, for African Americans, thousands of whom fled to British lines, “sometimes freedom wore a red coat.” Another explores the predicament of Native Americans, whose nations forged whatever alliances might best preserve their sovereignty.
“It’s important to acknowledge not just the disappointments of the Revolution, but the really dark outcomes,” Mead said.
What we need from 1776, he said, isn’t an origin story, but a transformation story. “We learn who we are by understanding how we have changed,” he said. “And the Revolution was a huge inflection point in that change.”
The museum’s Semiquincentennial exhibit will focus on the legacy of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a document whose interpretation lies at the heart of today’s hyper-polarized history wars.
Should it be celebrated as a transcendent statement of freedom and equality embraced by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Or was it just a philosophical fig leaf hung over a grubby war to defend white liberty grounded in slavery and Native dispossession (and equally useful as a model for South Carolina’s declaration of secession in 1860)?
How you see things depends in part on where you stand. In 2017, when Kamensky started teaching a new class on the Revolution steeped in the best new scholarship, the ethos was “skeptical detachment from the founding mythology.”
She was taken aback when one student, a third-generation Minuteman re-enactor, later told her he had hung up his tricorn and musket. “It’s all garbage and lies,” he told her (putting it more strongly). “Who could be proud of that?”
Kamensky revised her course. Next time, the session on the Declaration’s promise and limits ended with the group reading it together out loud.
“Everyone was in tears,” she said. “But I would not pretend to say they were the same tears for everybody.”
A DEMOCRACY . . . IF WE CAN KEEP IT?
Even some scholars whose work has most powerfully chipped away at the Whiggish view of the Revolution as unleashing a steady march to universal liberty and equality say they are uneasy at what they see as its hijacking by anti-democratic extremists.
Taylor ’s “American Revolutions” may be short on uplift or admiring odes to the wisdom of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. But in his class lectures at the University of Virginia, he said, he always tries to connect back to the founders’ understanding of the republic as a living organism which, if not constantly defended by engaged citizens, will “dissolve.”
“The founders had a very clear understanding of that,” Taylor said. “We have a much less clear understanding.”
Robert Parkinson, an associate professor at Binghamton University in New York, is the author of “Thirteen Clocks,” a recent study of how patriot leaders exploited fears of rebellious slaves and “merciless Indian savages” (as the Declaration puts it) to rally colonists to the cause.
“1776 really gets a pass,” Parkinson said. “Race was at the center of how the founding actually happened.”
Still, at the first meeting of his American Revolution class after the 2016 election, Parkinson found himself pivoting to talk about Enlightenment values, and the fragility of democracy. “It was way more patriotic than I usually go,” he said.
It was also, he said, in line with where Americans found themselves in 1776, when — as now — the situation was constantly changing, the stakes were high, the future uncertain.
“Returning to that kind of freshness is another way of talking about the founding,” Parkinson said. “It’s a different kind of usable past.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/arts/1776-2026-A-DIFFERENT-STORY.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I love the inspiring words of the Declaration of Independence, and also see the problem they create: if everyone has the “unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then slavery, the denial of a person’s right to liberty, is illegitimate. Yet the author of the Declaration of Independence, with its magnificent rhetoric, owned 600 slaves. Did he really see no contradiction? Let the historians continue their battles.
Robert E Lee statue being removed in Charlottesville, VA, on July 19, 2021. It will no longer preside over neo-Nazi parades.
John Guzlowski:
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WOMEN ARE MORE AFFECTED BY STRESS
~ Researchers have linked high levels of the stress hormone cortisol to brain shrinkage and impaired memory in healthy middle-aged adults. And get this: The effect was more pronounced in women than in men.
This research underscores an important point. Though stress affects your whole body, ground zero is your brain. It’s not just the effects of cortisol—it’s that teeth-grinders like traffic jams, personal snubs, and financial worries are perceived and interpreted by your gray matter. Fortunately, research focused on the brain is pointing to new, more effective ways to reduce your tension.
In his book Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, Dr. Amit Sood describes a number of traps that frequently ensnare our brains. Three of the most challenging:
Focus Problems
When giant predators roamed Earth, a scanning, outward-directed focus served us well—but today that focus is directed inward. Now, 80 percent of the time, our minds are wandering, stuck in an unfocused state even if we’re not aware of it.
Studies have found that this state makes us less happy, and the unhappier we are, the more our attention wanders and our thoughts pile up. It’s like having a huge set of open files on your computer, Dr. Sood says, only they’re in your brain, distracting you and demanding attention. Our tech dependence, a source of constant distraction, adds to our inability to focus.
Fear
Our survival depends on the ability of the brain (mostly the amygdala) to detect physical and emotional threats. Moments or events that elicit fear raise our heart rate, which the brain stores as information that might protect us from future danger. This so-called negativity bias makes us prone to paying more attention to bad news than to good. We readily remember bad things that happen to us because our brains also release hormones that strengthen those specific memories, and this further embeds them in our minds. The result? More stress
Fatigue
While a number of body organs (e.g., the heart and the kidneys) can keep going like the Energizer bunny, the brain is not one of them. After working hard, it needs rest. The more boring and intense an activity is, the faster your brain will grow tired—and that can happen in as little as four minutes or as much as an hour or two. You can tell when your brain is fatigued (it has to signal this indirectly, since it has no pain receptors) because your eyes feel tired and stuff happens—you start making errors, become inefficient, lose your willpower, or see a dip in your mood. Brain fatigue leads to stress, and stress leads to fatigue, in a continuous closed loop.
WHY STRESS HITS WOMEN HARDER THAN MEN
Stress almost seems to have it out for women. In an annual survey by the American Psychological Association, women have repeatedly reported higher levels of tension than men and sometimes even more stress-related physical and emotional symptoms, including headache, upset stomach, fatigue, irritability, and sadness.
What’s more, midlife women have been found to experience more stressful events than both men and women of any other age, reports an ongoing study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute on Aging. Stress overload may even lead to chronic disease: long-term pressures at home and work plus stress from traumatic events almost doubles the risk of type 2 diabetes in older women, according to a recent study at the University of California, San Francisco. Women are also more prone to stress-induced mental health problems such as depression and anxiety disorders.
Here’s the why of it: A triple whammy makes women uniquely vulnerable to strain and pressure, says Dr. Sood. First, women’s brains make them more sensitive than men to stressors and a perceived lack of control. The limbic areas of women’s brains, which help control emotions and memories, are highly active, making them remember hurts and slights more readily. Stewing over these and having difficulty letting them go strengthens the brain circuits of those negative emotions—another example of the negativity bias at work—which also increases women’s stress.
In addition, the multiple demands of parenting and being in charge of the well-being of the household mean that women’s focus tends to be more diffuse. And an unfocused brain, as noted earlier, is another source of stress. A mom’s protective radar is always up for her kids too, which makes her sense a threat more quickly, and she’s more likely than her husband to get stuck and dwell on it, says Dr. Sood.
WHAT MEN DON’T ALWAYS GET
The differences in how men and women experience tension don’t play out in isolation, of course. They affect how husbands and wives, friends, and work colleagues experience and interpret the world—and yes, often the result is conflict. If you’re a woman, think of a time you had an upsetting disagreement with your boss. When you vented to your husband about it—how your boss looked at you, what she said, how you responded, how you felt, what she said next—maybe you saw his eyes glaze over, and maybe he said, “It’s over now; why don’t you just let it go and talk to her tomorrow?” Which made you feel hurt, angry, and dismissed—and depending on which feeling was uppermost, you either escalated the conversation into an argument or retreated to mull it over.
New studies are looking at how the genders process stress in the moment and coming up with reasons for the disconnect. Recently, using fMRI to measure brain activity, researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine found that while imagining a personalized, highly stressful event, the action- and planning-oriented parts of men’s brains were actively engaged, while women’s brains were busy visualizing and also cognitively and emotionally processing the experience.
In the second part of the study, when men and women were experiencing intense anxiety, brain regions that were active in women were inactive in men. This suggests that women tend to get caught up in processing their stress, turning it over and over in their minds and reimagining it, says Rajita Sinha, Ph.D., director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center.
“Women cope by talking about being anxious and describing their emotions and stressors,” she says. This could put them at risk for ruminating about the issues. Men seem not to access that cognitive-processing part of their brains and “are more likely to quickly think about doing something, taking an action, as opposed to expressing their distress verbally. It’s just the difference in the way we’re wired.”
That might explain why women tend to provide emotional support to someone who is stressed, whereas men might offer advice or something tangible like money or physical help. Ironically, what both genders want is emotional support when they’re tense, says Jennifer Priem, Ph.D., associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University. So men and women who are stressed out prefer to get support from women.
BRIDGING THE GENDER STRESS GAP
Priem has found that problems arise between couples when each person has a different perception of what’s stressful. The result: When people are really tense, their partners aren’t necessarily motivated to offer support if they think, If I were in this situation, I wouldn’t consider it that big a deal. So how do you get the response you want when you need it?
Ask your partner to just listen
“That’s number one—listening to and validating the other person’s feelings,” says Sinha. “So even just saying ‘You’re really frustrated by this’ in a nonjudgmental way is validating and will ease someone’s anxiety.”
Explain that you feel defensive when he dismisses your experience
“When a partner downplays the significance of something, the person who’s stressed may hold on to it more or feel they have to convince the other person it’s true and that they have a right to feel that way,” says Priem. “You might say, ‘I’m really upset right now, and I feel frustrated when it seems you’re making light of my feelings. It would make me feel better if you’d be more responsive to the fact that I’m upset, even if you don’t understand it.’”
Treat yourself with compassion
“Women tend to be more self-critical about not being able to control their emotions,” says Sinha. So they may see a partner’s comment as judgmental even when he didn’t mean it that way. If that’s the case, forgive yourself and let it go—and hug it out, which can reduce tension and boost positive feelings.
Learning to negotiate conflicts is a big step in easing pressures. Also important: figuring out strategies to deal with the distractions, fears, and fatigue your brain naturally accumulates (see below for four smart ones). These can help you take stress in stride, with a terrific payoff: better health and greater happiness, plus a more resilient brain.
BE MINDFULLY PRESENT
Meditation is a great stress reliever, but not everyone can sit still, looking inward, for 20-plus minutes. Good news for the fidgety: Research has shown that focusing your attention outward engages the same brain network, so you can get similar stress-easing benefits by consciously giving the world your attention.
FOCUS ON KINDNESS
Even the nicest among us are quick to judge others, especially if they’re different from us (thank the amygdala, a region of the brain that interprets difference as a threat).
To calm the amygdala, focus on two things when you’re feeling judgy about someone: that every person is special, and that everyone has struggles. Start a practice of sending silent good wishes to people you pass on the street or in the halls at work. The benefits for you: Your oxytocin, the hormone of connectedness, rises; your heart rate slows; and you feel more benevolent. All of which makes you healthier and happier.
Guilty as charged, even though I'm a Boomer. I always took a great pleasure in plants, especially when living alone. Aside from the beauty of plants and so forth, I think a big part of it is not so much fulfilling the urge to nurture as to do so without sacrificing your autonomy — I pay attention to plants first thing in the morning, but that’s by choice. And later in the day as a delightful break away from words and ideas.
At the same time I can’t help but worry that parenthood has become too stressful for many educated women. If society wants them to reproduce, it should provide help with child care. Only a small percentage can afford to hire a nanny. Affordable child care centers could help relieve the burden. It takes a village.
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INSECTS AS A MEAT ALTERNATIVE
~ As humans gradually realize we need to cut back on traditional meat consumption for the sake of the planet, eating bugs — primarily crickets and mealworms — has become a buzzy, green alternative.
Some cultures, encompassing some 2 billion people around the world, already eat bugs. Mopane worms and shea caterpillars are routinely farmed and eaten (the former in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the latter in Burkina Faso and Mali), as is the African edible bush-cricket, which is commonly consumed in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Madagascar.
Wild insect gathering for food for either subsistence or sale is common throughout East Asia and the Pacific, from India to Indonesia to Japan to Australia. In the northwest Amazon region of South America, somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of total protein comes from insects.
But proponents of insect farming are looking to further industrialize the practice to raise more insects as feed for farmed animals as well as for human consumption — mostly in Europe and the US, where the practice is less common. In May, a European Union panel voted to approve the sale of an insect-based food for humans for the first time in the union’s history. The French company Agronutris had put in the application to sell dried yellow mealworm, a maggot-like organism “said to taste a lot like peanuts” when dried; with EU regulatory approval, the company hopes to sell the mealworm as a flour-like powder.
Insect farming may still be a niche industry, but dozens of startups have come on the scene over the last few years. (And two French startups received a combined $537 million in funding in just the last year.) Meanwhile, chefs in the US are embracing cicadas, trillions of which have emerged on the East Coast, as a potential ingredient. Dogs are already enjoying the bounty of Brood X, the current crop of cicadas, but there’s no health or safety reason for why humans couldn’t join in.
This excitement is eminently understandable: Insects are nutritious and environmentally sound to produce, which makes them a compelling alternative to traditional factory-farmed meats. But setting aside people’s personal tastes, I’m still wary of the push to eat bugs, largely because of one unanswered question: Do we really know all we need to know about the lives of insects — and whether they’re worthy of moral consideration?
The case for eating bugs is straightforward: They’re healthy, and doing so is good for the environment. A study published in May from researchers at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison summarizes both arguments well.
The authors found that if consumers in Africa and Asia added 5 grams of insect food to their daily diets, 67 million fewer people would be at risk of protein deficiency, with 166 million fewer people at risk of zinc deficiency and 251 million fewer people at risk of vitamin B12 deficiency. Anemia would also fall considerably.
The study notes that 5 grams is not that much in the grand scheme of things. Cricket protein companies often cite a serving size of 10 to 20 grams of cricket protein powder for use in smoothies or porridge and the like. A 5-gram requirement could be met by one of those meals every two to four days.
Particularly in areas of the world where nutritional shortfalls are common, insects could fill a useful role.
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Then there’s the environmental side. Factory farms are an environmental disaster. Beef farming specifically produces a huge share of the world’s methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than ordinary carbon dioxide, and drives deforestation in the Amazon as beef companies seek more open land for grazing. But factory farms of all kinds have environmental costs, not least from manure runoff that can poison streams, hurt local ecosystems, and endanger the health of local residents.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has promoted insect-based food in part because insects, which are cold-blooded, are more efficient than other animals at converting their food into meat. “On average, insects can convert 2 kg of feed into 1 kg of insect mass, whereas cattle require 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of body weight gain,” the FAO has noted.
Insects also require less water and land than traditional livestock, and produce 10 to 100 times fewer greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food than pigs, per the FAO. Their climate impact looks even better next to cows, which emit more than pigs.
The anti-entomophagy case is subtler but (I think) still compelling. We have to ask what farmed insects will be used for — and more importantly, what farming insects means for the insects themselves.
Let’s take cricket farms as an example. At a cricket farm, the animals are typically laid out in plastic bins with cardboard walls they can climb and lay eggs on, according to a report from the research group Rethink Priorities. Because crickets need humid temperatures and can easily drown in a pool of water, damp sponges are often included in the bins to both regulate humidity and provide a drinking source.
First and foremost for animal welfare supporters, the market for human-edible insects is completely overshadowed by the market for insects as feed for farm animals. Most insects are raised to be fed to farmed fish and chickens (or ground up into pet food). “Insect farming isn’t an alternative to factory farming — it’s a supplier,” Bollard writes.
This usage further indicts the environmental case for insect farming, he argues: “Feeding corn to insects, then feeding them to chickens, is inherently less efficient than just feeding the corn to chickens.” (To be fair, this is more an argument against the current insect-farming industry, as opposed to what some proponents want it to become: a system to feed humans more efficiently.)
Then there are the insects themselves. As Bollard notes, we really have no idea if insects are “sentient” in the way that, say, a pig or cow appears to be (or if they’re sentient at all). Pigs are really smart; they can play video games. Flies, by contrast, aren’t going to trounce you at Skyrim. Some smart people are trying to think through what we do know about insect sentience, but we still don’t know a lot.
Rethink Priorities has tried to pull together what we know about the welfare experience of insects on farms, but similarly, it’s not a lot. Insect farms mostly freeze and/or shred their animals, but we don’t know much about whether those methods cause the insects significant pain.
If you’ve read this far and aren’t a vegan or vegetarian, or even someone who thinks about animal welfare much at all, all of this may seem absurd. Insects are not creatures whose welfare we’re used to considering, an indifference that even makes its way into our vernacular. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly” doesn’t mean “she’s not a sociopath” in the same way that “she wouldn’t kick a dog” does — it means “she wouldn’t do a mean thing so trivial no one should care about it.”
But humans are constantly expanding our circle of moral concern. And though most humans have yet to expand their moral circle to fully include farm animals, attitudes on animal welfare have certainly evolved. The number of pets in the US has more than doubled since the 1970s, while the number euthanized every year has fallen dramatically, from 20 million to 3 million. Humans have become less comfortable killing animals just for being a nuisance: A half-century ago, it wasn’t so uncommon for dog owners to euthanize their pet because it was cheaper than putting them in a kennel during their vacation. That’s unimaginable today.
It’s not a far step from “cats and dogs deserve to be treated well” to “pigs and cows deserve to be treated well.” And while “caterpillars and crickets” is a leap further from there, it’s hardly an unthinkable one. They’re animals too. Bees understand the number zero, a concept that human children often cannot grasp. Fruit flies sometimes act in ways that suggest they experience a form of chronic pain. Is it so inconceivable that the insect world might deserve humane treatment?
For me, the most sobering finding of Rethink Priorities’s research is that around 1 trillion insects are already raised and killed on farms every year — a staggering number, since we’re still at the start of the insect-food boom. Because insects live very short lives, that annual total encompasses many generations; only between 79 billion and 94 billion farmed insects are alive at any given time.
I don’t know for sure whether those insects feel pain — but if there’s even a small chance they do, the scale of the suffering that would imply is massive. I’m not categorically against insect farming, but I do hope we can learn more about what insects’ lives are like before we start farming them at an even greater scale. ~
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22445822/insect-farming-crickets-mealworm-ethics?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mealworm larvae processing in a plant in France
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”My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Father’s Zosima speaks here of his younger brother Markel, who underwent a joyful conversion close to his death of TB at only seventeen.
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"RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM IS NORMAL IN AMERICA"
~ The only time I saw Brother Sam in person, he was marching like a soldier as he preached, with sweat running like tears from his temples and the Bible a heavy brick in his right hand.
It was 1978, I was five, and my family had traveled to Lubbock, Texas, for a Body Convention, which was what we called the semi-annual gatherings of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of members of The Body, or Body of Christ, an expansive network of charismatic communities created almost singlehandedly by Brother Sam.
My family lived on a Body Farm, a mostly off-grid outpost on the northern shore of Lake Superior, where I grew up singing, clapping, hollering and dancing in the Tabernacle aisles as shamelessly as King David. In our insular community, Holy Spirit-led practices like speaking in tongues, visions, prophecies, laying on hands and faith healing, altar calls, mass conversions, river baptisms and even demon deliverance were as commonplace as eating or sleeping or, for us children, playing with smooth stones in the frigid stream at the edge of the woods. Back then, if you had asked me if church scared me, I would have been confused by the question, and I would have said no. In retrospect, I was scared all the time.
If this were a face-to-face conversation, you might stop me here, as many have. "So, you grew up in a cult," you might say, hoping to preface any further conversation with a caveat that my religious experience had to have been uniquely harrowing, an aberration of wholesome, mainstream American Christianity. After all, unlike The Body, most denominations and church networks don't ask parishioners to sell their possessions and tithe half, or even all of their savings. Most pastors don't nudge their congregations as Brother Sam did into the wilderness, and demand that they pare their lives down to the most ascetic essentials — plain clothes, plain food, no TV, no holidays, no toys. Perhaps most importantly, most people in 2021 don't believe in spiritual warfare reminiscent of the Dark Ages; they are not warned by their spiritual leaders that they are under assault by demons and the Devil at every turn. If you're a Christian, you'd probably want to put as much distance as possible between The Body and whatever church you belong to. If not, you'd need reassurance that my experiences with religion are extraordinary — the stuff memoirs are made of.
But, only a couple years ago, Franklin Graham, son of "America's Pastor," Billy Graham, declared any criticism of former president Donald Trump to be the work of demonic powers. The following year, one of the president's closest evangelical advisors, Paula White, publicly commanded "all satanic pregnancies to miscarry." Polling in recent decades indicates that around half of all Americans continue to believe that the Devil and demonic possession are very real, and though some recent numbers suggest that figure may be lower among Democrats, the percentage of Americans who believe in the Devil rose from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007 — as of 2018, even Catholic exorcisms appear to be on the rise. Around half of all Americans believe the Bible should influence U.S. laws, and 68 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe the Bible should take precedence over the will of the people. In other words, if you find yourself talking to an American Christian, chances are they have been reared in the fear of making a wrong move, of choosing the wrong side, and believe that doing so could have nightmarish results in this life and the next. Chances are that fear is so deeply ingrained that it no longer registers as fear. Fear is simply the lens through which they view the world.
I had a friend in college who liked to call me Jonestown after she heard my story. But she'd grown up in Kentucky like I did after my family left communal life, and the longer I knew her, the more I came to understand that the preachers of her childhood were virtually interchangeable with Brother Sam, that the only difference between her church and mine was devotion, the degree of commitment to doctrine. In my church, we were instructed to live out our beliefs one step at a time, then another, then another, but they were the same beliefs my friend had. Long after my family "left" The Body, whether we were holding home church, attending Body Conventions, or going to regular services in Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist churches, I was 19 and in college before I encountered a single person who challenged the doctrine I was raised in, and I've since had similar experiences in urban Virginia, rural New Hampshire, and suburban Indiana where I now live. Classifying American Christians into the imaginary phyla of cults and not-cults, of dangerous, fringy, irregular churches and a safe, mainstream, religious majority is a terrible mistake and just as dangerous as extremism itself.
In fact, religious extremism has been if not the then a national norm for the duration of my lifetime. In my experience, you only need press most Christians for a few minutes before you encounter many of the "strange and sinister" beliefs that are supposed to be a marker of cults. This is why unlearning religious extremism in America is so difficult, and often takes a lifetime — akin, I imagine, trying to be sober in a brewery.
If more than three quarters of all American evangelicals believe we are living in the End Times described in the Bible, then it is not only probable but inevitable that some of those believers will take action and remove themselves and their families from the corrupt, materialistic, Babylonian world. Likewise, if the Bible was written by the finger of God, as I was taught, then questioning it — in fact, questioning anything about the church and church leaders, from the authenticity of teachings by men like Brother Sam to the sincerity of whichever right-leaning politicians are being praised in the pulpit, might render a believer vulnerable to unseen "powers and principalities" that circle above us like vultures, eager for our destruction.
In fact, religious extremism has been if not the then a national norm for the duration of my lifetime. In my experience, you only need press most Christians for a few minutes before you encounter many of the "strange and sinister" beliefs that are supposed to be a marker of cults. This is why unlearning religious extremism in America is so difficult, and often takes a lifetime — akin, I imagine, trying to be sober in a brewery.
If more than three quarters of all American evangelicals believe we are living in the End Times described in the Bible, then it is not only probable but inevitable that some of those believers will take action and remove themselves and their families from the corrupt, materialistic, Babylonian world. Likewise, if the Bible was written by the finger of God, as I was taught, then questioning it — in fact, questioning anything about the church and church leaders, from the authenticity of teachings by men like Brother Sam to the sincerity of whichever right-leaning politicians are being praised in the pulpit, might render a believer vulnerable to unseen "powers and principalities" that circle above us like vultures, eager for our destruction.
In 1971, just as my father was returning from Vietnam, Billy Graham delivered a message in Dallas, Texas, called "The Devil and Demons," and in the same year, Brother Sam began preaching the End Times that were already a staple of Billy's Crusades. Both men, and many, many other preachers like Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker, all technically outside the Body, and Buddy Cobb, John Henson, and Doug McClain, all inside The Body, saw the polluted, diseased, war-torn world as proof that a Great Tribulation was fast approaching. All taught the very biblical duality-laden concepts of demonology, of believer/nonbeliever, of us/them. And nearly all would fall from grace, charged with numerous crimes from fraud to solicitation to sexual misconduct to kidnapping, though believe me when I say that those falls never mean an end but a beginning, a new flush of pastors, rebranded, contemporized, fortified now by social media, and every bit as eager to wield fear as a weapon in the endless crusade for power.
Maybe I grew up with the Jane Tapes, but millions of Americans cut their teeth on similar messages from countless other pastors, mainstream or not. Not every extreme form of Christianity ends with cyanide Kool-Aid in Guyana. The rapid growth and clout of QAnon is another potential outcome, proof that a legion of pastors have spent decades nudging faithful Americans in the direction of paranoia, conspiracy theories and ultimately the dismantling of a government they insist is on the wrong side. If between 15 to 20 percent of Americans believe the government is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and that an apocalyptic storm will soon sweep away the evil elites and restore "rightful leaders" to power, America's pastors are why. The Body became The Move became the IMA, or International Ministerial Association: corporate, benign and dull as toast to the untrained eye, but still holding conventions in Lubbock and elsewhere, still raising up a generation, at this very moment, to believe what I believed for so long, to understand the world beyond the shelter of the church as hostile, malevolent and scary — a worldview I still wrestle with from time to time.
Even decades after my last Body Convention, when I began working as an ER nurse, every time I was assigned a patient with hallucinations of demons or The Devil, I had to exorcise myself of the belief in them. I often passed the hours of those shifts in a kind of extended adrenaline surge. I remember one patient in particular who had attacked her husband with a chainsaw and saw demons in the corners of the locked hospital room where I was caring for her. "There he is!" she kept whispering, pointing behind me, her eyes registering a presence there, her expression shifting dynamically from glare to terror and back to glare. I had to concentrate not to feel the presence, too, to slow my breathing and repeat to myself, "She's just sick, that's all. Just sick, like any other patient." ~ Shawna Kay Rodenberg
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/26/i-grew-up-in-an-off-the-grid-christian-commune-heres-what-i-know-about-americas-religious-beliefs/
photo: Oliver Sacks
CALCIUM SUPPLEMENTS MAY INCREASE THE RISK OF HEART DISEASE
~ After analyzing 10 years of medical tests on more than 2,700 people in a federally funded heart disease study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and elsewhere conclude that taking calcium in the form of supplements may raise the risk of plaque buildup in arteries and heart damage, although a diet high in calcium-rich foods appears be protective.
In a report on the research, published Oct. 10 in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the researchers caution that their work only documents an association between calcium supplements and atherosclerosis, and does not prove cause and effect.
But they say the results add to growing scientific concerns about the potential harms of supplements, and they urge a consultation with a knowledgeable physician before using calcium supplements. An estimated 43 percent of American adult men and women take a supplement that includes calcium, according the National Institutes of Health.
“When it comes to using vitamin and mineral supplements, particularly calcium supplements being taken for bone health, many Americans think that more is always better,” says Erin Michos, M.D., M.H.S., associate director of preventive cardiology and associate professor of medicine at the Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “But our study adds to the body of evidence that excess calcium in the form of supplements may harm the heart and vascular system.”
The researchers were motivated to look at the effects of calcium on the heart and vascular system because studies already showed that “ingested calcium supplements — particularly in older people — don’t make it to the skeleton or get completely excreted in the urine, so they must be accumulating in the body’s soft tissues,” says nutritionist John Anderson, Ph.D., professor emeritus of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and a co-author of the report. Scientists also knew that as a person ages, calcium-based plaque builds up in the body’s main blood vessel, the aorta and other arteries, impeding blood flow and increasing the risk of heart attack.
The investigators looked at detailed information from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, a long-running research project funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which included more than 6,000 people seen at six research universities, including Johns Hopkins. Their study focused on 2,742 of these participants who completed dietary questionnaires and two CT scans spanning 10 years apart.
The participants chosen for this study ranged in age from 45 to 84, and 51 percent were female. Forty-one percent were white, 26 percent were African-American, 22 percent were Hispanic and 12 percent were Chinese. At the study’s onset in 2000, all participants answered a 120-part questionnaire about their dietary habits to determine how much calcium they took in by eating dairy products; leafy greens; calcium-enriched foods, like cereals; and other calcium-rich foods. Separately, the researchers inventoried what drugs and supplements each participant took on a daily basis. The investigators used cardiac CT scans to measure participants’ coronary artery calcium scores, a measure of calcification in the heart’s arteries and a marker of heart disease risk when the score is above zero. Initially, 1,175 participants showed plaque in their heart arteries. The coronary artery calcium tests were repeated 10 years later to assess newly developing or worsening coronary heart disease.
For the analysis, the researchers first split the participants into five groups based on their total calcium intake, including both calcium supplements and dietary calcium. After adjusting the data for age, sex, race, exercise, smoking, income, education, weight, smoking, drinking, blood pressure, blood sugar and family medical history, the researchers separated out 20 percent of participants with the highest total calcium intake, which was greater than 1,400 milligrams of calcium a day. That group was found to be on average 27 percent less likely than the 20 percent of participants with the lowest calcium intake — less than 400 milligrams of daily calcium — to develop heart disease, as indicated by their coronary artery calcium test.
Next, the investigators focused on the differences among those taking in only dietary calcium and those using calcium supplements. Forty-six percent of their study population used calcium supplements.
The researchers again accounted for the same demographic and lifestyle factors that could influence heart disease risk, as in the previous analysis, and found that supplement users showed a 22 percent increased likelihood of having their coronary artery calcium scores rise higher than zero over the decade, indicating development of heart disease.
“There is clearly something different in how the body uses and responds to supplements versus intake through diet that makes it riskier,” says Anderson. “It could be that supplements contain calcium salts, or it could be from taking a large dose all at once that the body is unable to process.”
Among participants with highest dietary intake of calcium — over 1,022 milligrams per day — there was no increase in relative risk of developing heart disease over the 10-year study period.
“Based on this evidence, we can tell our patients that there doesn’t seem to be any harm in eating a heart-healthy diet that includes calcium-rich foods, and it may even be beneficial for the heart,” says Michos. “But patients should really discuss any plan to take calcium supplements with their doctor to sort out a proper dosage or whether they even need them.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronary heart disease kills over 370,000 people each year in the U.S. More than half of women over 60 take calcium supplements — many without the oversight of a physician — because they believe it will reduce their risk of osteoporosis. ~
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/calcium_supplements_may_damage_the_heart
Leafy greens are a good source of calcium
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CALCIUM SUPPLEMENTS MAY INCREASE THE RISK OF DEMENTIA IN SOME WOMEN
~ Using a calcium supplement has been implicated as a risk factor for heart attack in older women. A team of Swedish researchers sought to determine whether it also increases those women's chance of developing dementia.
The researchers studied the records of 700 women enrolled in either the Prospective Population Study of Women or the H70 Birth Cohort Study in Gothenburg, Sweden. The women ranged in age from 70 to 92 and did not have dementia at the beginning of the study. The researchers noted which women were taking calcium supplements and their supplement dosages.
The women had CT scans and were evaluated for dementia five years into the study. The researchers determined that among those who had evidence of cerebrovascular disease such as white-matter brain damage, taking calcium supplements was associated with three to seven times the risk of developing dementia. Dementia risk was only slightly elevated among supplement users who had no signs of cerebrovascular disease. The results were published online Aug. 17, 2016, by the journal Neurology.
The researchers noted that because the study was observational and not a randomized controlled trial, it could not demonstrate that calcium supplements actually cause dementia. However, their results add to accumulating evidence that taking calcium pills may increase the risk of vascular disease in older women. ~
And let’s not forget that high calcium deposits in blood vessels are also associated with increased risk of cancer, colon polyps, kidney disease, kidney stones, and lung disease. And now comes also the risk of dementia. Should anyone be taking calcium supplements? If it’s better to err on the side of caution, then the answer is clearly NO. As one publication put it: “The best calcium supplement? None.”
The positive message. however, is that DIETARY CALCIUM may in fact contribute to overall health, including vascular health. When you eat a calcium-rich diet, you’re also getting Vitamin D and K2, magnesium, and other other nutrients important for heart and bone health.
Also necessary for heart and bone health: exercise. Simply move around more. Take a daily walk. If you have a sedentary job, take frequent breaks. This is old stuff, but it’s still valid. The benefits of exercise combined with a calcium and magnesium-rich diet can hardly be praised enough.
Joe: DANGER OF SELF-MEDICATING WITH SUPPLEMENTS
While I agree with the article, it skirts the issue of an unintentional misuse of dietary supplements. Yet, there seems to be a connection between opioid abuse and misusing nutritional supplements. Medication abuse needs a doctor to be complicit, and in many surveys, the doctor encourages drug use. Still, we need a balance in our medical care.
In supplement abuse, people self-diagnose because they distrust the medical and pharmaceutical systems. There is a fear that doctors and pharmacists make their diagnoses based on profits or kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies. While there is proof of this type of medical misbehavior, it doesn’t justify ignoring medical consultation.
Indeed, we need to listen to our bodies, but it’s almost impossible to know what our bodies need without specific tests and procedures. Medicine is not exact. There is an element of trial and error. It takes a team consisting of patients, doctors, and pharmacies. We can’t overlook medicine’s evolution during the last 50 years or our duty to become informed.
Under guidance or by self-medicating, the use of dietary supplements is risky because of the harm it can cause. The reason is the difference between us. Individual doses depend on height, weight, and other factors. Secondly, a blood test is the only way to determine the need for a supplement and the required dosage, but treatment is never perfect.
Although a physician’s recommendation is needed, many insurance companies reimburse for alternative medical care, i.e., chiropractors, yoga, and Chinese medicine. Yet, dietary supplements are exempt, and the only accurate way to diagnose a chemical deficiency is a blood test. Most studies show that some supplements work well, and others are harmful.
For example, vitamins C & B are water-soluble and remain in the body for a short time. Other vitamins are stored in our body fat, build up over time, and can cause harm. International health organizations state that some supplements don’t have the ingredients they list on their packages. Even with medical surveillance, a healthy outcome is uncertain.
Studies show a significant difference between getting nutrition through food and taking supplements. Because international health organizations reproduce their studies, scientist and doctors perform the most dependable research. The results are offered on the internet and enable anyone who wants to be healthy to trust science but not blindly follow it.
Oriana:
I've heard of widespread deception in the supplement business. At the same time, suggest any regulation, and there is an uproar. Still, I have found a few supplements that do work for me and friends: berberine (the NOW brand, in MCT oil; for people whose physicians are not the enlightened sort who'd prescribe metformin unless your blood sugar is dangerously high, berberine is just amazing, and I and a friend did have lab tests that showed it); glucosamine, but only in mega-doses, can do wonders for joint pain; the same is true of curcumin, but only one brand, OMAX, works for me; and ubiquitol form of CoQ10; possibly, but I still hesitate about it, Vitamin K2 in extra-virgin olive oil. By the way, it's Vitamin K2 (best food source: natto, with Gouda cheese as a distant second) is the nutrient that is essential for direction calcium to bones and teeth, rather than being deposited in arteries and kidneys (one of my friends stopped taking calcium supplements after developing kidney stones).
So, when it comes to calcium, definitely get it from the diet. Food sources are plentiful, and, aside from cheese, include yogurt, sardines, beans, lentils, nuts, and more.
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GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY CHEESE
1. Cuts Your Heart Disease Risk
Some researchers think cheese might explain the so-called French Paradox-that French people have low rates of heart disease despite their affinity for cheese and other saturated fat–rich foods, such as butter and duck. Then there's a 2016 report that analyzed results from 31 prospective cohort studies (the ones that watch people throughout their lives) that compared how much dairy people ate to whether they developed cardiovascular disease. One major finding was that eating nearly 2 ounces of cheese daily (1 ounce equals a 1-inch cube) was associated with an 18 percent lower risk of heart disease. Writing in the British Journal of Nutrition, the authors propose that minerals like calcium, potassium and magnesium and vitamins like riboflavin and B12 may play a role. Another key finding: eating as little as 1/2 ounce of cheese a day could cut stroke risk by 13 percent.
2. Fends Off Diabetes
Eating 1 3/4 ounces of cheese a day may lower your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 8 percent, says an analysis of cohort studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. There's more good news from the same study-people who ate about 3/4 cup of yogurt daily had even lower risk. Another study in AJCN, this one out of Sweden, found that women who ate just under 2 ounces of cheese also lowered their type 2 diabetes risk. The shorter-chain saturated fats in cheese were linked to lower risk of type 2 diabetes. Also, calcium-which increases insulin secretion and may reduce insulin resistance-may fend off the disease, say researchers. Whey proteins might play a role, too, as they may increase insulin sensitivity.
3. Helps You Dodge Death
OK, that's extreme. But eating cheese really may help you live longer, per a 2016 study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which followed 960 French men for almost 15 years to see whether the foods they ate had any relationship to when they died. The happy finding? Eating about 2 ounces of cheese a day was associated with a 38 percent lower likelihood that they died during the study. Perhaps calcium's blood pressure–lowering effects play a role or its ability to curb fat absorption in the gut, write the researchers.
4. Improves Your Cholesterol
Keeping with heart health, a daily snack of cheese may lower your cholesterol. A 2015 analysis of randomized controlled trials (research's gold standard) in Nutrition Reviews compared the blood cholesterol of people eating a prescribed diet that included butter or cheese. Although both diets had about the same amount of saturated fat and calories, the cheese eaters ended their trials with lower total and LDL cholesterol than their butter-eating counterparts. Their "good" HDL cholesterol was also lower, though-the opposite of what you want. The cholesterol changes could be due to calcium's ability to ferry fat through your gut so you don't absorb it and its associated calories (the amount of calcium is much greater in cheese than in butter). Vitamin K2, found in fermented dairy products like cheese, may also play a role.
5. Makes You Stronger
Eating almost a cup of ricotta cheese a day for 12 weeks boosted muscle mass and improved balance in healthy adults over 60. The researchers of the study-published in 2014 in Clinical Interventions in Aging-said that the milk proteins casein and whey may have fueled the improvement. ~
https://www.eatingwell.com/article/289455/5-reasons-cheese-is-actually-good-for-your-health/
Oriana:
Cheese lovers, rejoice! Nutritionists are at last coming to their senses about this ancient health food. Cheese is a naturally fermented food, and offers many health benefits.
Cheese is also good for your teeth. As for increasing life span, some credit here needs to go to SPERMIDINE (found in mature cheese, e.g. extra-sharp cheddar; it’s also present in mushrooms and green peas and other legumes), a polyamine that enhances DNA repair and induces autophagy — see my previous blog, the article on senolytics).
And of course many kinds of cheese, especially Gouda, provide the super-important Vitamin K2, important for bones and circulation; it helps prevent the age-related calcification of blood vessels.
ending on beauty:
Frame the various breaks
Behind the mower with my eyes
We don’t really get any older
~ Samuel Amadon, Poem in July
Cezanne, Woods
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