The Midnight Library

 

"Beyond the edge of the universe {between life and death} is a library that contains an infinite number of books. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go and see for yourself?"

"Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived .. Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?"

                                                   ------ Matt Haig,  The Midnight Library

On the other hand,  Sylvia Plath, another American prolific poet and novelist said:

"I can never be all the people I want and live the lives I want.  I can never train myself in all the skills I want.  And why do I want?  I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experiences possible in my life."

Sylvia Plath committed suicide at age 30.

First, I must acknowledge the book for its bold if not thought provoking premise along with my apologies to its author, Matt Haig,  for co-opting the book's title for this musing. It's not a very long book, 437 pages of large print and its overall dimension is smaller than a standard hard cover, but just slightly larger than a pocket book. I found the theme and the premise as far too deep, if not entirely fanciful, so I'd say it is not an easy "read". 

But, the reader (of this blog or the book) will have to agree that the idea behind the premise is much too intriguing to be ignored or not pondered upon.  To get one to wonder or imagine "what if" is not entirely radical but it does indeed take anyone to the realm of wishful thinking. But, keep in mind, we are talking about "what if".  However, isn't the "do over" our most intimate wish toward a perfect life?  

Before we get too deeply, let us take a byway to warm up our thoughts about why The Midnight Library  can be a reasonable place for those seeking hope in the event that there is time, hopefully much of it still left, for the proverbial course correction for each individual life.

The perfect example would be the game of chess.  You don't have to know the game to get the gist of the analogy. According to Claude Shannon, American mathematician, there are 10¹²⁰ possible permutations for a typical  game of chess (that's 10X10 .. 120 times over). That designation is now known as the Shannon number but never mind that it would include everything from the silliest to the sublime on how a game may evolve and end.  If we count only the games by serious players, the number could be just third of that; still a very large number. Another mind blowing conclusion is that the Shannon number is more than all the atoms in the entire universe.  But bear with me because soon you'll see where this is going.

When I was in college - way, way back when - I played a lot of amateur chess among friends and classmates.  I poured over a few chess books, got to be conversant with chess openings and the history of the game (now almost completely beyond recollection).  Often the games were for fun but just as often they turned into both emotionally and physically draining jousts with folks who were otherwise good friends until you got them at the opposite side of a chess board.

I have not played another game with a person in a long time but still do frequently enough against a computer.  The beauty of computer chess is that one gets to choose the level of the game, akin to picking your opponent. In other words one may play against a novice, or one of average skill, or go against a grand master.  And the computer is so gallantly generous as to allow one to have a do-over or even offer to help with a better  move (against itself!) How cool is that?  

But, every now and then, feeling less chivalrous or seeking solace from beneath the thin layer of sportsmanship, I would invoke the chess move "do-over", once or twice or, well, as many as a few times, to salvage what was a great game on my part until that one fatal mistake. So, I would resort to a do-over. The computer, more than its compliant air of indifference, does not really care. Now, as a result, I do once in a while play the perfect game.  A computer voice obligingly either offer to resign or admit, "checkmate".  

Aside from the ego boost, one realizes that, indeed, in chess as in life, there is nothing like a do-over to achieve the perfect outcome. And how we wish it is possible or at the very least, a chance at something better than the prevailing predicament.

In chess one may elect the easier level; as in life, one may choose the easy circumstances with very little challenges.  However, life, unlike in chess, do-over is  hardly an option. Though sometimes possible, the required commitment may be daunting to those eager to try and find it often more challenging to "stick with it".  Alcoholics, drug addicts and criminal recidivists provide perennial proof.

In a coastal area of an island somewhere in the Pacific lived a family of four. The husband is a fisherman.  He has a small outrigger dugout canoe that he takes out before  dawn, if the weather is good, to fish. He is back two hours after sunrise, sometimes with a bounty, sometimes with very little.  He will either be at the open marketplace at the center of the village to sell fish, or he is at home with enough of what little he caught to feed his family for that day.

The wife takes care of a five year old girl and a three year old boy and the one room nipa hut that sits on bamboo stilts. Below, visible through the bamboo flooring are the handful of chickens and  couple of ducks fenced in by a simple enclosure.  Their bathroom and toilet are a one unit affair five yards away by where banana and papaya and guava trees stand as  part of a privacy wall from the rest of the small fishing community. From the other corner of the small lot is a pig pen with a couple of piglets.  She takes care of those two and  the ducks and the chicken.  In seven months the two pigs will be sold. Aside from the money spent to buy two more piglets, the proceeds from the sale she would save for the kids.  There are eggs to sell or eat depending on her husband's luck with the sea or the weather.

This is a happy family.  There are no debts.  There is little to pay for maintaining the house, their lifestyle does not cost much. The family is relatively healthy from the food they eat and the salty fresh air they breathe. What little "needs" they have are cheaply covered. What little "wants" they have are either cheaply addressed or ignored.  A simple but happy life.

Unbeknownst to the wife and the husband and the entire world, twelve thousand miles away from the opposite side of the globe eight years ago was another story.

Above the din and bustle of mid-town Manhattan, New York city, on the 21st floor of a plush tower-apartment, sat Natalie, alone, at the breakfast nook that is a mere section of a 3500 sq. foot luxuriously appointed living space all to herself.  Also, all to herself was a bottle of red wine, half of its $79 content she had already consumed. Again, all to herself was a bottle of prescription pills. She had already taken six of them.

Natalie just came back from a well earned vacation in the Far East, to escape the brutal winter that hit New York in a long time.  It was also to escape just temporarily the hectic life as a senior VP for one of the most powerful financial institutions of Wall Street. It was the break she needed but by the time the "fasten-your-seat-belt"  sign turned off, the reality of a fast paced life woke her up from her last vacation reverie.  JFK International Airport was still blanketed with snow.  Her phone lit up with texts and several messages.  She had a summon from the Board to come to the office bright and early at seven the following Monday morning. The late night TV business broadcast the last two hours of prime time about the potential financial crisis presumably to hit in the morning.

Natalie had a good life.  Wharton Business School, sixteen job offers before graduation. The years went by quickly.  Way too fast, really. She was brilliant and motivated.  She was 39 years old, unmarried, and a senior VP. She ate nothing but catered lunch almost every day. She gets picked  up and whisked around to wherever and back by limo with more than one dedicated driver at her beck and call every day, including weekends. She had a fitness trainer and dietician, all part of her negotiated salary package.

All that came with a price.  No long term personal relationship to speak of, professional alliances were only as good as the trade winds of the business cycle.  She had very few close friends and people in social gatherings suddenly would tone down their conversations to a murmur partly to gape at her good looks, expensive attire and in awe of her status, or to be filled with envy every time she entered the room.

She was refilling her glass to the brim, finishing off the bottle, while the pills were by then consumed to the last remaining handful of capsules left.  As she tipped the glass for the last gulp she was thinking of the woman hawking fresh fruit to the tourists from her dugout canoe next to the water's edge of Natalie's hotel as Natalie was having breakfast with someone she just met five days ago.

An hour later after the last drop of wine, after eight more pills, Natalie was perusing the books at The Midnight Library. 

It is now eight years since then.  Natalie is now Natividad but she has no knowledge of everything in that New York apartment, nor about anything before then.  She is at the present moment mending a torn shirt of her boy and if she has time before tending to the chicken and the ducks and the piglets, she will also patch her husband's well worn trouser.

Natividad might herself one day get to visit the Midnight Library. However, there is a strong possibility she may not find it necessary.

(P.S. - I made the story up and therefore not based on actual people I know or read about.  However, my family, as I was growing up in one of the central islands of the Philippines, lived as humbly as that of Natividad's. It is the best way I know how to illustrate the essence of the fanciful "what ifs" and "what could have been" in the imaginary world that is The Midnight Library).

Electric Shock

As a blog-writer of average skill and talent I love this two-word phrase.  It is a rich source for analogy; a base root from which one may grow a cluster of metaphors.  But I will try not to over harvest it.

In California - where else - there is one public agenda, "Under a proposal by the California Air Resources Board, the state would require 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold here to run on batteries or hydrogen by 2026. To give a sense of scale, in 2021, 12 percent of new car sales in the state were zero-emission".

"The proposal would gradually raise the sales of zero-emission vehicles—electric, hydrogen-powered or plug-in hybrids—to 100 percent of new vehicle sales by 2035."

"The proposal would also ban new gas-fueled cars by 2035, although it would not be illegal to own or sell a used one after that".  Now, what does that really mean? If it was meant to take a huge bite into the air pollution debate in the Golden State, it is about as toothless as a baleen whale.  But it will be one whale of a conundrum for the tax paying commuters of the state.

The electric shock will be real to the average California driver if this were to become a legislative reality. However, why should the rest of the country or the entire world be concerned with what happens in that state? Given the "right gestation" period, it could spread like a runaway infestation, couldn't it? 

The average cost of the five cheapest electric cars in 2020, way before today's inflationary levels, was $33,000.  Tesla's Model Y and 3 will set the consumer back by $40-45 K, plus tax and a higher insurance premium.  Who knows what these prices will be by 2035.

The electric shock to confront the California tax payers begins at building 250,000 charging stations (presently 80,000) state wide; charging stations that will be fed from existing power grids that get most of their electricity from power plants that run on fossil fuel (natural gas and coal and a small percentage from nuclear power).  That is shocking.

Even more shocking is that solar and wind power will barely get the state into clean energy independence.  Not by a long shot and clearly not even long after 2035.  So what is this electric car initiative going to do for the state? Image.  

Image, created by and for those obsessed with climate change but oblivious to those among them who are least likely to afford the price of electric vehicles.  On average, the second car in a two-car family in California is likely a used car (called for when a son or daughter gets a driver's license; a second wage earner; for the soccer mom, etc.) because two new cars are a huge burden, when you take into consideration the price of homes, gas, higher cost of living, and now inflation.

Clearly that proposed initiative for electric cars is almost detached from the realities of the average family condition. One may grant that the proposal was done with robust introspections by the esteemed proponents of the initiative, but one would be wrong.  One may even conclude that such a move by the Board and, possibly, later by the State legislators is likely one that is unencumbered by logical thought.  Significantly, that would be right! 

Please inspect the image below.  They look like blood vessels, each section a segmented artery. Staying with the analogy, the entire network is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.  More notably, however, it represents the daily annual truck traffic - 18 wheelers and delivery trucks, including  vehicles that haul our trash.  One must also include ambulances, firetrucks and emergency vehicles.  Don't forget tractors, graders, harvesters, mining vehicles, etc. Should we aim for them to run on batteries and hydrogen fuel cells as well?  Note how heavily red is represented by the state of California (left of the chart).

How about those coming from producers of the largest carbon footprint in use today.  45,000 daily flights over the entire country.

Image.  If that is what we need to focus on, then we are highlighting a portrait detached from reality.  The taxpayer who help pay (most of it) for the roads and air traffic infrastructures are asked to sacrifice the most.

Webster Dictionary defines climate: the average course or condition of the weather at a place usually over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity, and precipitation. 

These are questions we need to ask at the same time that we acknowledge that climate change is real. 

Lest we forget, from the above definition, the central over riding component of climate is weather.  As real as the weather is, climate change is real but we must put it in that context and a frame reference that encompasses millions of years of climate changes and evolutionary adaptations among organisms.  But from that to segue the change into an existential threat in the timeline that activist proponents claim is a huge jump from what is real to unhinged alarmism.

Let's ask these questions first.

Is it not better to focus more money on research and initiatives to make combustion engines to run more efficiently and cleanly?  There must be more that can be done first before we go all in with all bets on electric vehicles. Combustion engines last a long time.  EV batteries and electric motors do not and the issue of the amount of waste in disposing them is not fully known. Most lithium and other elements for batteries are mined in hostile places and under horrible labor and human conditions. Wind power is at best erratic, kills a lot of birds (including endangered ones) and the jury is still out on its effects on the environment and wide swaths of land allocated and sea lanes appropriated for locating them.  Solar panels use up a lot of rare earth elements as well and disposal of old components past their useful life (how long is not quite known yet) has not been addressed.

Meanwhile, we have made cleaner fuels, better and more efficient internal combustion engines.  We eliminated leaded gasoline, made cleaner burning engines by eliminating carburetors, switching to fuel injections and now to direct fuel injections, catalytic converters, computer managed engine and transmission systems, lighter engine and body parts, etc. Funding increase in research and development is likely to usher additional efficiencies.  As it stands, the U.S., Canada and western Europe have by far cleaner air due to those developments.  Unfortunately, the two largest countries of about a billion each that rely on fossil fuel to run their industries have the most polluted air and water.  Add to that the other surrounding countries getting more involved industrially in Asia, and the world is faced with an ever burgeoning problem with air pollution. 

How about privatizing the mass transit systems. Amtrak has not had a black-ink year in decades.  How about the U.S. Postal Service?  We didn't know how inefficient and budget draining their service is until we saw how Amazon and other internet sellers showed us. We didn't know how NASA overspent taxpayers money until Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos launched SpaceX and Blue Horizon within budget and in time.  It is about time we end the legendary mishandling of taxpayers money by the very government that pushes the climate change initiative down the throat of ordinary citizens.  There is enough that can be saved to fund research into much safer, compact nuclear power generators. Nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers have proven the power capability of small reactors that can clearly power small cities and towns. An aircraft carrier can go for months without refueling, yet 5,000 military personnel , enjoy unlimited energy to maintain a small-size town, including unsurpassed capability to launch aircraft anywhere in all the seven seas. 

Climate utopia, if ever there is going to be such a thing, can never be a localized phenomenon.  A "clean" North America and western Europe are of little use on a globe that circulates the same air over and over.

The entire planet is better served to help those regions that need it most in improving their path to cleaner industries.

The planet had survived eons of climate changes, organisms survived and thrived due to evolutionary adaptations far more powerful than we can ever imagine.  Here's a quick look:

The evolution of the atmosphere could be divided into four separate stages:

1. Origin

2. Chemical/ pre-biological era

3. Microbial era, and

4. Biological era.

The entire solar system is approximately 5 billion years old, give or take a few million.  The Biological era (humans and oxygen breathing organisms) came only during the last 2 billion years.  Our ancestors did not even show up until the last 100-200,000 years.  During all that time, all organisms (plants and animals alike) went through millions upon millions  of changes, each subsequent change due to mutation and adaptation resulted in better suited life forms.

Shockingly, those that survived and thrived did it in the absence of climate activists, alarmists and unnecessary legislation. 

What is needed is sane, well thought out legislation or regulation to pave the way to cleaner atmosphere for the entire globe - not just California.  Now, whether we like it or not, the planet is indifferent to our meddling - well intentioned or not.  We may be saving ourselves but we cannot be too presumptuous as to say we are saving the planet.  Earth can take care of itself as it had for eons, long before we were even here. The planet will be here for quite a while and we are merely temporary occupants. 

 

It's Hard Not to Blink ..

I was settling down at the eye doctor's exam chair when she noted that the nurse took several tries to get the eye scan done on me previously in the other room. Indeed, that was true, because apparently the chore took longer than the usual number of attempts to get it just right.  The eye scan is an eye exam device that is non-contact, non-invasive, except that the patient must sit still and not blink.  You'll hear the refrain of the nurse's constant admonition, "okay, now take a breath, blink twice, and now, don't blink". This is so she can get a high resolution 3-D microscopic cross section photo of the eye. I thought she came close to the point of exasperation, as in a photographer using up an entire roll of film (ages ago when cameras still used film) to get a couple of still photos just right.

I commented back to my doctor that, "It's hard not to blink when you're told not to blink". She burst out laughing like that was the funniest thing she heard that day.  She said, "I know what you mean but it's just hilarious that you phrase it that way".

In my defense, if there is one, it's not easy to sit still with your chin set tightly against one of two chin rests, hunched forward, and to remain focused on that green cross hair that is located on either corner of the video screen.  And do it again using the other chin rest, focusing on the mark now located at the other corner. This test is done once a year, together with a session with the phoropter - for refractive error and prescription. Quarterly and no less than every four months, I get a regular session with the tonometer. "A tonometer measures the pressure of the eye by very gently touching the cornea".

Before I go any further, as a  public service message to the readers, please have a regularly scheduled yearly eye exam, especially for anyone past his or her 40th birthday. Today's routine eye exam screens for cataract and glaucoma - number one and two main causes for blindness, in that order, later in life.  Yearly screenings will catch either one in the early stage and both can be corrected either with eye drops (for glaucoma) or simple out-patient surgery for cataract.

Now, why is it so difficult not to blink; especially when told not to.  Well, physically it is impossible not to, because it is one of those near involuntary reflexes, since "blinking releases a tear film — which mostly consists of water, oil and mucus — to keep the surface of the eyeball smooth. It also prevents the eye from drying out, which can be uncomfortable". 

Blinking is naturally counterweighed by staring.  Oddly enough there is such a thing  as a staring contest and the record, so far, is 40 minutes and 59 seconds. I know you are now, right at this moment, actually staring at this page to see how long you can keep doing it, then you quickly realize it is not easy not to blink.

When we are faced with all the bad things that occur around us, by rising crimes in some of our cities, unprecedented squalor in our neighborhood, atrocities of war in far away places like Ukraine, it is hard not to blink. But we know blinking does not change or erase anything away.

"How many times do we blink in, say, a day? Researchers apparently spent a good amount of scientific funding into just that.

900 – 1,200 times an hour

14,400 – 19,200 times a day

100,800 – 134,400 times a week

between 5.2 and 7.1 million times a year

Each blink lasts between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds. Given how many times the average person blinks per minute, this makes up about 10 percent of the time you’re awake". 

Astoundingly, our brain does not "record" all the blinking we do because our memory of every day is a seamless panorama, whereas a computer or camera will have seams that delineate images between blinks. Probably not much of anything, but it's good to know.

Now, we segue to something else. 

It is not easy not to worry too when you're told not to.  In fact, it seems that the intensity of our worries is directly proportional to how much and how often we're told not to worry. An adage says, that the less we know about something, oblivious even, the less we worry, or not at at all.  Some of us will go as far as to say, "I don't want to know" - as a near perfect insulation from worry.  Or so it seems. That is because for some, the conditions that brought about, "I don't want to know", in the first place, are what purvey the paths to worry.

Children - humanity's ultimate carriers of happiness (until they reach adulthood, of course) - have the least of worries because they still know so little, and what little they know about what to want is the key to their happiness.  Notice though that they may blink a lot when they're excited and they stare when they are awed; either way, they look cute.  We lose that as we age.  Recovering that childlike state of mind might be the ticket we all could use.

The less often we convert what used to be mere "wants" suddenly into "needs", the less we worry.  In fact, the less we search for what we think we will want, the less we become needful of them (whatever those are).

And I say,

"The state of Happiness is at its greatest maximum when worry is kept to a minimum".

Musk Oil Named Elon

There is so much going on, the average consumer of news is inundated with a cacophony of input from so many sources.  24-hour cable news and entertainment, social media churning 24/7; yet, it seems, people are likely to be ill-informed. "Ill-informed" can simply stem merely from too much of one side and little else from the other. From so many, there's too much, yet so few are of little value from the perspective of a truly functioning democracy.

"Musk was a name originally given to a substance with a strong odor obtained from a gland of the musk deer."

What do we have here? A source for countless metaphors, for one. Musk oil, long before it was synthesized from other material, was originally a very expensive source for the perfumery business since it meant killing the musk deer. Later, it included other animal sources to extract a substance to be used as a carrier of inducing scents, albeit for no other purpose than to smell fragrantly attractive to another.  However, it was also at one time used to attract wild animals for hunting. At one time tigers were lured with musk scents. On the other hand, if one were a hunter, he or she is discouraged from wearing  perfume or cologne on a hunting trip, lest their intended prey will sense them long before they can come close to unleash the perfect shot.

A multi-billionaire named Elon, with a last name Musk, is raising up a stink in the media world,  at a place symbolically imitating the sound of a bird's tweet. Twitter,  phonetic play or not, is accurately imaged however:  

The social media giant appropriately symbolizing a tweeting  little bird was meant to be a sounding board for anyone and everyone, wasn't it?  Like the bird's tweet, wasn't it meant so it can be heard by anyone and everyone, from everywhere? I do not  have either a Twitter or Facebook account so I am just another bystander asking a question.  What is all this stink churned up by a man named Elon, with a last name, Musk?

As metaphors go, it seems like a fly just landed on what used to be one smoothly spread ointment called Twitter.  If it is true that Twitter had also become a censorship platform, denying the participation of those whose ideas and opinions are contrary to the one espoused by the few in its leadership board, then perhaps they are only to blame for attracting an unlikely fly on their ointment.

Seven years ago I wrote, "When Rattlesnakes No Longer Rattle", but today it seems like one cannot be silenced anymore.  A quick quote from what I wrote then:

"Now we have a moral lesson – a metaphor of a sort in social and political discourse.  One of democracy’s most important attribute is freedom of speech.  It is because a democracy works when all sides are heard, discussed and decided upon by the people.  It ceases to be one when a monolithic voice takes over because that almost always happens when the government turns into a dictatorship that strives to silence any and all opposition.  It comes either from the persecution of the press or the press becoming an ally to restricting the voices of dissent with the aim towards the final eradication of anyone who opposes the prevailing ideology.  It works badly for either side of opposing ideologies when one tries to suppress the other’s ability to express".

I warned further,

"When one ideology prevails lopsidedly over another, the danger is that the latter will lose its ability to rattle.  The silence will have serious repercussions.  A monolithic society or government will always turn into an indivisibly and inflexibly oppressive aggregation of people when reason and dissenting voices are diminished if not entirely silenced.  That is a dangerous condition.  Whoever is in power must be aware that silence does not mean the demise of an opposition.  It must understand that it is easier when opposing voices are heard – not just for the logical reasons – because that is the best way to understand and know them and perchance to work with them (one can only wish).  Worse than hearing the opposition is the silence that percolates underneath.  History teaches us that political power changes hands, dictatorships are toppled and ideologies change or evolve   even amidst every effort to silence the opposition.  Worse than hearing too much out of the political and sociological discourse is when one side no longer rattles".

We can't probe, not accurately anyway, into Elon Musk's motivation to first buy up enough shares of Twitter to become its single largest shareholder or his now recent offer to buy up the whole caboodle. One thing he did make clear was that he would let Twitter become a true sounding board for everyone, without censorship. We can take his word for it, the same way most folks took Jeff Bezos' words when he bought the newspaper, "The Washington Post".

It is possible too that Elon Musk merely did one clever business jujitsu to raise the value of his investment.  One thing, for sure, it would seem, that to expect Twitter board to sit still and not create a defensive wall from a Musk takeover, is to expect that Musk will abandon SpaceX to probe the heavens.

But let us not perish the thought that censorship of free speech is the beginning of the end of democracy.

Our Greatest Fear Should Be Here

Whenever we see each other I have this almost always interesting conversation with Sam. That is his anglicized name when he became a U.S. citizen.  He came in the late seventies from China as one of a select group of a hundred or so young Chinese students  accepted to come and study in the U.S., under the auspices of the State Department, in line with the Nixon administration's diplomatic intercession for China's inclusion into the world's stage, politically and economically. Sam became an engineer and stayed and worked here after graduation.  He is retired now and a very vocal critic of the Chinese government.  He makes his opinion known loudly to anyone who'd listen and woe to those who'd dare say good things about the regime of his old homeland.

We both swim  at the local gym but we see each other only sparingly.  Yesterday, I opined to him that it looks like China might invade Taiwan.  His immediate response was, "Nope, that's not going to happen". He was willing to bet some amount of money that there is no chance of that happening. He went on to enumerate many different reasons why, not the least of which is what is happening to the bogged down Russian invasion of Ukraine; the  immediate world wide outrage that followed; the fact that Taiwan is a lot more militarily prepared and the Taiwan Strait (also called Formosa Strait) that at its narrowest gap between the two coasts is at least a 100-mile treacherous strip that is essentially still part of the Pacific Ocean that could present problems to naval crossings. There is also, of course, the semi-formal commitment of the U.S. and Australia to defend Taiwan from invasion (however, soft or "hardly cast in stone" that commitment is). Add to that the uneasiness Japan and the other ASEAN nations feel about it and the added concern for a potential domino effect on the region.  China also risks its commercial and trade relations with the world at large. We should keep in mind that China does not have oil or some other natural resource that it can leverage like  Russia has over Europe. China's best advantage of cheap labor is at best tenuous. Think Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh, The Philippines and others which are only too willing to take up the "slack" if the need or circumstances arise.

Sam, however, told me that what we should really worry about is what is happening here. Now.  "Our greatest fear should be here", Sam said with his index finger pointed downwards toward the ground. And he had a litany of "this and that" that we in the U.S. should worry about by first looking no farther than the natural state of the union. "What union?", Sam asked rhetorically.

This country is almost inextricably divided politically, socially, sociologically and culturally, Sam observed. 

So, is Sam right?

Well,  politically, for sure, this country is most certainly 50-50 divided. But that division now runs so deep that friendships, the work environment and even family interactions have become painfully untenable. A far cry from when people used to be able to tolerate the differences without affecting their overall relationships. The chasm has widened. Gone is when people with varying political persuasions can go to lunch, play sports, go out for drinks after work together, each other's opinion freely spoken and tolerated. That had become more of an exception now.  Even in large gatherings, people tend to immediately gravitate into globular clusters of people with the same minded beliefs and ideas.

Political differences have always been around since the birth of democracy. In fact, it is an essential component.  Where it becomes a problem is when people are so dug-in that opinions and ideas become inviolable dogmas. This condition negates the idea of meeting in the middle. Each other's "way or the highway" does not tolerate meeting halfway in the middle. Political parties in power, whether locally or nationally, aim for total control of the agenda.  That is how the seed to totalitarianism begins to germinate.

That is just one beef Sam has on what is going on. There is a fracturing of America's social and cultural backbone.  Long held values of family and civility are eroding right before our eyes.

What seemed like an easy question about "how do you define a woman" now appears to be so complicated.  A Supreme Court Justice nominee found that so difficult to answer, falling back on, "I am not a biologist" retort.

Women have come a long way to breaking all kinds of social and cultural barriers only to hit a staggering stumbling block, more powerful than the corporate glass ceiling, in women's sport.  Sports history is being written about how women athletes are losing in unfair competition to competitors who were born male.  Women's track and field and swimming records are being broken by biologically male athletes.  Where is NOW, the National Organization for Women.  The silence is deafening when they used to be the loudest and very effective advocate for women.   

High school girls and college women had seen decades of their opportunities and equitable rewards elevated  to unprecedented heights never seen before only to be dashed by unfair competition from those who shouldn't be in the same playing field.  How many young women's dreams of future scholarships or even just the chance to make the team will unravel because they would lose to the superior strength and speed of biologically male competitors.  

What is happening?  "Woke-ism happened.  The Supreme Court nominee and NOW were intimidated by a sinister force used and applied but never acknowledged by those who practice and employ it.  It is so subtle, yet powerful, that it would only take a handful of voices and keystrokes on social media to intimidate otherwise strong willed individuals and powerful corporations, and even seasoned politicians to cower in fear.

Disney that used to be the steady platform in entertainment to espouse the old traditional values of family and moral certitude is the latest to declare open city to the woke crowd. Disney now finds it necessary to do away with "boys and girls", "ladies and gentlemen" in welcoming its customers or announcing what's next in the program.

The country's politicians and businesses are now so mired with gender multiplicity that they are willing to sacrifice the rights of the majority, who are clearly and simply identified as male and female, on the altar of the woke faith.  Look at the following quote below, from one study:

"The estimated proportion of gender-diverse individuals (those who are not cisgender) varies between 0.1 and 2% of the population, depending on the inclusion criteria and where the studies were held."

The backbone of the U.S. and all other nations are 98% of the traditional male and female classifications  In other words, the country's economy that produce goods and services, the national provision for its defense and security are pretty much carried out by 98% of the population.  Yet, a lot of social changes are now geared towards appeasement of and bending over backwards to accommodate the 2%.

It is one thing to be tolerant and accommodating but it is another to be practically subservient to the minority.  Long strides have been taken to protect the rights of minorities, including those who identify with non-cisgender identities, and laws are in the books to ensure it.

This is just one of those that worries Sam.  He worries that the government now allows "X" on the box for gender in U.S. passports. Ironically, since women inherit only the X chromosome, so facetiously, in a manner of speaking, anyone who will mark their passport X, is for all intents and purposes a woman.  Just saying.

So, where did this leave Sam? He finished our conversation with a defeated shrug.