JackTReason

(Shinrin-Yoku)

Shinrin-Yoku, which in English you’ll hear called Forest Bathing, is a practice of immersion in nature, and in particular in the forest. As one can see from the name, the term originated in Japan where the practice is a part of the culture.

Studies have shown actual physical benefits from forest bathing beyond the exercise of walking, and beyond the mental benefits and enjoyment of nature. Forest bathing has been shown to lower stress, boost the immune system, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and help one sleep better.

There is a park near my home where the township has recently blazed a series of trails around a couple of ponds, one of which is generously called Grass Lake. The park is still expanding (which I am helping with as a volunteer), and is open to hiking, biking, and trail running, as well as snow-shoeing and cross-country skiing during the winter.

No motor vehicles are allowed, and pets must be kept on a leash and cleaned up after.

There is good wildlife viewing, with a pair of Sandhill cranes making their seasonal home there, along with various other fauna, such as geese, ducks, wild turkey, various songbirds, deer, small mammals, several species of turtle and snakes, and numerous insect species. At least a handful of these different creatures are protected or endangered.

The flora is fairly diverse as well, with a secondary growth temperate forest with a mix of  deciduous and conifer trees. White Pine (the state tree of Michigan), as well as Red Pine, Red and White Oak, Beech, and others are well developed.

The entire upper-half of lower Michigan (and other areas) was extensively logged during the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Though many types of trees were cut, it was the dominant White Pine that was the lumberman’s target. The White Pine was tall, strong, and straight, and cut into dimensional lumber easily. It was this wood that built many cities in America, and rebuilt Chicago after the great fire of 1871.

The lumbermen who came after mid-century, found an “inexhaustible” supply of White Pine, which only took them approximately sixty years to exhaust.

This particular part of Michigan was cleared of pine during the early part of the lumbering years because it is very near White Lake, which joins Lake Michigan, and was one of the several lakes dominated by lumber mills. As the years passed, timbering moved farther and farther inland, following the White River as far as it would take them.

After they were cut, pines quickly seeded themselves and slowly began to regrow. Since the lumbering days ended in the early decades of the twentieth century, pines that had started to regrow in those early years, hadn’t yet grown large enough to be cut profitably. There are some of those of the early second growth White Pine, which are now among the tallest and oldest in the state. (Notwithstanding an area of old-growth [400+ year old] white and red pines which were withdrawn from timbering by the widow of a lumberman, who donated the land as a tribute to the lumbering era. The place is Called Hartwick Pines State Park, and it lies near Grayling, Michigan. It is well worth a visit to see what Michigan looked like before the lumbering era began.)

The ponds grow and shrink from year to year, with Grass Lake earning its name when water tables are high, and splitting into marshy areas with ponds when they are low – such as this year.

The park is very close to my home, which makes it easy to get to for both volunteer trail work, as well as personal access for enjoyment. Which is what I did this past Sunday morning.

Normally I go to the trails for a combination of exercise and natural beauty. I like to look at the wildlife and enjoy the smells, but I also want the vigorous exercise I get from briskly walking. You could say that I’m picking them up and putting them down as I hike along the trails – working up a light sweat, and increasing my heart rate.

This is good to do, of course. Studies have shown that seventy-five minutes a week of light cardio exercise such as brisk walking (3-4 miles per hour) will reduce your chances of premature death by all-cause mortality by twenty-three percent. That’s pretty significant considering the sedentary lives most Americans live. Seventy-five minutes is really not so much time. Less than a half-hour three times a week. So, get out there and walk, even if it isn’t on the trail.

But this Sunday morning I didn’t walk briskly, but rather the opposite. I spent ninety minutes on a trail just over a mile long. I strolled slowly around the Grass Lake loop, stopping to view the flora and fauna along the trail, examine the spider webs near the base of trees, glistening with dew in the mild chill of Spring. Noticing the lichens growing on rocks, studying the fallen trees as they gradually decompose.

I looked (unsuccessfully) for morel mushrooms, and found (accidentally) a wild turkey egg that was laying in a cavity of a fallen tree.

I stopped to view the wild birds with the binoculars I brought with me, and took some pictures and video of the cranes as they made their haunting prehistoric calls.

This was Forest Bathing. I was immersed in nature, and I slowed down to enjoy the moment, rather than enjoying the exercise. I wasn’t focused on the walk, but on what I was walking through.

During that morning in the forest I had no thoughts about the world of men. No thoughts about politics, money, traffic, or what chores were waiting for me at home. I didn’t check off the accomplishment of exercise. I thought only of what I saw and smelled, and how the earth felt under foot.

It was remarkable how pleasant this was. It was just the slowing down that engaged the spirit of zen. For that hour and a half there was no past or future. There was only the present.

If you know about zen and have tried to experience it, you’ll know how hard it is to clear your mind and stay in the moment. You sit and breathe, paying close attention to the feeling of the air coming in and out, and you try not to let other thoughts come into your brain. This is because those other thoughts are about what has happened (and cannot be changed) and what might happen (which cannot be experienced yet), which can bring stress and worry.

Not that some time must be given to reflecting on the choices we made and actions we took; and that some planning and consideration should be directed toward what we will do in the future.

We should do these things too. But those thoughts will constantly be with us, and they will overwhelm our spirit with the pressure of regret and worry over changes and what we cannot control.

We can only live in the now. It is only when we pay close attention to the moment we are in that we find real contentment. It is when we focus only on what is happening now, what we are doing as we are doing it, that we find peace and are in harmony with the world.

Forest bathing is a shortcut to that. Don’t go for exercise all the time. Don’t look for how many miles you can cover in your allotted time. Don’t measure the success of the moment by some accomplishment of completion. Just be there, and listen and watch for what nature is doing.

The success of my forest bath along that trail wasn’t in getting ninety-minutes of exercise, nor in completing a mile and a quarter of walking, nor in taking some pictures. The success was only in being in the moment for some time, and being truly aware of what was around me. Just being without a goal. Just existing. Just living.

All individual life is temporary. And perhaps all life will one day come to an end after billions of years. Maybe Earth will be demolished to make space for a hyperspace bypass. (Tips cap to Douglas Adams.) And perhaps life will start again some billions of years after that. (If the concept of years or billions even fits in that context.)

When the tree loses a limb, or when its roots lose their grip on the earth, it falls to the earth and begins its slow decay. It will continue to be food for other fauna and flora, from rodents and insects, to lichens and fungi – with its mycelium spreading out and connecting to the rest of the forest.

So to with us, or it should be. For though our consciousness ends when our brains stop functioning, our mortal remains can be absorbed by nature, and in so doing continue to be a part of life for as long as life itself goes on.

(Image by JeffreyGammon – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158156832_)

Individual Sandhill cranes will live for thirty or so years, but they have been around for millions of years as a species. They are one of the oldest existing bird species by a lot. When I see them flying in pairs and hearing their chilling cries echo around me, it is easy to remember that they are descendents of dinosaurs. (As are all birds, but few others conger the images of pterodactyls so effectively.)

Each crane lives only so long, but the species is older than humans by many multiples. And likewise, each of our human life spans is limited, but the species has continued for three-hundred thousand years, after evolving from other homo sapiens before that, and will go on and will continue to evolve (probably, and that is partly up to us).

We live for today and also for the species and also for life itself. We share DNA with Sandhill cranes, as we do with all life. We are part of the whole of life, and when we engage with life in close and immediate contact, we feel that connection and can see in a glimpse the stardust of our origins.

Take a bath – in a forest near you.

(All photos by me, except as credited).

First let me say that this is a rhetorical question. I don’t expect anyone except me to answer this. And I am addressing this question primarily to white Americans, though I welcome anyone to read it. And for full disclosure, I am a white descendant of Colonial era European white people, as well as later white, European immigrants. I’ve got ancestry from Germany, Denmark, France, Scotland, Ireland, England, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and probably other countries.

Barack Hussain Obama was the forty-fourth President of the United States of America, and the first President who was black – African American as we now say.

I was proud of my country when we elected him, and proud of the eight years of his Presidency. I felt our country had turned a corner, and finally put a good chunk of our racist story behind us. I expected some backlash from the racists I knew were still here, but I didn’t expect Trump to rise to power and stoke that racial hatred for political gain, at least not successfully. He did, and they were emboldened, and here we are facing a national crisis and perhaps the end of the American democratic experiment. But only part of that can be credited to racism.

Of course Barack Obama isn’t all black. His mother was white. And in the bigger picture, race is a construct based strictly on physical appearance, as all humans are one species of beings. Humans are Homo Sapiens, the last of the genus Homo, in the family Hominidae, in the order of Primates, in the class of Mammalia, in the Phylum Chordata, and belonging to the kingdom Animalia.

We are Animals. We are Primates. We descended from the same ancestors as Chimpanzees and Bonobos. But what separates us from the other Primates is identical in all humans – regardless of skin color or body shape.

Race, as we define it by color, is immaterial in every way except the social  constructs we have formed around those apparent physical attributes, and the locality of the tribes we emanated from.

But when we talk about race, the difference in skin color becomes very important to people. Should it be? I’d like to think not, but we are a long way from seeing the distinction of skin color disappear from our global consciousness.

Now back to Barack Obama. His father was black and his mother was white. Yet most of the time we refer to him as black, rather than as multi-racial, or of mixed-race. Why is that? The reason is racism.

If we call Barack Obama black because he had one black parent, we could just as easily call him white for the color of his other parent. It can’t be because his mother was the white one, as we don’t call people white if their father was white and mother was black.

The reason we do this is because his whiteness is inconsequential. It is ordinary and unremarkable. Every previous President had a white mother. But they also had a white father. What matters is that some of Obama’s ancestry is black. Half of it, which is more than enough to make him black. I say more than enough because our racial history in this country (and elsewhere) defines just about any percentage of black ancestry as black. Even “one drop” of African ancestry made a person black.

This seems absurd from any viewpoint that doesn’t have standards of racial hierarchy. The one drop rule was supposed to represent any visible trace of African ancestry, yet someone whose blackness couldn’t be seen was said to be “passing” as white. So even someone who was outwardly white, could still be looked down on if it could be shown that somewhere in their past a black person was in their gene pool. An expression I heard as a teenager when listening to some racist questioning the ancestry of some person on TV said this in a most disgusting and denigrating way. “I bet somewhere in his family’s past there was a n****r in the wood pile.”

Terms like mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon were used to describe percentages of black blood.

For racists Obama was a n****r. It wouldn’t matter to them if it was just his grandfather who was black, or even his great-grandfather. Remember, it’s the one drop rule.

And for black people it’s a point of pride. A pride that is shared by non-racist whites as well. I know I felt it. I felt pride for our country, and vicarious pride for our nation’s black population, as they were our traditional underdogs, finally getting their due and achieving visible equality.

It doesn’t matter that his mother was white, as having white people in power is the status quo, the de facto standard we established. It was his blackness that stood out, for the good or bad, depending on your own racial acceptance.

Now, and ever since Trump rose to political power, the racists have been restored and blackness is again a sin that demotes someone to a lower condition – a tertiary standard below white women, who are themselves below white men. And for these empowered racists, any black person in power or holding status is there because they are black, and not because they’ve earned their position. DEI is a bogeyman word. To the racist, it doesn’t mean the promotion of diversity, equality, and inclusion of otherwise qualified persons; it means the unfair placement of an unqualified person into a role that would otherwise belong to a white person. Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency was a call to arms for the racists. A clarion call to action. The time for them to save America for true Americans – white Americans.

We heard them disparaging DEI constantly over the last decade. I listened to a panel of triggered white men say they worried if they saw their commercial airline flight was piloted by a black person, because DEI initiatives had imposed unqualified people into the job. Never mind that the requirements to be an airline pilot didn’t change when airlines started embracing DEI within their companies. There is no black pilot who took an easier test, or needed fewer hours of flight time, or any other metric that standards established as the qualifying criteria. The racist white men were justifying their racism in a way so obvious, that they should have just pulled white hoods on over their heads.

Since the arrival of Trump 2.0 in the White House, his government has not only demanded that all sectors of government and even private industry stop DEI initiatives, they have also begun systematically erasing the history of black achievement in government. (Along with the history of numerous other marginalized minority groups.)

I don’t know how long this will last, and I don’t know if we will get past this point in history without another civil war. But I believe what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said about the arc of the moral universe being long, but bending toward justice. And I will lock arms with anyone, regardless of skin color, who wants to see that justice comes fully to our country and the world.

So, Barack Obama is considered black because that matters to us, even though it really shouldn’t; and not considered white, because that is inconsequential, even though he is that color too. And even though neither of those physical attributes should matter, we continue to define people based on this. This unimportant presence of melanin in an otherwise equal human animal.

The leap refers to people mentally crossing the gap between what we can know and what we believe without knowing. What we can reason out to be true, versus what we must believe intuitively.

All supernatural claims are leaps. In each case some assumption must be made that is outside of explanation within our natural world. Yes, we have learned that some of our explanations were wrong in the past, but we did so by finding the truth of some proposition, not by insisting we always knew the truth.
The leap isn’t an educated guess, or a hypothesis of how natural laws might explain something. The leap isn’t made by wondering if we live in a geocentric or heliocentric piece of space. The reality of our solar system arrived after observation and reason were applied. We see the sun at the center now because we figured out that it is, not by insisting that it must be.

The leap always crosses the line between knowledge and imagination. It is always imagination that creates the supernatural. The only evidence of the supernatural are claims made by those who believe in it. The only place we can find these claims are from the mouths and pens of humans. In each and every supernatural claim there is a leap made from what we can discover and infer from evidence, to what we must accept as real on faith.

None of the supernatural claims have anything but stories behind them. Not gods, not astrology, not reincarnation, none of them.

The apologist (regardless of which supernatural claim is made) has made that leap. They see no answer in nature so they insert one from without. It is a leap because we don’t know if there is anything from without – I mean from outside of nature.

The universe exists, and we continue to learn more of its depth of time and its vastness, but the universe is always within nature. Studying the universe reveals many answers, but the universe never reveals the answer to at least this one question: Why?

Whatever we discover about time and space and the cosmos around us, we never get an answer to why. On this the cosmos is mute. It is there that imagination kicks in.

The history of human existence is a history of humans being wrong about the answers to the questions that are beyond our knowledge. The lesson that should teach us is to stop making the leap from what we can know is true and what we wish were true.

When the apologist asserts their imagined truths, they are asking you to make the leap they made. But they have the disadvantage in that they presume a leap of some kind must be made. They do not understand the position of someone never taking such a leap. To the apologist there is the supernatural, and the only question is which supernatural claims feel more true.

They do not grasp the idea that if only the natural exists, then all explanations must come from nature. For each of us, the knowledge about nature and the explanations it offers can be divided between what we do understand and what we don’t. Here I use the universal “we,” as each of us cannot hope to fully understand all science, and each of us will differentiate between which parts of science we seek answers in. Collectively we have found many answers.

The thinking person makes their stop there. They don’t insert the imaginary into the natural to gain some closure for their finite mind. The thinking person can understand that we learn over time, and knowledge builds upon knowledge. The total sum of knowledge is beyond our capacity to learn, but collectively we have learned each of billions of truths over time. At no place did we stop seeking answers to that which mystified us. Except of course when people make those leaps.

The leap can be comforting. But only as long as that leap can be sustained. When a leap is discovered to be in error, the committed believer will often adapt their belief to sidestep the discovery (If it was earth’s plates moving that caused the volcano, then it was God who caused the plates to move. If thunder comes from friction in the air columns due to pressure gradients, then it was God who caused the pressure gradients. Etc, etc, etc). But this is little more than moving the goalposts. It is shifting the claim beyond the ability to falsify it.

Our curiosity compels us to seek answers. We all do this all of the time. Show me the person who never asks a question of anyone about anything. We all are learning. As we discover the answers within nature, it often conflicts with the imaginings we were raised believing.

Nature has shown the age of the earth and length of human existence to vastly exceed the thousands of years postulated by some religious groups. When this happened we saw divisions form.  There are those who recognized the frailties of putting belief before knowledge, and abandoned un-examined belief entirely; there are those who adapted their beliefs to allow them within the context of science (as exampled above); there are those who believe that science has got it wrong, and that they only view test results the way they do because they want to deny god; and there are those who refuse to believe the science, and insist that a grand conspiracy is underway and the perpetrators of science are lying in order to deter people from belief in god. That’s a heck of a leap.

To open one’s mind and abandon belief in these imaginary assertions of whatever supernatural claims are made requires no leap. It requires only the refusal to take those leaps.

This will put us in line with nature, in that nature (so far as we can tell) is not withholding its mysteries from us, nay it doesn’t consider us at all. As we are part of nature we affect nature. But nature has no conscious plan for us, no purpose for us. It has only the reaction to us in the same way we react to nature as it affects us. We are part of nature, and nature is (most probably – almost certainly) all that there is. New discoveries – that can be shown to be true – are still part of nature, regardless of what we previously knew.

We look to understand our lives, our world – all life and all existence, really. But all the prizes offered for discovery of truths are shared only among other humans in a universe beyond the scope of human importance.

Not knowing why there is anything is only frustrating to those who believe we should know the answer to that question. If there is no why (which seems most likely to me), then we can live contently in our pursuit of knowledge about the how of existence, without turning to our imagination for answers that only offer closure. The supernatural claim is an end to discovery and exploration. Once you plant that flag and declare it to be true, there is no more need to investigate the world.

What improvements to our lives have been made by such exploration and discovery? Can you imagine if the apologists were able to stifle the pursuit of knowledge in the dark ages? We might still be treating the four humors and flaying our backs with burning brands to purge demons.

But more importantly, we can turn away from belief in the imagination of others, who in each generation place new assertions on our table for consumption.*

*When acknowledging assertions of supernatural claims, we must understand the usefulness of such claims to gain power over others. Every person who claims special understanding of the supernatural is doing so to gain power or influence over others. Those who profess to only wish to save someone’s soul, only do so with dictates of how that should be done. Never do you hear them suggest that a person merely seeks out god in his own way, and in so doing save his soul. No, such offers always come with A prescription of method, and the requirement to obey the rules that they are assigning to them.

One may be so trapped in their belief that they can’t understand someone who will not make those leaps. But the path to wisdom is first recognizing that they have made such a leap. Then look for the countless leaps that have been made and later shown to be wrong. The volcano wasn’t an angry god, and the sun wasn’t pulled by a chariot.

When we recognize that our leaps have no more support than the leaps made by those who believed in Vulcan or Helios, we are on our way to understanding skepticism.

To be free is to be unbeholden to any supernatural claim. Freedom is found in understanding our limits. We are finite. We cannot (probably) comprehend the vastness of space in distance and time, but we have good reason to think the universe must comport with our shared reality.

We have good reason to reject all supernatural claims, and can be much happier rejecting them. No, this doesn’t mean there can’t be some supernatural being. I can’t know the vastness of time and space, so I can’t prove something doesn’t exist.

But why would there be such a thing? How could there be anything that isn’t part of our natural world? We can see and study thousands of years of humans assigning cause to the supernatural, and never once has such a claim held up to science – once science was developed enough to study it.

Demonic possession isn’t a thing, and bleeding people when they caught a cold wasn’t such a good choice.

At the top I mentioned using intuition as an alternative to reason. I don’t think this is a good idea. This is so evident to me, that I am surprised how many people would rather rely on intuition.

Intuition is programming. Nothing more or less.

We instinctively suckle at our mother’s breast when born, but this has been programmed in us over tremendous amounts of time. We react to some stimuli exactly as our ancestors did. The baby clings to the neck of its mother when frightened, though it never learned to do it in its short life. It learned to do it by genetic programming.

But intuition includes more than just what we carry with us genetically. It carries all the knowledge we gain as we grow, from the sound of different voices, the feel of different materials, the exposure to other people and what they do, and the incidents that happen from very early childhood, many of which we will carry no memory of to adulthood. The child learns the stove is hot from touching it, not from the instinctual awareness of generations of burnt fingers.

Some things we learn, and they become part of our intuition. This means that some of our intuition could be flawed, because it was built on false premises, or misunderstanding of circumstances.

Most people get religion from the earliest parts of their lives. Even if they don’t attend regular services, they are raised by people who have made the leap to belief, and who never knew it happened.

The knowledge we learn as babies, the deference to whatever claim your family group believes in, the near universal acceptance of supernatural intercedence in human affairs that most children are raised around; all combine to make belief in such claims automatic. This is the default position, and most people believe it at such depths, they cannot comprehend not believing.

But behind it all is nothing. Assertions turned into scripture, and scripture indoctrinated into the minds of the young. They are claims without connection to reality, and include the requirement that we take leaps.

There is only us, and we invent for ourselves whatever purpose we wish. We have purpose because we create purpose, or we accept the purpose assigned to us by someone else.

For the latter we can often thank religion. People adopting the beliefs of their parents, who had adopted those beliefs from their parents, their grandparents, and the stories attributed to their ancestors.

Any of these people can easily see the frailty of the arguments that come from customs and religions different from their own, but they cannot comprehend that they too might be indoctrinated.

But from these instincts we also learn that cooperation and empathy are beneficial to the survival of our species. So intuition isn’t bad, per se. But it is a poor means of determining truth claims. What “feels” right only reflects what you were programmed to be accustomed to. Beliefs must be questioned and examined.

Making the leap stifles curiosity. It ends discussion, and slaps on a label of permanence that must be adhered to perpetually.

We can withhold belief until such a time that good evidence can be provided. We do not know what we do not know. When our path to knowledge is blocked by lack of information, or lack of the correct tools of discovery, it is an error to assert knowledge to fill that gap.

For example, and to use an American sports analogy, I’ll offer this: If one was out for a hike in the forest – without any device to communicate with the outside world. Or perhaps sailing across an ocean, insulated from the news of the world. And this trip corresponded with, say, the Super Bowl (American football). Perhaps one might be setting up camp or fixing their position on a chart, and they begin to wonder about the outcome of that game. Assuming the outcome mattered to them, or that they had a preference to which team would win that game, they would be left only to guess, to wonder about the outcome. In this moment they would likely accept that all they could do was guess, and wait until they reached civilization or connected with the world in some manner to find out the result. They would wait until discovery of the facts could be ascertained, rather than insisting on the answer. They would be content to not know the outcome of the game until such time that the answer could be found.

In this way we demonstrate that it is possible for us to withhold belief until evidence is presented. We are not compelled to decide an answer without evidence, and would find it absurd if someone insisted they knew the answer when no possibility of discovery could be shown. And if one does guess correctly, they would be delusional to think it was anything but a guess.

It should be the same with all claims. The acceptance of a claim should be weighed against the ability to show evidence of such a claim.

If someone tells me they have a pet dog at home, I am generally safe to assume this is true based solely on their assertion. But if they tell me that this dog channels the spirit of Greta Garbo, I will withhold belief until it can be demonstrated. And that demonstration needs to clear a high bar before I would give it any credence, if ever at all. But in neither of these claims am I affected. I can assume the first is true and the second untrue without any further investigation. Neither matters to me.

Such is the nature of deistic claims. If someone says they believe in a god, I am in good shape accepting that they hold such a belief, without accepting the belief itself. Should the line be crossed where their claim begins to affect me, then I must insist on evidence, and that evidence must meet my satisfaction.

There’s a rub there, as I have no idea what evidence would satisfy such a claim.

If the supernatural can be evidenced, then it is part of the natural world, and not supernatural at all. It isn’t really magic we see on the stage, though it defies explanation within our base of knowledge. We accept the magician has completed a trick, and that he didn’t conjure something from the ether.

Apologists often fall back on personal revelation. But this is too frail an answer. All personal revelation does is express one’s acceptance of a claim – a leap.

Should some stranger present himself at your door claiming he has communicated with a god, who has instructed him to collect from you all your money, you would surely doubt such a claim. Even if you had a honed sense of deception and were satisfied that he was sincere in his belief, you would assume he was delusional. After all, any god that could give him such instructions could give those instructions directly to you.

But what if you received such a revelation?

Reason has an answer for that. If you can agree that this other man could be genuinely sincere yet deluded in his belief, then you must accept that you too could suffer from such a delusion. I would and must hold that even a personal revelation of the supernatural must be suspect, and that I should be skeptical. I am more likely to be suffering from a delusion (which we have ample evidence for in the natural world), than to be in communication with a deity (for which evidence remains non-existent).

Alas, no supernatural claim should be accepted at all, under any circumstance. As Arthur C. Clarke correctly observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Something we don’t understand might turn out to be true, but only through the examination of the natural world can we justify belief.

Just because we have no explanation for something, does not give us cause to assign an explanation. If we don’t know, we don’t know. We need to accept our limitations, and recognize that some questions may never be answered.

It’s in the shaker on your table next to the salt. Or maybe in a tall, wooden mill waiting to be ground onto a salad or into a dish. It is boringly commonplace, and often not even mentioned when people are listing the spices they use.  Pepper.

As everyone but me already knew, pepper (piper nigrum) is from the family piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit – the peppercorn. The fruit itself is a stone fruit (drupe) which is dark red and holds a stone with a single seed – a peppercorn.

The word pepper ultimately comes from the Sanskrit word, “pippali,” which means long pepper (not to be confused with Long Pepper, an alternative to black pepper). That the word comes from Sanskrit makes sense when we understand that pepper is native to the Malabar coast of India. And while it is grown in abundance there, the country with the largest annual production of pepper is Vietnam.

Its spiciness comes from the chemical compound piperine, which is a different kind of spiciness than capsaicin, the spice found in chili peppers.

Black pepper is the most traded spice in the world, and is ubiquitous in the diets of the western world.

That small, red peppercorn is briefly boiled, and then left to dry. The skin shrinks and wrinkles around the seed, and when dried is a whole peppercorn – just like those in your pepper mill. If you were to remove that outer shell, you’d have white pepper. White pepper is often used when making white sauces (who wants black flecks in your bechamel sauce?), though it does have a different flavor profile.

Don’t get pepper confused with long pepper, though it seems the ancient Romans did, referring to them by the same name (piper.) They can also be found in pink, green, and various shades of white and black.

But black pepper is what I am focusing on today.

Black pepper is the most commonly used spice, and its history goes back well into antiquity. Its use and cultivation is recorded more than four thousand years ago, and it’s safe to assume it predates recorded history.

Being used in some cultures and places as a medicine as well as a food spice, peppercorns were found stuffed into the nostrils of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II as part of the mummification rituals.

As a spice it spread through the Greek world and then into the Roman world. There, its popularity exploded. In the first century BC, Roman natural historian Pliny wrote:

It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion, seeing that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas, pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who was the first to make trial of it as an article of food? and who, I wonder, was the man that was not content to prepare himself by hunger only for the satisfying of a greedy appetite? (Wikipedia)

The cause of my writing this exploration of pepper was my pondering the same question Pliny had asked more than two millennia ago. Who first used this?

As I have noted elsewhere in the past, the harvesting of grains for human food goes back tens of thousands of years. Archaeological digs have revealed lentils and wheat residue that had been ground and cooked on a rock in the pre-pottery neolithic. Our “caveman” ancestors were eating meals that we’d recognize today. And I would be surprised if they didn’t seek various plants for seasoning and flavor enhancement.

When Pepper? I don’t know, and I doubt we can know, but the discovery of pepper and its use preceded record keeping. Maybe when writing was first developed, pepper was so ubiquitous that they forgot to write it down.

Forgetting about pepper isn’t unusual. Way back in my early days as a merchant sailor, a ship I sailed in ran out of pepper in the middle of an ocean passage. These were the white and red cans of ground pepper that are ubiquitous in just about every commercial kitchen in the world. The mess steward went to the pantry to get a fresh can to refill the table shakers, and none were to be found.

This happened because an incompetent chief steward simply copied the food provisioning order the previous steward had used, rather then actually inventorying, and pepper hadn’t been on that list. If you think pepper is boring and unimportant, climb into my head and watch the reruns of irate shipmates threatening violence upon the man, and grumbling for the rest of the passage as we passed around the one last shaker of pepper amongst the 34 of us, all the while everyone challenging any excessive use by others. (Rumors had it that the officer’s ward room had pepper, but no one wanted to face the wrath of the Captain if caught stealing any).

The most asked question during that entire voyage was, “How can you run out of pepper?”

More recently I was looking to add more greens to my diet and picked up a large bag of kale. This worked well stuffed into soups and potages, but in trying to eat it alone I arrived at steaming it until tender, and then seasoning it with salt and pepper, along with a little lemon juice. It was quite delicious. The pepper chiefly stood out, and it made me wonder about the question above: Who tried it first?

Had prehistoric humans tried to eat it like a berry? Were the first pots ever made used to boil the drupes as preparation for drying? Were they chewing the seeds while green?

What was that like the first time some ancient cook pounded the peppercorns into powder and sprinkled it on his pita sandwich?

But it is easy to picture the others trying it out. That first bite of what was formally some plain meal, like lentils and wheat berries. “MMMMM, Thag. That good flavor! Very pungent!”

Thag: “Glad you like it Dad, now can I borrow the wheel tonight?”
Drok: “Sorry, kid. The wheel won’t be invented for another thousand years.”

Whether running out of pepper or trying out new dishes, pepper is a welcome and wanted spice, even if we sometimes forget about it.

It is hard to express my concern for America in the coming years. The election of Donald Trump to a second term as President comes with enormous peril for many.

Here are some thoughts about what we can and should do:

First, we need to support those institutions, groups, and individuals who have the resources to fight this fascist agenda in the courts, in Congress, and in the public sphere. Whatever mitigation can be done in advance will be done by these groups.

Since we care about others, we need to try and protect the vulnerable. This includes maligned groups such as the LBGTQ+ communities, as well as women in general.

This also includes ethnic minorities, and immigrants – legal or otherwise.

Then we need to do what we can to mitigate the harm that will befall our economy.

Part one: Organizations that are going to fight this out in advance.

This will include Democratic members of Congress, as well as many state power structures, like those in Michigan, plus local power structures, like those in Muskegon County.

This will also include NGOs such as the American Civil Liberties Union, whose sole purpose is defending the Constitutional rights of Americans.

Next: Protecting the vulnerable.

We like to think in terms of how things should be. But we now face the reality of how things are.

There was a time in this country when the minority groups I mentioned needed to hide their nature to avoid harm. This will depend on where one lives. A gay boy in Holton is at greater risk than one in Chicago, for an extreme example.

Individuals must be prepared to hide their nature from those who would harm them for it. It isn’t right, but it is practical.

The next thing we need is unity. We need to build groups that will help others, and offer shelter for those who are threatened.

This means making safe spaces for those who are at risk, and minimizing their contact with the evil that is emboldened by this election result.

At risk individuals need to stay in groups, and those groups need to include the rest of us. We all, especially mature adults, need to make ourselves available to be around threatened groups to diminish the threat from others. Whether it is giving rides, opening spaces in our homes, or organizing community centers.

The how and where and when are details I haven’t worked out, but the idea is basic. Make it hard for bad actors to confront targeted people, by sheltering those we can, and by camouflaging where necessary. This means going back in the closet for many.

One major risk going forward is women’s rights. Especially reproductive rights. While Michigan and many other states have protected reproductive rights in their Constitutions, many other places have not. And while Donald Trump ran his campaign promising to leave it up to the states, it is probable that the Christofascist forces behind him will not be satisfied with that.

Although it will take some time, years even, to move their full agenda forward, we should expect some national abortion ban to emerge. We should also expect restrictions on access to birth control, beginning first with minors.

The most effective thing that can be done in this matter is to work to reduce the number of unintentional pregnancies. You don’t need an abortion if you don’t get pregnant.

We need to massively increase the community engagement about pregnancy, and educate women (and men) about reproduction. This must not be limited to birth control devices and medication. It must also include rejection of sexual intercourse whenever pregnancy is a possibility.

It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right, but it is the moment we are in.

On this line, efforts need to be made to educate men about the risks they face. Too many men feel they needn’t be concerned about birth control because the onus is on women to keep themselves from getting pregnant. It is time to change that.

We need to lobby our government at every appropriate level to raise the burden on men who do not take steps to avoid unintended pregnancies.

Again, I am speaking in general terms, and I do not know exactly what would be most effective and practically possible. But this may include state funded paternity tests on demand, and strict enforcement of financial obligations. Perhaps this could extend to parents of male minors.

When it comes to rape we must take an all-effort approach. We must keep women from getting into risky situations. This means women pairing and teaming up to minimize their vulnerability.

We need to use the law to reduce rape. As bad as things get, I doubt anyone is going to legalize rape. The problem that most women face in court is proving the rape itself.

Until these men come to their senses, women should not put themselves in a position where rape is possible.

Some amount of rape occurs because of excessive drinking, or because of date-rape drugs.

Women need to guard against this by changing patterns of behavior. This may mean only double dating during early stages of a relationship, and avoiding being alone and in compromising situations.

Again, this isn’t how it ought to be, merely how it is.

And then we must use technology to our advantage. This isn’t just to protect against rape, but assault of any kind.

We should look into widespread use of body cameras whenever the situation warrants. I am not well-studied on the subject, but I remember hearing about apps that automatically upload video to sites so that victims can prove their claims against abuse of authority in traffic stops. This could become common wherever needed.

Men are much less likely to force themselves on a woman, or assault a trans person or minority, if they are aware that evidence is being collected.

The group that is most likely to suffer the soonest are undocumented immigrants. There is little doubt that Trump will immediately begin arresting people who cannot prove their residency, with the goal of deportation.

This becomes complicated very quickly, and could lead to devastating consequences. To deport someone you need to prove where they originated from. The countries in question are not likely to want millions of extra people to house and feed, and may well refuse to accept them. How, for example, does Mexico know this person came from Mexico? If someone left Columbia because conditions there were intolerable, they might claim Mexico as home to avoid being sent to Columbia.

For this I will mention a dark chapter of human existence. The Holocaust.

Hitler’s early plans were to deport the European Jews. But since they were actually from Europe, no country could be found that would accept such numbers of immigrants, especially during the Great Depression. The Nazis even worked up plans to ship European Jewry to Madagascar. This would have been tantamount to genocide anyway, as those Jews wouldn’t have found infrastructure or resources to sustain them. But in the end, even this was impractical because of the numbers of ships that would be needed.

The Final Solution (death camps) was what they decided after they couldn’t make deportation work.

I don’t know that today’s dark forces would proceed to such an extreme answer, but Trump openly and publicly referred to much of our immigrant population as “vermin,” “animals,” and “criminals,” along with other horrific and dehumanizing terms, and his new border “czar” was the man who crafted the family separation policy that Trump implemented the last time he was in office.

The possibility is that millions of humans will end up in internment camps, while efforts to oust them from the country continue.

This bodes badly, and may well become the humanitarian crisis of our time.

For those who are citizens, and those who are here under the protection of immigration laws, it is time to ensure that you can prove it, and carry that proof with you at all times. As unthinkable as it was to me all my life, we’ve entered the “show me your papers” phase of American life.

I recommend getting a passport and passport card. The passport card can be used to cross the borders by land, and will definitely help replace your passport should it be lost or stolen while abroad, but what is best is that it can fit in your wallet. You can instantly prove citizenship without carrying around naturalization papers of a birth certificate.

For those who are undocumented, it may be best if you left before Trump takes office. At least it would be on your own terms, and you could avoid the horrors of an internment camp. I do not mean to treat this lightly. Nothing about this is good.

I cannot advocate that Americans shelter undocumented people. This could put you in jeopardy. Though I imagine there may be some religious institutions who can arrange some protections for them while fighting deportation. But for the time, underground railroads should be off the table.

I wrote a letter to the State Department suggesting that countries south of the border work out arrangements to take these people, along with some money and resources to house and feed them. This might be the best way to prevent massive suffering and even death. Though to be sure many will still suffer.

I also suggested that they speak to the companies who have hired these undocumented workers, and encourage them to move their plants and factories to wherever their workers are sent. After all, they are hiring them because there is a labor shortage in the states.

If you can’t move the workers to the jobs, move the jobs to where the workers are.

When it comes to workers and production, the loss of so many workers will create shortages of products, which will drive prices up. This, along with the proposed tariffs Trump is planning, will put a huge crimp on our economy. I cannot stress this enough. We will see great shortages of products, and what we get will cost us more.

The way to address this is threefold. First, we must plan to reduce our consumption, second, we must find ways of bringing down the costs of what we do need. And third, we should stockpile as much as we can to help us weather the storm that is coming.

We should all plan on gardens next year, if we can, and share the produce with others. We can set up produce-sharing networks through social media, so that the excess each of us grows can be exchanged with others for their excess.

We should develop cooperatives to buy in bulk and divide the shares.

And we should lower our general consumption.

We need to be careful about protesting. There is a strong probability that Trump will pardon the January 6 insurrectionists. They, along with paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys, Three-Percenters, and others will become Trump’s jack-booted thugs. After his inauguration, Trump will be looking for any excuse to rain violence on those who oppose him. Protests in the street, regardless of how peaceful they are, will be met with violence. That is the America the majority voted for. That is not a fight we want. At least not yet.

When it comes to force and repelling it, we should organize our own force structures. Not to project power, but merely to defend. Perhaps this can be done through the county and state authority. Perhaps it needs to be solely the creation of our own.

And lastly we must organize and work together. Strength comes in numbers, and by building community.

We have some established groups and institutions, both social and political. We need to join them and form new groups to implement the suggestions I’ve made, or perhaps better ones that are presented.

I still believe that most people want a peaceful and just society. Let’s make sure we give that a chance by meeting with people and discussing the subjects.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

But you can keep right on fooling a lot of the people again and again if they never hear that they’ve been fooled.

We have work cut out for ourselves, and the whole world is at stake. And though none of us wanted to be in this position today, at least we are alive to do something about it.

Old Or New Republican?

I was canvassing for elections last weekend, and a man told me he was a Republican. I asked him which one, the old or new Republican?

He got quite angry at the question, and called it sarcastic, along with a lot of other words that a paper wouldn’t print, before ordering me off his driveway (I was actually in the street).
My question may have seemed cheeky, but I think it is legitimate.

Political parties change over time. That’s a fact of history. I can’t think of anything more contrasting politically, than the change from the Dixiecrats of the Jim Crow south, to the Civil Rights Democrats of today.

The Republican Party was started as an abolitionist party, founded by former Whigs who were upset by the lack of effort to find an end to chattel slavery in America. Abraham Lincoln was only their second Presidential candidate. Within a decade the Whig party was no more, and the Republican party dominated much of the country for decades.

The most progressive President of the early 20th Century was Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who broke up monopolies, busted trusts, forced industry to negotiate with striking unions, and championed the rights of working people. A Square Deal is what he called it.

I grew up with a Republican party that professed fiscal discipline, strong national defense, and an unwavering opposition to authoritarianism – particularly regarding the former Soviet Union and then authoritarian Russia under the dictator Putin.

That Republican party reached out to all groups, and sought to build a “big tent” for the variety of different people in the country.

I didn’t always agree with that party, but as I considered myself a “blue dog” Democrat, I often saw overlap with Republicans on how to move the country forward.

Trump has changed the GOP. There’s no way to dodge this reality. The traditional Republicans of old didn’t change. It was the party that moved away from them. And it moved in a dark direction.

The old GOP members are not behind the current Republicans and their candidate for President.

By numbers that seem unbelievable, traditional Republicans are denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris for President.

Stalwart party members like the McCains and the Cheneys, along with many, many more, have endorsed Harris. Even most of the Republicans that served in the Cabinet of Trump during his last term are refusing to endorse him, or have made it clear he is a threat to America.

We see traditional conservative Republicans forming groups to oppose Trump and support Harris. There is the Lincoln Project, Republicans against Trump, Country First, The Bulwark, and many more, who are actively campaigning against Trump.

Even arch conservative columnist Bill Kristol has endorsed Kamala Harris.

These folks didn’t change their economics, and they didn’t change their support for a strong America that leads the free world.

They are motivated by allegiance to the Constitution, and to the democratic principles we were founded on. Our founders sought a “more perfect union,” and said so in our Constitution.

These traditional Republicans remain behind those ideals. And are concerned enough about the direction of their party to endorse and campaign for a Democratic candidate.

They see Kamala Harris’s experience as Vice President, as a Senator, as the Attorney General of the most populous state in America, and before that as District Attorney. They know Harris is tough on crime, and they know she is tough enough to stand up to the world’s dictators.

And they know that when Harris leaves office, be that after four years or eight, she won’t try to stop the peaceful transition of power like we know Donald Trump did. (I should mention that hundreds of members of Congress also failed this citizenship test, by joining his false claims of voter fraud and trying to help him steal the election).

And they can see that Trump is far too easily manipulated by Vladamir Putin. Again, this subject could support its own letter.

Economists – most of whom are fiscally conservative, are also endorsing Harris. The policies she will pursue are better by far for our economy than anything Trump has offered. And frankly he hasn’t offered much at that. Little more than sloganing and disparaging others. He spends most of his time attacking our fellow countrymen, and pretending that he is the most important man in the world.

When we see his behavior most recently, it is impossible to believe he is mentally stable at all.

His most significant accomplishment as President was a huge tax cut that mostly benefited the wealthiest people and large corporations, and he has promised to do more of that.
He mismanaged the worst pandemic we’ve seen in a century, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans than should have died.

Trump could have led the nation through that pandemic by leaning into best practices, instead of trying to force the economy to stay stable. It didn’t work, and wouldn’t work. Down in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro tried to force the economy to stay open, but so many people got sick or died, and business collapsed anyway.

His tariff plan is preposterous, and would lead to a massive recession and drive up the cost of living. (Economics 101, folks).

Simply put, tariffs are taxes on imported goods. They are paid by the importer, and the costs are passed on to the consumer – always.

Further, he recently offered the 1890s as an example of tariffs being widely used. Comparing today to America 130 years ago is foolish without the other side of the story.

Mark Twain called that period The Gilded-Age. The extraordinary wealth accumulated by the top percent of the public, had caused massive poverty and deprivation for huge underclasses of mostly immigrants.

Those immigrants were flooding our shores, and they needed jobs to support themselves.

The Robber Barons exploited those workers in sweatshops, factories, mines, and other places, and they discouraged foreign competition by lobbying for tariffs against competition.

And since the burden of tariffs lands on consumers, the wealthiest paid little or nothing to support the country they benefited so greatly from.

Two differences are glaring. The first is that we have a manufacturing surplus and a labor shortage. There aren’t the workers to fill more jobs if those factories were built in the first place.

We need more immigrants already. And Trump is mostly against immigrants, chiefly because the bulk of those wishing to emigrate to America are non-white. And white people are doing pretty well everywhere in the world, and often better where they are now. It’s the exploited peoples of the world that are seeking the opportunities available in America.

But that process has gradually changed the demographics in the land. The melting pot that is America, is producing different shades than it had in the past.

This white-nationalism appeals to a large minority.

So Trump can’t bring massive immigration to fill the newly built factories without upsetting his cult, leading to point two:

There won’t be a consumer base to purchase these products. There will be no need to hire anyone, because the increased cost of imports will mean fewer purchases. Without an increase in earnings, higher prices means less purchasing. People have to cut back on spending to afford the increased prices on imported goods. And where they cut back is on services in their own community. They eat out less. They reduce their entertainment budget. This hurts local workers. Workers who all now have to pay more for goods because of the tariffs.

This will cause inflation, as well as a recession.

Trump has no plan to help Americans get health care, nor afford the health care they have.

After repeatedly advancing bill after bill to terminate the Affordable Care Act as President, he finally admitted during his debate with Kamala Harris that he has no plan to replace it. After almost a decade of complaining about it, he has only the “concepts of a plan.” And yet he spent years trying to end it, and leave millions of Americans without health insurance.

He has no plan to bring down the costs of insurance, or medical care, or prescription drugs.

Donald Trump used the power of his office to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Perhaps because of a weak ego, he couldn’t accept that the American People rejected another Trump term and chose to move forward with new leadership.

He beckoned his followers to come to the Capital on January 6, 2021, where he fomented unrest and anger, making numerous lies about the election he lost. And then he directed that angry mob to the US Capitol. Next he sat in the White House and watched on TV as a huge violent mob attacked the Capitol, threatened to kill members of Congress, and even to hang Vice-President Mike Pence, while Trump did nothing. He took no action for three hours, while his own Capitol was under attack.

This has been corroborated thoroughly. Numerous members of his staff and Cabinet approached him about ordering the people to stop attacking the Capitol. They asked him to make public statements directing people to go home. Instead Trump inflamed the crowd with tweets.

There was no peaceful transfer of power in America for the first time. Trump did not provide a transition team for incoming President Biden. He did not attend the inauguration. And he never acknowledged that he lost.

In fact, after the failed coup on January 6, he continued lobbying Congress and other bodies to remain in power.

When he left the Whitehouse, he stole mountains of classified information, much of which was highly sensitive, top secret information that could expose American agents to death, could give tactical advantages to adversaries, and could harm the national security of the United States.

The long and arduous efforts to get those records back has yet to result in his prosecution, and we have no assurances that all such records have been returned.

Trump kept communicating with Vladimir Putin after Trump left office. It was reported that Trump spoke personally with Putin at least seven times after he left office. And much of this time was while he had possession of those classified documents.

Trump is so deeply submissive to Putin, that many suggest that he is being blackmailed. He cannot be trusted to operate in America’s best interest, but rather only in his own interest.

When so many traditional conservatives step away from their party and endorse the opposing candidate, any sensible person should take a pause to look at why.

And they should see that following Donald Trump into the madness he offers for our future is wrong. It would be a catastrophic mistake.

Trump is a chaos agent. He has spent the last year trashing the country, and making absurd claims about the state of our nation. He’s made racist claims about other Americans, and even more about those immigrants who are coming to share the dream that has brought so many millions before them.

He refers to other humans as vermin. He says they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” This is the language of fascists.

Trump has repeatedly said that as President he will use the military to arrest his political opponents. He has said he will federalize the police (that would make us a police state) to attack Americans who protest. Don’t think he’s bluffing. As President he did order the tear-gassing of peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square so he could pose for a picture holding a Bible (upside down).

One of those with him that day on Lafayette Square was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Mark Milley.  Shortly after this incident, Milley made a public statement to the press stating that he didn’t know what Trump had planned, and that it was a mistake for him to attend such an event, and that he regretted having done so.

More recently, General Milley has told reporters that Trump is a “fascist to the core.” A sentiment shared by other senior members of Trump’s Cabinet. Former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis agreed with that characterization. As did Trump’s former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly.

40 out of 44 hand-picked Cabinet members of Trump will not endorse him. This includes his own Vice-President. These are (or were then) Republicans.

So, when someone asks you whether you are with the old or new Republican party, it is a fair question.

If someone is on the Trump train, there’s little I can say. Psychologically it looks like cult behavior. It looks like they’re responding emotionally out of fear. It looks like they have stopped thinking for themselves.

I don’t know how to break through that but I sure wish I could, because we need all Americans to work together to continue on our path toward a more perfect union.

But if you think of yourself as a traditional Republican, you should join the millions of others like you, and support Harris/Walz for President. And since every Republican down ballot – right down to State Representative, are election deniers, you should recognize that your party has left you and headed down a dark path.

I don’t know if the Republican party will survive this, or if they will go the way of the Whigs. It is possible that a decade from now the Republican party will no longer be a viable political party. Or, they may save themselves by ousting the election deniers and xenophobic reactionaries. In either case, America needs those citizens to step up now, and put an end to this authoritarian nightmare.

We seem to do best in America when there are two functioning parties committed to bipartisan efforts to move the country forward. But we should not support the party of a cult leader who is bent on vengeance and retribution.

Vote Democratic like your country depends on it.

On Tuesday evening of this week I went to see a local model railroad museum. It had come to my attention in a local online news article. No, I’m not a model railroader, but I do very much like model railroads, and railroads in general. And this makes for a nice diversion from staying home and hibernating, as I am wont to do during Michigan winters.

I had been to this local and small museum many years before, when they were housed in the same building and adjacent to the local heritage museum. But they moved away to, I knew not where, when that museum needed the space for additional displays.

It was a pleasant surprise to find out they still existed and had a new home, in a building they owned.

The news article correctly noted that they were open to the public on Saturday for a few hours, and on Tuesday evenings from 1900 to 2100 (though the news said 7pm to 9pm). But they didn’t mention that the first Tuesday of the month is the date of the club meeting. This wasn’t a problem at all. I happened to show up exactly on time, and one of the members grabbed a folding chair for me and I was welcomed by the president and secretary, after giving my name and spelling it for their record. This was a monthly meeting after all.

As with any proper meeting you may have attended, they followed standard rules of order: reading the minutes of the last meeting, financial conditions, work by various departments (different model train gauge, library, building, etc.), old business, new business, and so on.

The meeting included about 25 people altogether, mostly grown men, with one mature woman, and one boy, though the bulk of the men were middle aged.

They were all congenial, and seemed glad to be present. Perhaps this was a respite from winter for them too.

They even grabbed some tickets and held a 50/50 drawing (which I did not participate for fear of winning), and sold 36 $1.00 tickets. The lone woman won, but donated her $18.00 winnings back to the club to a round of applause.

This was all quite pleasant for me to see. A group of people meeting for a harmless hobby that carried none of the baggage of the outside world with it. Well, almost.

During the meeting, the member who managed social media for the club gave his update, which included a significant uptick on engagement – probably driven by the television news coverage. I’ll note here that the member who ran the club’s social media was atypical of what I’d expect. It was a very heavyset man well into his seventies, whose appearance suggested someone unfamiliar with the workings of cellular phone, much less managing the social media for a club. (There’s me stereotyping!).

When the secretary called for this update, he first offered that he didn’t go on Facebook, as that’s where Taylor Swift was. The reference seemed to go almost unnoticed beyond that, and drew no response, except the president doing a facepalm and a light head shake.

At the end of the meeting, the president introduced himself and showed me around to see the layouts they were building, and made it clear that he hoped I would return. And I will, though I doubt I’ll become a member and participate as such. Again, I like the history of trains. I like looking at the pictures and artifacts. I like watching the trains and seeing the displays, but I’m not really an enthusiast of the hobby.

But the point of this commentary is because of that Taylor Swift reference, and how it shows the idiocy of the secretary.

First, I’ll mention the context, in case you, dear person, are reading this long after the events in question have occurred. This is February 2024, and six days before the Superbowl, and Taylor Swift (the most famous popstar in the world) is dating the star wide receiver of the Kansas City Chiefs, who along with the San Francisco 49ers, will face off in that season ending American football game. She and her boyfriend Travis Kelsey)  have drawn the ire of the Republican media lately. He (to a lesser extent) because he has endorsed vaccination against Covid-19 and subsequent variations but mostly for being the boyfriend of Swift, who has caused such uproar on the right you’d think she joined John Lennon in claiming The Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

I am not exaggerating their response. The right wing talking heads are having conniptions about her, and practically rolling on the floor, thrashing about and speaking in tongues.

Why the anger? She is using her platform as a superstar to encourage her fanbase of “Swifties” to register to vote, so that their voices can be heard.

Yeah, encouraging young people to participate in democracy and perform their civic duty has caused the political right wing to name her enemy number one.

This says a lot about the intent of the political right in America today. Rather than building a platform that will appeal to more people, and especially to include young citizens, they are trying to stifle the civic participation of those who don’t align with them politically. They are not trying to win and gain political power with the consent of the governed, but by denying, discouraging, and disenfranchising those with whom they don’t agree, and thereby hold power from the minority. They seek to rule, rather than represent.

Now back to our railroad fool.

He’s a fool, and as the title of this piece says, has his brains in his caboose, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that he has almost certainly not formed the opinion about Taylor Swift through his own reasoning. How can you reason this out and still come up with the answer that someone encouraging democratic participation in a democracy is bad?

This means he is most likely hating on the woman because the talking heads on his television are telling him to. And their nonsense is evident to anyone who thinks with an actual brain. So, he’s not thinking for himself. A sin in our Republic.

Second, and maybe more telling, is his willingness to say it so bluntly to a crowd of people he only knows mostly through their mutual interest in model trains. And even in front of a person he has never met, and whom he would like to include in their club.

The idiocy of assuming like-mindedness of such an issue is pretty apparent. I was immediately reminded of an experience I had way back in the winter of 1977. Yeah, that long ago.

It was about the same time of the year, not long before or after Groundhog Day of that year, and quite late on a very cold Chicago night. I was seventeen, and was returning home after a Friday night shift as a busboy at a restaurant on Chicago’s north side. It was on Grandville Avenue, and to get there I rode the “L” north to Howard Street, from where I walked less than a mile home.

It was after eleven o’clock, pretty late for a teenager alone, when I climbed up the stairs to train level. There was one other person on the platform, a man who I guessed to be about forty or so. He nodded in my direction as I topped the stairs. I turned to the right and away from him, as a general indication that I didn’t want to engage with him.His nodding wasn’t unusual, Chicago was and is a friendly city.

The CTA has 24 hour service, one of only two cities (the other is New York) in America that has, but trains are infrequent off hours. I think they might have run hourly back then, but I can’t remember precisely. I mention this because it was normal to stand and wait for a train at that hour.

But it is also common to look down the tracks to see if the train was coming. You could see the headlights when the train was at least a couple of stops south, so frequently taking a glance was normal. It was 1977 after all, and there wasn’t much else to do while waiting.

As I took those glances I saw that man doing the same, though he would occasionally turn to look north on the platform, apparently to catch my attention. On one of those occasions he started walking in my direction. I wasn’t generally afraid of people, but from any point of view this was not a good thing. A grown man shouldn’t be approaching a solitary teenager on the train platform late at night. Though I do remember taking into account that I was almost six feet tall, and he might not be aware of my youthfulness.

When it got about 20 or so feet away he stopped, perhaps recognising the intrusion unwelcome. He looked again to the south on the tracks, and then turned back to me and said aloud, “Jungle Bunnies driving the trains” as he shook his head with a disapproving grimace.

I took a couple of symbolic steps away and avoided eye contact. When I peek up I could see him shaking his head again.

Let me be clear, I don’t think the train was late when it arrived, and I couldn’t see the driver clearly through the window, as the headlights of the car blinded the view. I boarded and went home, uncomfortable thoughts of this popping up in my head several times before they disappeared for years to come.

It joined the Navy that summer, and this took me far away from Chicago and the “L,” and was a decade or more later before I remembered the incident and reflected on it. I figured out by then why it was so troubling. Not only was I being approached by a grown man while alone at night as a teenager. And it wasn’t just the racism, which I didn’t like or appreciate back then. It was also the assumption that I could be included in his racism so easily. This has happened often in my life over the years, where racists presume that since I am also white, I must share the racist feelings they harbor. That the mere coincidence of skin color would allow them to insinuate agreement. And when I was seventeen years old and alone on that platform, I was hardly in a position to challenge that racism, but I wanted to. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t like the disparaging racial slur, and didn’t agree with it, nor have a problem with any race or gender being a train engineer.

And here on Tuesday night I wanted to draw a contrast between me and this man, this anti-American troglodyte who can’t understand the basic concept of democratic government. But I didn’t. I’ll save that for later. I will go back to the museum and look at the trains. And I will engage with people there on the subject of model trains, and real trains, and pictures of trains. And if that chap slips up again, I’ll let him dig a little deeper before saying anything. Perhaps a mind can be changed. But if not, it’s best to humiliate someone after they have tossed away their excuses.

If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll just shake it off.

And Remedy

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution bars anyone who has formerly taken an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection, or gave aid and comfort to anyone who did from ever holding public office in the future.

This seems plainly to apply to Donald Trump, who incited the insurrection which led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and then gave aid and comfort to those who engaged in the attack (actually, he continues to do this last part today).

But there is a provision in that Amendment to allow Congress to remove that disqualification by a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers.

This last provision gives the Supreme Court (which will ultimately have to decide if his disqualification is Constitutional) the ability to declare him disqualified, but require that he nonetheless remain on the ballot in all fifty states.

The argument is that should he win, Congress would then be able to vote on whether or not to accept the will of the People and remove the disqualification or not.

This is dangerous ground, as such a vote against Trump would surely engender greater violence than simply refusing to allow him to run. And it would open the door to the question of whether or not the will of the People is valid in such a case. This isn’t open and shut. The Constitution is the will of the People in a larger percentage than any popular vote could be, as Amendments require super majorities in both chambers of Congress, as well as the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. The Constitution and its Amendments themselves are checks against temporary public support for populist ideas or candidates. After the 18th Amendment was ratified alcohol sales were illegal, regardless of how unpopular the ruling was, and remained so until we scrubbed it with the ratification of the 21st.

This is how the Supreme Court could get around the question of ballot access without facing Impeachment themselves.

The remedy to this is not waiting for the election to decide this issue, but instead to hold the votes as soon as SCOTUS makes this ruling. Thus (assuming he fails to get the necessary votes to remove the disqualification) he can be removed from the ballot in the public’s interest. There being no good cause to give the People an option to vote for someone who is disqualified from serving.

I do not believe that any intelligent life has ever visited Earth, nor has any such life directed devices or craft to do so. Though I do remain open to evidence to the contrary that could change my belief, should the evidence be sufficient.

My reasons are simple: I consider the vastness of the galaxy (and the universe) too great in distance and time to afford an opportunity for physical visitation.

And, none of the arguments for alien visitation have been convincing. This includes all pictures, films, testimony and the like.

There is no such thing as absolute certainty about a claim. We are left only with deciding between choices of likelihood. Which is more likely? We ask. Whatever the subject before us, we can ask that question.

What method do we use to decide what is more likely? Reason or Instinct?

Reason of course, as instinct is simply what you already take to be true. And we gain instinct from environment and experience. We are predisposed to certain assumptions, so using reason will give us some help sorting what is, from what we assume it is. We come with embedded beliefs from childhood, and all the later times when we took something to be true for bad reasons. It is a good practice to examine all beliefs to determine how we came to hold them.

Occam’s Razor is a good tool, even applied casually. It is a question of numbers of assumptions. Sometimes people say it means the simpler, the better. It isn’t that exactly, but more like, in which argument do you have to assume more things without proof in order to get to the result.

A simple proposition might be the statement: I have a brown dog. A person who hears this only has to make one assumption to form a belief. They have to assume I am telling the truth.

Whereas if I said that I had a brown dog that can drive a car and fly his own airplane, they’d have to make more assumptions to form a belief. (Dogs driving cars, flying and owning planes).

But here the assumption that I am joking is enough to form a belief about the statement. (Or that I am crazy, etc).

There are uncountable numbers of stars and potential planets in our galaxy alone, and it seems foolish to believe that we are alone. It must be, we say, that life emerged on many other such planets. And even if a tiny percentage of these potential planets had life, and even if a smaller percentage had intelligent life, there would still be large numbers of such lifeforms out there amongst the stars.

This is a reasonable proposition, at least for the sake of looking and listening to see if we can detect any intelligent life. It is a big place, and we have barely begun to look. Maybe we will find some?

But these numbers arguments are flawed. They all are static, and the galaxy isn’t. The galaxy is 87,000 light years in diameter. Even the spiral arms are 1000 light years thick. Only a relative handful of stars are within 50 light years of Earth. That means that speed of light communication would take a century round trip. If we heard today from an alien race, our answer could be generations before it was received. On the contrary, our grandchildren’s grandchildren might get an answer from messages we sent fifty years ago. That’s just at the speed of light.

The practicality of interstellar travel makes it more likely than not that any intelligent life would not undertake such trips. The distance of time is too great. We look at the night sky and we do not see the stars. We see the light from those stars that has been traveling for a thousand years. That light might have gone out centuries or millennia ago. Time. The distances are time.

I make one assumption: They don’t likely know we’re here, and couldn’t come if they did know. It isn’t a question of simply overcoming the technology. (Which we have to assume they could).

Time traveling? That’s another assumption, and not one that comports with reality. Why assume they have different physical laws? Why speculate about possibilities at all? Each time we allow for a new truth based on speculation, the more assumptions we are making, and the less likely it is true.

At some point we need to realize that we are not making estimate for predictive purposes, but excuses to allow continued belief.

This is sort of my position when it comes to what might be “out there.” We are probably not alone, but it probably hasn’t been here, nor would it come.

But to think it is probable that we are not the only place where life emerged, is not the same as having evidence that it did form elsewhere. And it is a long way from reasoning that it would or could come here.

Let’s examine the rarity of intelligent life capable of space exploration.

Life emerged on Earth roughly 3 billion years ago, a billion-ish years after the planet formed. And hominids didn’t evolve on Earth until about 6 million years ago. It has taken all of those billions of years to evolve the intelligent life we have now. Intelligent life is brand new on this evolutionary scale.

There are 1.2 million identified species of plants and animals on Earth, with estimates suggesting there could be 8.7 million. And yet, only one of those is intelligent enough to create written language or transmit messages beyond our planet.

This is evidence that life sufficiently intelligent for space travel is exceedingly rare. There could well be millions of planets with life that may never evolve to this degree. Millions of possible worlds with life that never reaches the intelligence of even primates. We could be the pinnacle.

And the window of time within that evolutionary timeline where intelligence reached even the ability to transmit radio signals is a tiny fraction of that time, I suspect it would be in the last few seconds of New Year’s Eve if presented on an annual calendar. That is, technologically advanced intelligent life is evident for only an extraordinarily small fraction of time, and only within a single species out of millions.

When we are looking out at space with this evolutionary timeline in mind, we should understand that it may be that none of the intelligent life that may be out there exists now. We not only have to understand the number of potential planets, the rarity of intelligence, and the distances of time, but we must also figure out those windows of time that intelligence exists in – if it exists at all.

Occam’s Razor applied here says that it is more likely that other life does not overlap in time and distance with us. 

There could be vast amounts of life that we will never be aware of, nor could be aware of, because the time lapse of communication exceeds humanity’s period of technology.

Aliens could have sent signals to Earth for millennia to no avail, because while we were here and intelligent, we were not yet technologically advanced enough to understand them. They might have reached out millions of years ago, and since have vanished in the collapse of their own local star, asteroid strike, or internal conflict.

The evidence for alien visitation is insufficient to support belief based on the feasibility.

Claims:

Broadly speaking, the claims of alien visitation are eye witnesses, photographic and video-graphic images, and conspiracy theories.

UFO sightings have increased in direct proportion to the development of manned flight. When human powered aircraft began crossing the skies in earnest, UFO claims became a thing. And they increased as human flight increased.

And what people say they saw has changed too, and chiefly according to the popular conception of what others saw.

In the early 20th Century, aliens of our fictions looked entirely different than they came to look later. The first “saucer” wasn’t a saucer at all. It was a reporter’s mistake that led to that description. Before that they were cylinders. After that, the saucer shape dominated the sightings.
In The War Of The Worlds novel, aliens were octopus-like creatures. And they were Martians. Later, we imagined short men with suction cups on their limbs.

 After the movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the “gray” became the predominant description in UFO claims. And the “alien” bodies being displayed in Mexico look remarkably similar to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

I point these out to show that when we see something we can’t identify, we form in our mind the image we think we should see. Once we start thinking the UFO is alien, we fill our mental image with what we think it should look like. And that appearance is often what is most popular at the time. This is evidence of human error in identification.

I’ve heard it said that these claims are evidence, just not good evidence. This is incorrect. The UFO sightings (all of them, or at least those that remain unidentified) are not evidence of aliens. They are evidence of UFOs. All they tell us is that someone saw something they couldn’t identify, and they asserted it was alien in origin. But none of them have ever crossed into evidence beyond unknown, except when found to be from Earth, which was all of the ones that were identified.

Apply Occam’s Razor to this. If every time we identify a UFO it turns out to be from Earth, what’s most likely true about the next one we see?

When UFOs mostly turn out to be planes, birds, balloons, and atmospheric phenomena, why do we continue to persist in thinking some of the remaining are alien?

“I saw an alien craft,” is an assertion without supporting evidence. To correct it we could say, “I saw something I couldn’t identify, and I assert it is alien.”

A UFO should not prompt a choice between whether or not it is alien to Earth. That’s a false dichotomy. This kind of logical error leads us to think that some number of them could or must be alien by default. This puts an assumption into our heads at the beginning. We assume that some alien visitors are coming here. This is an unwarranted assumption.

Each claim should be treated as if it is likely from Earth, and if we are unable to make such an identification, it is fallacious to presume it is alien to Earth.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

A thousand unproven claims do not add up to one proven claim.

The entire body of ufology amounts to claims and accusations of conspiracy. Anything alien remains speculative.

This has led people who are committed to the belief in alien visitors, to assert that “they” are hiding the truth. This should be dismissed out of hand because it is an unfalsifiable claim. We cannot prove anyone isn’t hiding it, because you can’t prove a negative, so the assertion shouldn’t even be part of the discussion.

The burden of proof is on those making the claim. The claim of government coverup must be shown to be true, not merely asserted as a way to distract from the failure to verify a claim.

The alien believers club has tried to do this in papers, books, films, online and the like, by asserting that various classified government programs exist in order to hide the truth. Of course they have not proved any of that. That our military has secrets about some things is not reason to believe it has secrets about everything. Nor should the lack of evidence be used as claims of hidden evidence.

The most recent has been alien true believers testifying before Congress. This was a fascinating example of how the UFO community uses innuendo and assumptions to mislead the untrained public.

In Congressional hearings about the subject of UFOs, the claimants talk about actual programs, some of them secret, which investigate the phenomenon. It is important to understand how this sounds to the untrained ear.

When most of us hear the word UFO, we assume aliens. We do understand when it is pointed out that unidentified doesn’t mean otherworldly, but for most laypeople UFO is synonymous with ET.

So, when a “whistleblower” tells us that the government has secret programs to investigate and retrieve crashed UFOs, we often assume this means that alien craft have been recovered. This is a logical fallacy called a non sequitur. Unidentified does not equal alien. The US military has shot down unidentified objects. Some very publicly. This year’s downing of supposed Chinese spy balloons were all over the news. These were definitely from Earth. We sent teams to these crash sites and recovered the wreckage. We also shot down some stuff we weren’t sure of (which turned out to be balloons). UFO crash site recovery teams doesn’t mean aliens. That’s a non sequitur.

Anyone in the government familiar with these recoveries are aware that these are from Earth. When they omit that from their Congressional testimony, it is fair to conclude they are doing so intentionally to mislead the public, and perhaps Congress itself. It is deceit by omission.

Even more telling is the use of charged language. The newest is “non-human biologics.” At a hearing where witnesses testify about alien visitation and government coverup (all implied but never directly claimed under oath), this phrase sounds like it means the government has the alien bodies.

I have paid close attention to the reaction to this phrase, from the Congress members at the meeting, news reporters covering it, articles written, and the general public as a whole, and in nearly every case it is clear that people believe non-human biologics means alien creatures.

The use of this phrase is woefully misleading. And the witnesses seem clearly intent on letting it mislead. At no point did the witness attempt to clarify this, or even define the phrase. Here’s a definition of biologic: biologic |ˌbīōˈläjik|

adjective

relating to biology; biological. there is growing interest in the biologic activities of plant extracts in the treatment of disease.

noun (usu. biologics)

another term for biological (noun). these natural biologics can be as potent as manufactured drugs.

When I first looked this up it reminded me of my childhood. I can’t remember the exact age, but some school mate pointed at me and told me my epidermis was showing. This was a good laugh for kids until everyone learned what that word meant.

Non-human biologics could be any other living thing on Earth. At no point should we conclude that this means alien to our planet.

That Congress and the public misunderstood this, is evidence of how easily we will jump to conclusions. We (the people, broadly speaking) are not skeptical. We do not think critically.

And the use of this phrase in the context it was presented without clarification suggests (strongly) that the witness intended for people to make that assumption.

A suspicious drone knocked out of the sky by a trained eagle (yes, that’s a real thing) would have a crash recovery team sent, and the bird feathers would be non-human biologics. A spy balloon that lands in a field of grass would have non-human biologics.

There is zero reason to conclude that this means alien, but nonetheless this is what most people would assume because of the context.

In all, the witnesses made no direct claims that could put them in jeopardy of perjury while under oath. And they were all very careful to qualify that they personally didn’t see any of the craft or bodies, or biologics. It was all hearsay. Someone told them. Even the claim of being a whistleblower is misleading. He merely made statements regarding the existence of activities, and hearsay of others, while implying that evidence of aliens was being hidden. No accusations, but plenty of ambiguous statements implying aliens.

And around that they crafted a story that would set up the listener to believe the tale that “they” are hiding the truth from you.

The testimony was a complete nothingburger. It sounded like every other claim I’ve heard, full of implication and misrepresentation. And the whole thing steeped in the belief of coverup.

I’ll repeat what I’ve said before. The time to believe something is when there is sufficient evidence and not before.

In the case for alien visitation the reasonable burden of proof has not been met. It has not even been approached. When examined critically, none of the claims get past the stage of unknown, except where we found them to be Earth born. And our inability to understand what we saw, or recognize the error in our observation, does not permit us to infer something not in evidence.

Couple that with the known constraints of distance and time, and the likelihood of such visitation becomes even less plausible.

Triple that with the innate human tendency to assert an answer wherever there is a gap in our knowledge, even so far as our own minds forming images, and the idea that any sighting is credible isn’t reasonable.

I’ll keep an open mind, but I don’t know what it was, maybe it is alien, is poor reasoning.

(The Modern Dodge)

Twice this year I’ve heard that phrase directed to me. It came from two different people in two widely separated forums. Both times they were offered when I called out someone for an indefensible and disturbing statement they had made.

I’ll get to the problem in a bit, but first I’ll briefly explain the interactions.

The first was in late winter, February or March, I believe. It took place while playing team trivia at a local pub. A man I’ve known for years (I’ll call him Jim as an alias), and with whom I had previously been a teammate, approached me after one night’s game was over and brought up Alex Haley, the author or Roots.

Let’s be clear, none of the night’s trivia questions or answers had anything to do with Alex Haley, or with Roots the book or Roots the TV miniseries, and there was never a mention of slavery or race relations at all. Oh, and Alex Haley died more than three decades ago. It seemed clear that Jim brought the topic with him to the pub that night.

Jim and I got along well enough, even having rode together to a regional trivia tournament six or seven years before. He is an odd man, perhaps more odd from his life circumstances. He was the last or only child of a mother who lived to be very old, and with whom he lived as a bachelor all that time. She had died a couple of years before, leaving him the house. During those years she guilt-tripped him into staying with her, and keeping her company much of the time. It was impossible for him to form any romantic relationships for the attention his mother demanded, and to which he subjected himself. I sympathized with him, as I was the last of a large litter myself, and knew all too well the nature of life around a clinging mother not ready to have no children at home. I joined the Navy to get away from that.

That night Jim launched into what can only be described as a screed about how Alex Haley had lied about his personal history, and that none of the Roots story was real. (This is not really true, Haley admitted to taking someone else’s story and claiming it as his own. The story wasn’t invented from whole cloth).

To Jim this meant that none of the Roots miniseries was true, and that the entire nation had been misled about slavery because of the popularity of the book and TV shows. And, he further added, none of the whippings and bad treatment were true either. And that the country had been manipulated by “the Jews” in order to make white people hate themselves.
I called him out on it, and told that this was nonsense, and that our understanding of history is built on far more than a popular TV miniseries, which along with the book, accurately reflected both many individual circumstances, as well as the entire institution of slavery. And I made it clear that I understood the white supremacist background behind this gaslighting about slavery, and that it was born from the “Lost Cause” myth that had been invented in the late nineteenth century, and which led to the Jim Crow era. And that such talk had gained new momentum in light of the racist and fascist populism that has risen since Trump came to power. (Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been floating and demanding that his state’s high school curriculum include the skills the enslaved benefited from learning. Yes, the claim is that slavery was like an apprenticeship).

I told him to never bring it up again to me, and that I thought it revolting that he considered such claims credible at all.

I left with the intention of discontinuing associating with him at all.

A couple of days later I got a letter from him. There were many excuses, such as saying this was just something he ran across on the internet, and that he had black friends he would fight for, and the like. But ultimately what matters is that he was sorry that he had offended me.

I wrote back a stern letter advising him to lose my phone number, and abandon any thought of interacting with me in the future, pointing out that men in their sixties don’t just happen upon racism and white supremacism on the internet.

Further, I said that I was not offended, but rather disgusted by his comments.

The second incident happened online and more recently. (The occasion triggered my writing this today).

An acquaintance of mine is visiting Japan and had posted on Facebook a series of photographs he took around Tokyo. Someone else he knows commented on his post asking if he was introducing himself to people as J. Robert Oppenheimer Jr. (A reference to the father of the atomic bomb, whose biopic was gracing the theater screens across the country).
I saw this comment when looking at the post, and responded that I couldn’t imagine anyone finding that funny. It was, after all, a crass joke about nuclear holocaust victims.

We had a brief exchange where he said he thought our mutual friend would find it funny, and suggested that he should have sent it as a private message; and I responded that such a change wouldn’t do anything except hide his trivializing of hundreds of thousands of deaths from the two atomic bombs we dropped, and then suggested he visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum for a perspective.

He then said that he didn’t mean any offense, and apologized for offending me.

I said I wasn’t offended, but rather disturbed. And I said that were I to have made such a joke and been called on it, it would lead me to feel great shame, but that “you do you.”

It is this use of an apology for offending me, and the assumption that I was offended by both of these two people that struck a nerve, and made me think about why this had happened.

I realized that what they were both doing is defending their horrific comments, and putting the blame for being called out on me for taking offense. As if the problem wasn’t what they said, but rather who heard it. Like a guy at a bar telling his buddies his favorite Sambo pickaninny joke in his best Uncle Remus voice, and then apologizing to the black couple at the table behind them, by saying he didn’t notice them there. As if the problem wasn’t the racist joke, but letting that joke be heard by black people.

This is what both men were doing. Dismissing their own racism (and additionally antisemitism with Jim) by offering that it was my offense to it that was the issue. It wasn’t.

Over the years I’ve had countless occasions with groups of people where one person starts to say something, before carefully looking over both shoulders to see who might be within earshot before completing the statement. It was rare that whatever came next was not problematic. Almost invariably they are seeking to ensure that something they are saying would not be heard by someone outside of the group, and they are always surprised to find someone within the group calling them out for the comment. Sorry, they say. I didn’t know you were a (fill in blank).

Racism, xenophobia, nationalism, white supremacy, antisemitism, and overall bigotry is widespread in America, and surely throughout the world. But it won’t be curbed until people of good character refuse to let it slide when brought up around them. Joining in the laugh is tacit endorsement of their particular vitriol, and gives comfort and community to those who expound those vile ideals.

Don’t accept those apologies. The problem is what they said, and not who heard it.

“I’m sorry for offending you” is a copout. It is a dodge to avoid facing their own inner evil. A way to blame others for not sharing their bigotry. We cannot control what people think, but we (collectively) can make it so they find themselves alone when they say it.