John Wise

I recently wrote about the Origins Project that was operating through Arizona State University for a number of years and which, in many ways, came to an end by 2017. This got Caroline and me talking about how many great lectures we had attended, and then it all stopped, just as the music stopped once the COVID-19 pandemic shut things down. The difference, though, is there wasn’t a pandemic per se but a catapult of rationality that happened to coincide with the program going quiet. But why?

It was time to legitimize that segment of the population that had been feeling excluded and fearful of becoming irrelevant. As society progresses during this age, there is an increasing requirement for a wide swath of our population to wrestle with complexity. Due to limited resources of deep intellect to explore difficult problems, humanity must pull from all corners of culture to find the talent that can rise to the daunting challenges we are facing. In these ever-shifting sands, it’s inevitable that people will be left behind; this has always been part of the price of progress.

When we attended our first Origins event, it was in 2011, which was also the year that the Google Brain Team was established. Look at any image of that group, and you’ll see a microcosm of what our workforce is inching ever closer to looking like. This was also the same year the Occupy Wall Street movement began, though this might have had its roots in the Tea Party movement that got underway in 2009. Another part of this puzzle is that the smartphone gained serious popularity with the release of the iPhone back in 2007. So, how are these disparate elements playing a role in the catapulting of rationality?

Since the advent of the commercial internet in 1995, and even before that, with the rollout of the personal computer, great stressors were being placed on the way business was evolving and how people were employed and remunerated. Between 2007 and 2011, we left the first stage of the internet behind as it became ubiquitous in everyday life. Out of the ruins of the housing collapse, we saw the demise of the Big Block stores accelerate and a move away from Mom & Pop restaurants. People were simultaneously heading online for shopping while at the same time looking for uniform experiences from those things and places where they were spending money.

The speed of innovation and the changing face of the labor force combined with social media platforms that were spreading information faster than ever were all contributing to more and more people being able to see the place they were living in clearer than ever before. While some of us who grew up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York City in the 70s and 80s saw this cultural shift first hand, the majority of Americans only had only caught glimpses through television. As time went by, these same isolated citizens were starting to wake up to the fact that gay marriage, Indian programmers, and pharmacists, along with predominately Hispanic kitchen labor, were all around them, and they panicked.

By 2017, the momentum behind the Make America Dumb Again and Pride of the Deplorables was in full swing. Behind the movement of silly archaic ideas was an exploitative media blowing dog whistles, convincing this segment of our population that revolt was the best way forward. This culminated with a near-full-on attack on the U.S. Capitol in a half-hearted attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government.

The progress made after the 1968 countercultural revolution has been curtailed by the events and messaging of the past four years, and I can’t yet see that this momentum will be recaptured as America must deal with the recognition that abandoning any segment of the population is detrimental to its overall health. Failing to lift up those who are less fortunate is equivalent to having an immigrant problem but ignoring it while it serves particular economic benefits. Our problems are deep and complex; calling a group dumb, deplorable, liberal, racist, or any other moniker that riles the “base” only contributes to issues becoming intractable. Fixing things from the end of a gun barrel might work in some war situations but has never been conducive to propelling societies forward in any prosperous manner.

But the catapult of rationality has been launched, and where its payload landed is beyond my purview; I can only hope that 2020 will not have been our 476, and we are so far gone that all is lost.

The coin image is licensed by Creative Commons and is titled Claudius “ROMAN EMPIRE, CLAUDIUS 41-54 A.D. b” by woody1778a

The question occasionally arises in media that asks, “What would you do if you were confronted with your imminent demise?” Well, neither Caroline nor I am facing that right now that we are aware of, but we do have a somewhat similar question in front of us that asks, “What must you do or see in this corner of the planet if you were moving to the other side of it in the future?” What places are so important that should you no longer live in that country or state, it would become a hardship to return just for that one location? For example, imagine you went to Paris but were unable to visit the Louvre.

So we’ve scoured the map, and the first glaring omission is that we’ve never visited Central or South America. Closer to home, the list turns out to be quite short. We only identified four places we’ve never been to, three destinations we’d like to visit again, and two events we’d like to catch. They are in the order I just listed above: Lowell Observatory and the Arboretum in Flagstaff, Arizona, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and taking the Amtrak from old Route 66 in Arizona into the Great Plains. Our return visits would bring us back to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, the Oregon Coast, and relatively low on the list of priorities for culinary reasons, Oki Dog, Shakey’s, and the Northwoods Inn all in the Los Angeles area. Finally, the events include the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Rhinebeck Sheep & Wood Festival held in New York state. That’s it for the United States

From Mexico south and Central America, we have three or four things on our list, including kayaking in the Sea of Cortez among the whales, a textile tour in Peru, and another textile tour in either Oaxaca or Chiapas, Mexico. With that, we’ll feel we did justice to seeing the world around us while we lived in America. For anyone who’d point out that a visit or two to points south of us would never do justice to understanding an iota of our southern neighbors, we are well aware of that, but life is too short to ever know everywhere.

Sure, we’d like just one more visit to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and a number of other national parks, but lodging in those parks is already sold out for 2021. Believe it or not, we’ve seen the majority of America, and while we’ve never been to Vancouver, Canada, or taken in Butchart Gardens in Victoria, we’re okay with that.

After 26 years in America, we are approaching the need to immerse ourselves in something else. The natural beauty and ease of meeting people are certainly attractive, but the detractors are growing too big to ignore. The prices of housing, health care, and transportation will garrote our retirement experience or demand that we work to death. That ugly idea of working to death is beyond the pale and feels inhumane, and so we’ll be looking at when our time in America has to come to an end and have another new beginning where limited resources can go further. After all, this is all about going further.

Image licensed under Creative Commons titled “Old Globe” by ToastyKen