Brand New American!

JWise Life, Moments, Photo of the Day

Caroline Wise has become an American Citizen today here in Phoenix, Arizona

Seemingly forever ago, back in 1995, Caroline moved with me from Germany to the United States, the land where I was born. We arrived here without a clue what we’d do for our careers; we were ready for an adventure doing unknown new stuff. Over the ensuing years, we accomplished many things and experienced an amazing number of adventures. After nearly 25 years, we’ve grown confident in this endeavor while experiencing a resounding sense of joy. With the sense that life was traveling on the right track, it was time to throw some new conditions into the mix. What if Caroline were to auto-magically transform from a German into an American? Or maybe she could be both simultaneously?

First of all, why might she/we want that? A couple of reasons, really. As a tax-paying resident alien (green card holder) for all these years, Caroline is entitled to a lot more social security here in the United States than in Germany. However, that entitlement is tied to maintaining her residency here, among other factors. So, if Caroline wanted to take up retirement in Germany (or just wanted to stay outside of the U.S. for an extended period), she wouldn’t qualify to receive her social security without an address in America. This is one of the drawbacks of being a resident alien. Secondly, there are “luxuries” that come with being a U.S. passport holder, such as the certainty you can easily reenter the United States from abroad. Every time when we return to the U.S. from Europe or recently from Mexico we encounter that feeling of nervosity when we fear that somehow her reentry will be denied.

Caroline Wise has become an American Citizen today here in Phoenix, Arizona

If she could maintain her European status and also be a U.S. citizen, we would be free to make choices later in life regarding living options that wouldn’t be limited by how long visas allow one or the other of us to remain somewhere. This process, though, is not an easy one. I wrote back on September 21, 2020, that Caroline was applying for her U.S. Citizenship; what I didn’t mention was that she’d just received approval from the German government that would allow her to retain her German citizenship. So, here we were more than three and a half years into this process, and then on May 24th, 2022, she walked into the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Office to take the citizenship test and possibly be sworn in that morning.

Caroline Wise has become an American Citizen today here in Phoenix, Arizona

When I dropped her off, my wife was a German citizen; the next time I would see her she’d likely be an American citizen too. Or so I thought. As for me, I was sitting at a Burger King at the corner of the parking lot, sipping a coffee, and waiting as I couldn’t accompany her into the facility. Every so often, she texted me; she was pretty nervous.

After an hour and a half, a message was delivered to my phone, “Passed.”  Huge relief was felt between us, but her fingerprints had expired, and the resubmission would take another 60 to 90 minutes. We thought this meant she would still be able to attend a swearing-in ceremony on the same day, but as it turned out over 2 hours later, it wasn’t meant to be. She emerged from the building holding an invitation to an oath ceremony to be held at the District Court in Phoenix on June 3rd. Which brings us to today – and all the photos in this blog post.

Caroline Wise has become an American Citizen today here in Phoenix, Arizona

Since the venue was the U.S. District Court, I was able to attend the ceremony. About 70 applicants and their family members jammed into the courtroom and viewing gallery. Just before the ceremony started, volunteers were requested, and Caroline and two other applicants raised their hands without knowing for what. It turned out that they would be called on later to speak to the attendees about their experience as immigrants.

The ceremony included speeches (including a recorded message by the President), the all-important oath of allegiance, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance. I could tell that Caroline was close to tears because when it was her time to step up to the microphone, her voice was a bit shaky, but she pulled it off nicely.

After the ceremony, Caroline insisted I take her photo with the presiding judge, the Honorable Stephen McNamee, as a nod to her dad, Hanns, a retired judge of the German Federal Court of Justice.

Caroline Wise has become an American Citizen today here in Phoenix, Arizona

Not quite 30 minutes old as a new American, Caroline was registered to vote, and a U.S. Passport was applied for. Her social security card update will have to wait until we get her citizenship certificate back.

Our first stop was at the drive-thru at McDonald’s for a Happy Meal, followed by shopping for her first AR-15, while a pair of new yoga pants from Lululemon arrives next week. With all of those things done, she’ll really be 100% American. Please excuse this last bit of jest; it’s just my sarcasm to throw in some of the uglier American stereotypes, as she’d never wear yoga pants. [I might – in a yoga studio only, though – Caroline ^_^]

They Don’t Know Yet

JWise Life

King Coffee Roastery in Phoenix, Arizona

Their lives are changing, but they don’t know it yet. People count on consistency, repetition, and some certainty. And so it is when they’ve found a place that has allowed them to find some sense of community. The coffee shop I’m writing at today is closing in 23 days, but it’s not been announced yet, so some of the regulars are still in their routine with no sense of foreboding or knowledge that a month from now, many of them will no longer run into each other. I believe when they, too, learn of the closing, there will be a sense of mourning as a favorite morning stop is being taken off the map.

Inflation is the culprit, taking another victim that will be yet one more anonymous mom & pop operation to close on the march toward corporatized America. The division of wealth has created incredible hostilities between reality, comfort, and what some of us consider luxury. When private equity groups, millionaires, and billionaires are able to gobble up vast amounts of property and require them to have sizable returns to generate yet more wealth, they can take rents and valuations to whatever the market might bear. As for the disenfranchised public at large, they are a faceless victim that will either figure it out or land on the street; such is our take-no-prisoners style of business.

Regarding this coffee shop, the rent is going up, coffee prices are rising in part due to energy and transportation costs, finding basic supplies such as cups, lids, and even oatmeal grows more challenging, and all of this figures into the problems of finding employees that even if they were available, the employer has to remain aware that they are going to be pinched by an economy that will have them needing to demand more money.

Meanwhile, the laughter this place is accustomed to continues throughout the morning, and I’m acutely aware that this counter I’ve stood at for years will become a distant memory like so many other places I’ve frequented over the decades. Normally, I move away or encounter the locked door of a business that, from one day to the next, just quit. I’m sure that they, too, knew what was coming but couldn’t face the brutality of telling customers whose sympathies would make it just that much more heartbreaking to see their dream extinguished. Part of me wishes today that I didn’t know.

Until the owner makes the announcement, there will be no commiseration parties of solemnity over final cups of coffee; it’s business as usual…until it’s not.

Childhood Rememberances

JWise Life

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1970 in Frankfurt, Germany

Last summer, in late May and early June, I found myself in Germany helping deal with the belongings my mother-in-law Jutta had amassed at home. My job was to sort, make sense of, preserve, recycle, donate, or toss those things that were no longer required by anyone, considering that Jutta had entered assisted living. Among the lifetime belongings of Jutta was a portfolio of close to a hundred drawings from her daughter Caroline Wise née Engelhardt of Frankfurt, Germany. From the time she was two years old, right up until Caroline was 13, Jutta put these drawings into safekeeping. My mother-in-law was pretty meticulous about saving these and dating them as Caroline presented mom with her art. This very first piece was drawn the month before Caroline turned three. I’m finally getting around to posting this now as it sat languishing as a draft for too long, just as they had in a folder for nearly 40 years among Jutta’s things.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1971 in Frankfurt, Germany

Five months later, Caroline was mastering people, realistic hands, castles, and blue skies. This is from April 1971, and Caroline is 40 months old.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1972 in Frankfurt, Germany

At four years old, Caroline was drawing patterns, while over in America, I was probably still eating dirt at nine years old.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1973 in Frankfurt, Germany

By the time Caroline Wise was five, she took a liking to American Indians with horses starting to show up in her imagination.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1974 in Frankfurt, Germany

It’s 1974 when if I had to guess, Caroline drew this image of her mom.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1976 in Frankfurt, Germany

I don’t know what happened in 1975, but there wasn’t a single image from that year, and so here we are jumping right into 1976 and a nine-year-old little girl in love with ponies and Native Americans.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1976 in Frankfurt, Germany

1976 must have been the year Caroline was introduced to watercolors at school, or maybe mom bought her a set?

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1976 in Frankfurt, Germany

Caroline wrote down this story in 4th grade (at 9 or 10 years old). Back then, a typical exercise in German class would be that the teacher (Mrs. Hirsch) read a short story to the class, and the children had to “re-narrate” it in their own words. The story titled The Careful Dreamer is about a traveler of the old days who shares a room in an inn with someone else. He took off his clothes and got ready for bed, but before he lay down, he strapped his slippers to his feet. The traveler’s roommate asked him why and got the answer, “I once dreamed that I stepped on broken glass, and it was so painful that I never want to sleep barefoot again!” According to Mrs. Hirsch’s comment, Caroline did a great job.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from date unknown in Frankfurt, Germany

This was one of a few images without a date, but I was finding her fascination with horses interesting as although I knew she’d read Misty of Chincoteague and Black Beauty, I can’t say she ever shared with me just how deep her love of horses was.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1977 in Frankfurt, Germany

It’s 1977, and the year Caroline will turn ten years old in mid-December; I think her sense for the abstract was something that should have been developed.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1977 in Frankfurt, Germany

More horses, this time from 5th grade.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1978 in Frankfurt, Germany

Maybe this was foreshadowing that Caroline would one day see ponies in the mountains.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1979 in Frankfurt, Germany

During the summer of 1979, the horse and Native American theme continued.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from date unknown in Frankfurt, Germany

Another image without a date.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from 1981 in Frankfurt, Germany

Crayons were one of the first things Caroline asked me to get for her from the American PX, a big box of 96 colors. It was probably around this time in 1981 when Caroline had to give up drawing and art to take her studies seriously.

Drawing by Caroline Wise née Engelhardt from date unknown in Frankfurt, Germany

A rich woman throws a coin at a beggar woman with a child. This was the last image in the portfolio and a fitting one as the woman I would meet in 1989 was very aware of injustice, violence, and the social ills that fail so many people.

First Teddy Bear from Caroline Wise née Engelhardt of Frankfurt, Germany

All of these things, including the teddy bear above that belonged to Caroline at one time, are headed to the scrap heap where maybe pieces will be recycled while some of it burned. They were never destined to find their way into a museum, and while it might feel tragic at first glance that they should just be put in the trash, it’s ultimately where everything we own and create ends up. Maybe here on the internet, they’ll last longer than they might have otherwise.

Better Unseen

JWise Life

Colonoscopy

Ask me tongue-in-cheek why I didn’t blog about your colonoscopy, and I’ll just go ahead and do just that. What kind of question was that coming from my wife? Really, you want the world to see the inside of your lower intestine? Fine, here it is.

Caroline was the first of us to go ahead and finally get a colonoscopy. I, on the other hand, have been leery, and it turns out that it was for no good reason. Well, let’s condition that because my idea of a colonoscopy came out of the ancient past where doctors, using something approaching the size of a thermos, required the patient be put under general anesthesia due to the trauma of having a giant tool shoved up your pooper, so they could look around trying to find the damage done by a poor diet. Then there were the stories I picked up before I was seven years old, where adults spoke about the horrors wrought by the laxatives and their foul taste. These scars have lasted a long time.

It turns out I was all wrong, at least as far as the procedure is concerned in 2021. This, though, begs the question, why didn’t one of my doctors ask me over these past eight years just what it was that was making me hesitant to have someone deep-diving past my rectum? Shouldn’t they have known that someone my age could have known of the process prior to modern medicine? Then again, I can also ask myself why didn’t I just Google it?

I have a great answer to that last question. Google any malady or medical procedure, and your ad stream automagically is transformed into a modern-day pharmacopeia where every corner of a webpage is there to encourage the reader to diagnose ailments and formulate strategies to deal with illness: poof, yer a doctor!

Well, it turns out that the device is no bigger than a finger and is able to probe the 5 feet of the colon without discomfort, but then again, what could be uncomfortable under the influence of propofol? This means that I can finally belly-up (or would that be “butt-up”?)  and get those nether regions beyond the b-hole checked out and photographed like Caroline’s seen above.

As for how did things look up, that squishy wet pink tube normally filled with creamy brown poop regarding my wife? She had one tiny polyp identified by item #3, a seriously small polyp, and doesn’t have to come in for a return visit for 5-10 years.

Finally, this is a milestone in my writing as while I’ve written about Oregon, Yellowstone, Europe, and other places many times, this is the first time I’ve ever noted anything at all about the interior of my wife’s bottom and for the casual reader, maybe you hope this is the last…until I write about my own.

Car Books

JWise Life

Reading in the car

I’ve known that Caroline tracks the books she’s been reading and listening to and has been doing so for years. She started the list back in 2012 when she was endeavoring to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction and needed to track which ones she read; this was also part of her goal to read more novels as the two of us both share a passion for non-fiction. Tonight, I learned that she’s also been keeping track of books we’ve completed while out driving. For those who don’t know, Caroline doesn’t like driving, and most of the time, when we are both in the car, she reads to me. I’d like to share when this started, but we are both relatively uncertain; while I thought it was while we were in Germany, she insists it wasn’t until we were in America [In my memory, our first shared book experience was Moby Dick  – Caroline].

Had you asked me a day ago, I might have guessed that Caroline has read a dozen or so books to us in the past nearly ten years. This would have been based on feeling like it takes us months to get through a book, for example, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson clocks in at 1024 pages. I could easily see us needing nearly a year for a tome that big, but nope, according to Caroline, we started it on July 10, 2014, and finished it on December 13 of the same year. So, not only do we read books faster than I thought, but they are read incredibly fast. From early 2012 to October 14, 2021, or about 9.5 years, we shared 49 books we can account for. There are a number of titles we spent a day to a week trying to find a groove with that didn’t work out; those are not listed, only the books we’ve finished while driving around America. The idea that we’ve jointly read five books a year on average in the car is mind-blowing, but as I started going through the list, every one of those books came back to me.

Note regarding the first book below titled The Plum in the Golden Vase (real author unknown although it is listed as Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, which translates to “the Scoffing Scholar of Lanlin” according to Wikipedia), this massive work arrives in 5 volumes (estimated 850,000 words) with nearly 3,800 pages of dense text and a wide cast of characters. Caroline and I have used this tome as a kind of commercial interlude between other books we are reading. After a number of chapters from other titles, we’ll return to this 400-year-old Chinese novel to pull in a chapter or two before returning to the primary book we’re reading through. As of this post, we have finished the first four volumes and are about to start on the final book. This 10-year journey into the life and death of Ximen Qing will leave a gap after we’re done, but we are heading into The Water Margin, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh and The Plum in the Golden Vase is a kind of spin-off from that novel, so we are not straying far.

The Water Margin by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong comes in just below the 850,000 words of The Plum in the Golden Vase and will be read simultaneously with In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust at 1.27 million words that we started recently. I find this arrangement interesting because we’ll be dividing our time between these monumental Chinese and French novels interspersed with other books about science or history. This doesn’t take into account what we read at home.

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s that list covering early 2012 to October 2021:

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 1 – Read between 2012 to 2015

The River of Doubt by Candice Millart – Unknown to April 2012

Victorian London by  – Unknown to October 2012

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal- October 2012 to November 2012

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson – November 2012 to January 2013

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt – January 2013 to April 2013

The Vikings: A History by Robert Ferguson – May 2013 to August 2013

How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman – August 2013 to Feb 2014

The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg – Unknown to August 2014

The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg – September 2014 to November 2014

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby – February 2014 to March 2014

Humboldt by Gerard Helferich – April 2014 to May 2014

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms by Richard Fortey – May 2014 to July 2014

The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson – July 2014 to December 2014

Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall – January 2015 to March 2015

Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco – March 2015 to April 2015

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 2 – 2015 to 2017

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – April 2015 to May 2015

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo – May 2015 to June 2015

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey – June 2015 to August 2015

Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth by Chris Stringer – July 2015 to September 2015

The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson – September 2015 to October 2015

East of Eden by John Steinbeck – October 2015 to November 2015

The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire by A.H. Sayce – December 2015 to Unknown

The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy – Unknown to July 2016

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder –  August 2017 to October 2017

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 3 – December 2017 to August 2019

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – January 2018 to February 2018

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan – February 2018 to May 2018

The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization by Nicholas P. Money – June 2018 to July 2018

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson – July 2018 to October 2018

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett – November 2018 to November 2018

Handywoman: A Creative Life, Post-stroke by Kate Davies – November 2018 to November 2018

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow – December 2018 to December 2018

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman – December 2018 to August 2019

Kabloona by Gontran de Poncin – January 2019 – February 2019

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis – June 2019 to July 2019

Barons of the Sea by Steven Ujifusa – August 2019 to October 2019

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 4 – September 2019 to October 2021

Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti – October 2019 to December 2019

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan – January 2020 to February 2020

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann – February 2020 to August 2020

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard – August 2020 to January 2021

The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray – January 2021 to April 2021

Tales from the Ant World by E.O. Wilson – April 2021 to April 2021

The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson – April 2021 to July 2021

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey Smith – July 2021 to August 2021

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – September 2021 to (currently reading)

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 5 – October 2021 to (currently reading)*

*Edit: Part 5 of The Plum In The Golden Vase pulled us in hard, and its 420 pages were zipped through in just a few weeks. We closed out this incredible journey on November 5, 2021.

Things Will Change

JWise Life, Thoughts

John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

While I’m still enchanted as always with new technology, I’ve been reluctant to share that enthusiasm as it feels to me that our current obsession with hoisting ourselves upon the petard of stupidity requires the addressing of fundamentals such as education and acceptance of diversity as important precursors before we embark on explorations of complexity. But life is not just about the basics, and besides, who will I ever convince that the way forward and into the future is through the struggle with those things that force us to wrestle with our own ignorance?

In some people’s eyes, I’m old. With less than three years before I turn 60, I’m already eligible to be a member of AARP. This organization is the Association of American Retired Persons and one only needs to be 50 to join, and I, in fact, am a member. At first, I wasn’t very inclined to join as it felt like an acknowledgment of being old, which is anathema to being a participating member of mainstream America. Then, with some reluctance, I accepted that the discounts for hotels and rental cars were worth the price of admission. So, while I might be considered old by some, I’m not ready for a couch; we don’t even own one, nor do we own a TV. I’m not into golf, motorhomes, or grandchildren, as we don’t have those either. But I am still into the shit that blows my mind.

When I was younger and looking for the meaning of life and god, I turned to philosophy, science, sociology, music, art, technology, and various psychedelics to help illuminate a world that seemed hidden to me. That dark world was a place of curiosity that seemed shut off to the majority of people encountered. They wanted to mine what they knew and revel in what had been. They were archaic, empty shadows of the humans who, at one time, embraced the unknown and raced into adventures. Sure, we’d been to the poles, to the depths of the ocean, and touched the moon, but it felt like we’d been nowhere regarding our own minds. Today, I find confirmation of that bias all around me. Collectively, we are idiots.

This, though, isn’t supposed to be a lament of society’s direction and lack of focus or what propelled my curiosity. It is supposed to be a question of why, with so much opportunity to scale the heights of the impossible, are we, as a society, pandering to the lowest common denominators? The “LCD” humans that a famous politician once referred to as the “Undesirables” are all of a sudden dictating the rollback of progress, so their lack of intellectual gumption can earn a silver star, and they can feel good about their failure to evolve. Fuck that.

John, what’s triggering your anger? I recently received the August/September issue of AARP – The Magazine. Kevin Costner is on the cover with promises to talk about the American West, fatherhood, creativity, and old-fashioned values. There’s a story about pets, Carol Burnett, sunblock, home improvements, and the Geriatrics Crisis. Ah, you say they covered creativity in the issue? Nope, unless Kevin Costner being in a band and acting is inspiring others to explore their own creativity. This magazine is a window into older America, boring old shits fascinated with celebrity, spectator sports, TV, the Standard American Diet, their ailments from sitting around doing nothing, and occasionally being teased with the idea they too could master TikTok. But isn’t this all just a form of agitprop or maybe agedprop? What I mean is, isn’t this a kind of information conformity warfare meant to wrap people in the banality of comfort instead of agitating them to find new horizons?

Seven years ago, in 2013, the Oculus Rift DK1 was released of which I was a Kickstarter backer. By April 2014, I had started a small company to build a virtual world; it was known as Hypatia and was originally meant to be a casual learning environment for the exploration of the arts. Prior to my fulfilling a 20-year dream of virtual reality becoming a thing, I’d been diving deep into the world of video while learning Adobe’s Premiere and After Effects along with a host of plugins. This was a natural extension of my work with DSLRs that were all of a sudden sporting 1080p video recording capability that paired with nice lenses, were offering the kind of quality reserved for film. A revolution was at hand that would grow exponentially as smartphones embraced digital video, but I’d have to put that on hold as VR held greater sway over me. Virtual reality was where video, photographs, art, music, exploration, learning, meeting, chatting, and commerce could all converge and give me my own private SoHo or Left Bank in Paris. Well, I was too early, and the demand for computer “gaming” content that didn’t involve violence was too niche a market, and it was even smaller in a world where there were still very few VR headsets.

Along the way, I encountered more amazing software and started falling in love with Eurorack modular synthesizers. Crypto-currency was gaining traction, as was artificial intelligence, after more than 50 years in the lab and on the periphery of the sciences. Video was heading for mainstream adoption of 4k resolution, and Tesla’s Model S was going in the same direction in popular acceptance. The whole time these revolutions were happening it felt that there was a wider reluctance to fully embrace the changes these technologies were offering. It feels that these breakneck advances alienated so many people that by 2016, fear drove people to embrace populism to return the world to the way it was.

So here we are at the tail end of what will have been the Age of Fake. Fake concern, fake politics, fake worries, and fake people who snatched the Post Reality reigns of mass delusion and manipulated a frightened population into what is becoming a kind of mass suicide. Yes, COVID-19 was the catalyst for killing and maiming the old, but it is the policies of obfuscation that propelled the selfish to endanger themselves and everyone else. We are turning inward in a toxic war that smacks of Jim Jones’ efforts in Guyana that ended in 900 people taking their lives back in 1978; was that a dress rehearsal for 2021?

How in the world is this blog entry about my love of technology after dumping all this spleen on the reader? We need to course-correct this ship and move into the Post-Fake era of Super Enlightenment, and that requires all the tools of technological discovery that humanity can throw at our problems. From the environment, viruses, ignorance, poverty, racism, social and economic imbalances, war, and all the other malaise that threatens us and the other life that shares our planet, we humans must lead a charge of advancement or hope that far worse forms of plague are able to stop this reckless species. I, for one, want to see us do good and stop or at least slow down our slip into the abyss.