Magic

Months ago I set up a Twitter account to see what it was for. Didn’t really see it as useful to me so have let it slumber for months, in spite of which I have a grand total of ten followers.

This evening, however, while at the gym, I decided to do an experiment. I’ll be honest: I don’t think it will work. But no cost to try it. So I sent out a tweet saying that I was looking for anyone who studied French at UCLA back in the ‘60s or later with Mme Sylvie Walker. She was Swiss, married to an American (Professor of English, I think), and a wonderful, funny, witty, outstanding teacher. I loved my French classes with her and wish they had been twice as long.

We corresponded for a while after I graduated in 1970. I was in the Peace Corps from 1970-1973 in Senegal, but at some point thereafter—because I’m a terrible correspondent—I lost touch with her. So the Twitter experiment is just for nostalgia sake and also to see if my tiny group of followers know anyone who knows anyone etc. etc. And if my tiny group of blog followers would like to pass the question on as well, I thank you in advance.

Okay, now to the title of this post. As the news washes over us day and night, I wonder how much of our attention is directed to the wrong things. Not that AIG bonuses aren’t infuriating; of course they are. Not that we shouldn’t worry about the financial black hole whose event horizon seems to be spreading rapidly across the planet. But what are we ignoring?

Like the person with high blood pressure who ends up dying of the cancer that was overlooked for too long, I wonder whether sooner or later (and it’s the sooner I worry about most since I’m old enough that later may not concern me personally) we will discover that we paid too much attention to the magician’s left hand when we should have been focused on his right. While we wondered whether or not OJ was guilty (first time), bankers were inventing derivatives. While we focused on various other scandals of the day, the 9/11 hijackers were in flight training schools.

It’s not that there aren’t people paying attention to potentially serious issues that only get occasional media coverage. But from what I see on the big TVs at the gym (which is where I see the mainstream media), relatively few stories get saturation coverage and everything else is ignored.

A big part of this is the time scale involved. For example, glaciers all over the world are retreating. If you live in Maine like I do, or Florida, or Louisiana, or Texas, this is not high on our list of concerns. But for millions and millions of people in Asia, or the northwestern USA, or anywhere else in the world where winter snowpack and glacial melt provide vital water for drinking and irrigation, the vanishing glaciers are a ticking bomb.

But it’s not a bomb that will explode tomorrow or next week, so aside from scientists and a handful of writers, it’s not at the top of most people’s lists of things to worry about, even though the problems that will arise from a diminished water supply in areas of huge population could be historic. Civilizations have fallen when water supplies vanish.

Oh well. Every day is a test for every species on the planet including homo sapiens. Personally I’m betting the bacteria will outlast us.