We social animals come together for a variety of reasons; often, if not always, it is due to words spoken by a catalyst person or group of people. Indeed, with a minor tweak (and perhaps a twerk-heavy Dubstep remix) Dylan’s classic lyric could in 2025 go “Come gather round people and put down your phones…”  And then a paradox emerges: how did the social tool of a cell phone become synonymous with a sense of being adrift in an isolated life? Even an old grandfather clock ticks and tocks with more visceral power than a steady stream of Tik-Tok videos, the likes of which lull to sleep even the most fervid of imaginations. How did the tool of digital technology come so widely to be seen as a set of shackles, a harness of creativity and connection alike?

Herein lies a paradox: we’re social animals, but not all socialization is created equal.  One sphere, that of online video gaming, at first blush seems immune to this blanket anomie.  Gamers, presumably, are having a field day with the whole planet as possible participants in their adventures.  In recent decades even the most shy or buttoned-down young people found expressive prowess in the realm of video games.

Silence in the Halls of Gaming

A stark lifeless reality seems to have descended on, of all places, the nacho-fuelled realm of online gaming: the internet presently is awash in articles like that of L. Winkie discussing a “lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture.”

Such realms of honor and duty abound in online gaming—team play populated by knights, gremlins, ogres, special ops, and flight simulators.  Fictionalized realms that translate the performative nature of human interactions from the mundane to the magical. For some, the truest way of experiencing social solidarity occurs in these simulacra.  While the body is stationary the mind conquers vast vistas along with comrades of the same ilk. Some even say that the gaming realm is uniquely situated to open the most reticent of introverts to a realm of healthy human contact and conversation. “I think [games like World of Warcraft] can affect one’s willingness to open up to someone. You don’t have to deal with the layer of bodies. You don’t have to worry about the physical barrier. All of that is stripped away when you’re speaking through a video game,” Although mediated by a gaming console or computer, people of any age or earthly ability share a game, with rules, and converse socially—it’s about as sci fi a setup as anyone would have imagined a half century ago. Yet, when games are played in silence it’s almost akin to merely playing with oneself.

Be it Backgammon or Fortnite, this paradoxical empirical reality has emerged in the online gaming sphere: silence holds sway. While game forests are still full of druid avatars and prowling gremlins the in-game chat, that glue of social good times ranging from hippie prayer circles to fraternity reunion gatherings, has fallen by the wayside. All that’s left is the game itself, played in taciturn silence. “The complex social contract, the acquaintances waiting to be forged into brotherhood—is nowhere to be found. The chat box that used to chirp with shitposts, gossip, and hyperlocal banter is conspicuously barren. If you do partner up with someone for an adventure, words are rarely exchanged. When the final boss is toppled, everyone leaves the group and dissolves into the ether.”

Studies and anecdotes conclude, then, that people are literally just there to play the game, not to interact in any meaningful human manner. The result seems a bit like automated checkout kiosks or AI chatbots suggesting improved dish-doing methods. Instead of being replaced by mindless automaton robots, have we just become more like computers? To be fair, since time immemorial, people have played games. Mahjong and backgammon boards date back millennia, for instance. Beginning in the 1970s computers entered the fray.  A tennis-like game called Pong somewhat swept the nation and, since then, concentric circles of youths have learned to wile away their free time drafted into the intense and competitive world of sports—gaming, in other words. While in any gaming effort the great majority of their effort goes into conquering this or that villain or achieving one of a myriad of preordained missions, it’s in that extra non-competitive percentile of awareness that parents and onlookers tended to notice that the raw humanity of daily discourse would seep in. Pets, bills, girlfriends or boyfriends, current events, or any matter of external cultural concerns were grist for the mill.  With the rise of the internet that become part of the mic-d up gaming chat system. And yet now, apparently, the woodland of non-productive gaming discussion has gone eerily quiet, maybe too quiet. It’s a bit akin to a woodland that falls silent while a stealthy cougar patrols through, its thoughtful mincing footfalls barely making an impression on the mossy forest floor. What is stalking and silencing gamers who once heckled and hazed one another in a manner most jocular – what has brought on this muteness?

It’s a question, alas, not yet to be answered. The one certainty we have is, as reported in Slate Magazine, gamers are not chatting much anymore. My brother offered a suggestion that as a great majority of online gamers have, er, aged out of teenage tomfoolery and into the sometimes-sordid but oft-serious realm of adulthood and parenthood, such men have grown into a life for which their pubescent jocularity lacks a vocabulary. While holding a digital rifle or golf club is as simple as swinging for the fences, the feeling of nuzzling an infant in swaddling clothes or holding a marriage together with twine is ever-so much more difficult to explain in the brief intervals between setting up a perfect putt or ducking for cover in the face of enemy fire. Another opinion would be that amidst the din of irrational toxicity about all manner of current events and political machinations the requisite sense of openness and understanding foundational to discourse in any social setting has eroded such that gamers collectively think “why bother” when it comes to opening their mouth about that which is relevant to the task at hand. No industrial sweatshop boss could expect more!

Yet, so long as we at AU remember to try and enlist in courses that we prefer, we at least will be able to converse gladly about what we are studying!

Reference

Winkie, L. (2024). ‘Silent But Deadly’. Slate. Retrieved from https://slate.com/culture/2024/12/video-games-world-warcraft-multiplayer-call-duty-halo.html

Besides the panoply of course material on offer, ranging from creative writing to interpersonal psychology to personalized course syllabii constructed in unison betwixt oneself and one’s tutor, the pedagogical outcome of the program is uniquely individual. Students learn to see that, even amidst the most hallowed ivy-draped canvas, full of pomp and circumstance and folks who graduate to become apparent Masters of the Universe, a great divide exists between differing academic disciplines. These varied approaches, often termed silos, tend to be in either open or taciturn conflict with each other’s worldviews.

Now silos, for those of less agrarian origins, are generally filled with materials that, over time, ferment and become useful fodder for animals. It’s called silage, logically enough. Occasionally, as happened in my elder’s living memory in BC’s Fraser Valley of my childhood, a silo’s inner zymology creates so much heat and a vacuum as air is inhaled and exhaled by yeasts and bacteria, that the silo will literally explode. While comedians make hay about all the hot air emanating from politicians in far away capitals, the organic truth of the silo reveals that whenever a lot of one thing is stuffed into a sufficiently enclosed canister, a roiling inner turmoil can explode out into the world. Maybe this helps to explain all the unbecoming freakout sessions one finds online in the social media sphere—folks always seem to be emotionally outraged in a manner not conducive to critical thought or devil’s advocate inquiry.

This extends to disputes in academia, too, such as the way the realm of psychology obsessively focuses on notions of individuation, treating the interior life of the mind as though we each are characters in a Jane Austen novel. By contrast, sociology takes the birds eye view of society, by and large, seeing it as an immense mechanistic realm where much of our life is forged out of our background and beginnings such that our apparent conscious agency appears as an afterthought. And then there’s the hard sciences, in the popular imagination especially, where much of who we is best understood through an algorithm of genetics and chemistry, rather than the meanings we make and create through our conscious effort. In the end as learners we’re left to sort through the jumble of certainties (often plied by social media influencers in a manner that would surely induce a blush to the cheeks of even the cheapest 1920s snake oil salesman or travelling preacher). To pick through the randomness and refuse of facts and events and make some use of it might be the ultimate academic skill we strive to attain – like dung beetles of academia, if you will.

But it can’t all  be work, and, just as creatures of the wild relish their tasks, if for no reason as they know nothing else, each in its nature knows to rest and recuperate. As humans this means, in part, learning to not take ourselves so very seriously.

In our more expansive moments we know that our lives are not only limited in duration but our minds are limited by the ways by which we define and acquire truth. It helps to stop what we’re doing and take stock. Even in mid-sentence, in mid-lecture, in the middle of what would be a raptly-attentive classroom discussion for a brick and mortar pupil, we can lie down and take a nap like a newborn. This moment of instant change involves a sudden appreciation of those mindlessly mindful moments of pondering where, like lion cubs bellied up to the colostrum bar, our soulful eyes rise to the horizon and we ponder the meaning of life and our place within it. These dazed and dawdling interjections to our studies can remind us to not take ourselves or our discipline so very seriously, the better to apply that most priceless of life skill to our studies: the acquisition of true perspective, true context, toward our lives in the real world.

The 20^th Century author Henry Miller, in the midst of a deepening horror at the vacuity of the Hollywood script-writing industry, wrote to a friend “when I do nothing I find I like it immensely. One can do nothing here because the surroundings themselves are sufficient.” California’s beauty, akin to much of our wonderful country of Canada, reminded Miller that the core starting point of his life’s struggle, his desire to express in words the horror of his urban life, had relieved him of that which had driven him forward. Like a dung beetle placed in a huge terrarium with enough fecal matter to keep him satiated for the rest of his days, Miller was able to look out on the world and find bemusement at the passing realm. And if, through the views we discover in our studies, we, too, lean to wonder about the meaning of myriad aspects of the society we see and our place within the cultural constellation, our distance education will surely have proven its worth.

Animals, like ideas and beliefs and trends, all come and go with the days and the seasons. But in the end, wherever we go there we are. And to separate ourselves from excrescence of cultural upsets and live-streaming verbal diarrhea, might be the highest outcome of higher education. With the acquisition of a distant-yet-knowing view of the societal morass in our midst we might also, metaphorically like the singer Lou Reed, learn to look askance at:

“all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down”

When we separate ourselves from our ideas that may be where we most realize the variety of ways to get our proverbial dung ball where its going – the better to find our academic purpose.

References
Kroen, G.C. (2013). ‘Dung Beetles Navigate By the Milky Way’. Science. Retrieved from https://www.science.org/content/article/dung-beetles-navigate-milky-way
Miller, H. In Hoyle, A. (2014). The Unknown Henry Miller. New York: Arcade.
Reed, L. (1967). ‘Heroin’. Lyrics on Demand. Retrieved from https://www.lyricsondemand.com/lou_reed/heroin

Powerful though diffused in our tech era, the media remains the mouthpiece by which events are portrayed and digested onstage, as it were. In Ancient Greek theatre, actors were accompanied in the background by a chorus who would, often in song, repeat themes of the script to keep the audience on board—not unlike editorial pieces claiming to sum up a news story. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Ancient Greek chorus as a “group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation.”  One thinks of backup singers harmonizing to the soulful crooning of a star performer. And in today’s cyberworld we might well consider the rattle and hiss of online podcast punditry as a form of the chorus at the back of the stage presentation of current events. Things don’t just happen, on the news or online, they are framed and narrated by expert voices and, in the last instance, by each of us within our own personal echo chamber of favoured views, augmented online by algorithms that give us what we seem to want.

Such repetition of themes and meanings comes particularly into focus when a rupture in the, er, space time continuum of acceptable norms and values occurs. Elon Musk’s infamous salute incited the cultural chorus into studious clarity so as to claim that Musk was showing reverence for Hitler’s Third Reich. Now, Musk should have known how he would be interpreted—not unlike a child, who, when asked how many vegetables he would like on his plate, begins by briefly extending his middle finger before the others. There’s a coyness to public displays of virtue signalling not limited to the more sanctimonious layers of society.

As thinkers and academics, it behooves us to dig deeper to understand the full breadth of meaning behind Musk’s act—remembering that, unlike in pop culture, historical awareness provides a more nuanced explanation than can an automatic dismissal and a been there, done that attitude. Expressions have a plurality of meanings depending upon one’s audience and, as with stories of all stripe, often a polysemy of meanings exist. It is with an eye to diversity that critical thinking opens new avenues of inquiry.

Two Streams Among the River of Discourse

In the Musk’s salute case, voices within the chorus of popular opinion fall often into two camps, which we shall now explicate—a worthwhile exercise given that a key Jewish activist mouthpiece group for Holocaust and anti-semitism awareness, arguably the arbiter of such topics, the Anti-Defamation League stated that “it seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute” and “in this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning.” This new beginning, to remind we whose chorus foxhole has been rife with criticism of Israel’s response to the brazen terrorist attack of October 7^th and an increase in pro-Hamas narratives on campuses, is one of a US administration that, as it were, claims to harbour no Quislings who sympathize for terrorist violence of the anti-Israel sort. Quisling was a pro-Hitler Norwegian leader who, like an apologist for Hamas, found ways to aid and abet the NAZIs – ironically, some say Musk is similar in his support for right wing European political parties, but what speaks loudest is louder White House support for Israel.

Now is a timely moment to embrace the big picture in terms of living in history, given that Monday January 27^th marks 80 years since the liberation of death camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz. By contrast, the chorus of online pundits tends to live in the eternal present, judging acts in a vacuum far removed from historical awareness or a pragmatic embrace of the fact that an arm gesture means less than does steadfast policy support for Jewish people by the US administration. In our times the updated official line, the one that matters, embraces the narrative that remembers that the state of Israel is the symbolic survivor of a planned extermination of the Jewish people by the Third Reich. Whereas Hitler, and his erstwhile Arabic Allies, including in a meeting famously 1941 depicted in Time magazine and revisited by columnist David Kaiser in 2015, stands as the clear anti-semitic essence of evil. Musk’s involvement in the pro-Israel current White House seems unlikely to combine those two poles of good and evil – in terms of policy, if not his personal psychology with which we shall shortly engage.

So Nevermind Polysci, Here’ s the Mental Health Perspective

A parallel interpretive direction as regards Musk’s faux pas emits from the autism awareness chorus. Experts agree that Musk’s salute is a teachable moment, a shot at explaining and disentangling the mysteries of body-self awareness that those on the Autism spectrum encounter – and their human ability to admit when they’ve offended someone. While thrashing spasms and loss of bodily control and awareness may be common in infants as they seek to navigate their newfound arms and legs, trauma-informed therapist Amelia Kelley reminds us that “these movements in autistic individuals are a natural part of how their brains process sensory input and social interactions”. Kelley also is quick to remind us that audience awareness is not lost to people on the spectrum, like Musk. Indeed, as surely as if there were an infinity of cloned Musks parading onstage and cavorting in an infinite number of physically-bizarre manners what are the chances that our Earthly Musk would make what to some seems like a NAZI salute?  He would have known how he might be interpreted by right wing extremists.

And yet, for the persona psychological context we must note Musk’s effusive love of science fiction technology and rocket ship deployments.

Why, you might ask?

You see, in an imagined century far, far, away, but filmed as usual in Southern California, the Star Trek universe (replete with amazing futuristic spaceship abilities and digital brain technologies like Musk’s brain implant project), other alien cultures the protagonists encountered had greetings and signs of deference all their own. It was a way that Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, brought humanity to other beings in the cosmos – a far cry from later Sigourney Weavers battling incomprehensible insect beasts and the like. Other worlds were possible, and in one episode Captain Kirk abides in two places in an exploration of the plural universe hypothesis known to physics junkies the world over. In an alternative, parallel, realm, Earthlings adopt a distinctive Terran Salute rather than our familiar hand-over-the eyebrow show of deference: “During the 2150s it began with the right fist pressed against the left side of the chest, and then extended straight out parallel to the ground”. With increased efficacy and militarism this alternate humanity gained traction and their salute (with directorial assistance by the creators of the show) followed fashion: “By the 2260s the right arm was used, and the palm was opened as the arm was extended, giving it the appearance of a more traditional NAZI salute. It also resembled the salute purportedly used by the Roman Empire in Earth’s ancient history. The salute was occasionally accompanied with the phrase “Long live the Empire!“. Musk, known for his sci fi life’s work, likely was aware of that episode—he’d even featured as an actor in a recent Star Trek release. And, substitute Make America Great Again and you have the circle squared and a nervous giggle of relief can overcome the audience. “He was just being his techie nerd trekkie self after all!” they may claim.  Then again, the chorus in their respective wells had made up their mind about who to like and who to abhor regardless of the details—that’s how themes and narratives function and cohere, in life as in the performative drama of society.

Peek a Boo, Behind the Shield of Labels It’s Still You!

Now, as sure as any of us with one or many mental health diagnoses can seek shelter in them when our behaviour contravenes norms and values, or when we miss a class of a shift at work, the psychological history of how folks justify and explain their actions may be a reflection of our development all the way back to childhood as we achieve awareness and identity. Remember the infant flailing and thrashing in search of cohesion? In Sigmund Freud’s intergenerational family home, he spent much time in the companies of children and babies and noted the symbolic, ego-forming, outcome of their minutest play behaviour.

Fort and da, here and there or hide and seek, is a game played by children and even pets to this day.

“Fort and da was Sigmund Freud’s name for a game played by his 18-month-old grandson involving a cotton reel which the boy would repeatedly throw out of his cot, exclaiming ‘Oo’ as he did so, forcing his mother to retrieve it for him, at which he would utter an appreciative ‘Ah’. Freud interpreted these noises as babyish approximations of ‘fort’, meaning ‘gone’, and ‘da’, meaning ‘there’. The significance of the game, which Freud discusses in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), is that it shows the child transforming an unhappy situation, one in which they have no control over the presence of their parents, into a happy one in which the parents are at the beck and call of the child. Freud also interpreted it as a kind of revenge on the parents, a way of saying to them that they aren’t so important.”

In terms of playing audience mind games, we might consider Musk on a spectrum with assorted Hollywood and pop culture icons who thrive on being “misunderstood.” In any case, as adults, we should know better than to hide behind mental health diagnoses but how often do people shield their critical thinking behind their political beliefs to justify their opinions of others—especially when an audience is involved? Assertion of power and control over one’s peers or minders, and with public figures this means the audience at large and especially those pesky know-it-all pundits, comes to appear as a constant game of hide and seek. Unconsciously, or pre-consciously in the case of infants, some folks seek attention and to string others along to our benefit. The more people wonder about intentions and meaning, rather than actual policies, the easier it is for the dependent little babies to have their diapers changed. The adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity long precedes our present epoch.

So next time we feel like assessing a social faux pas with easy recourse to a psychological diagnoses (imagined or real), let’s remember that for every hide and seek game there can be an infinite regress of justifications. What matters most is the big picture, the nuts and bolts of a person’s behavior, rather than the shield of this or that diagnosis or malady. Anyone can be “hangry”, for instance, but it takes an adult to just admit that he was being unpleasant. After all, with a wink and a nudge, we who have conquered university psychology courses know the inside joke that the DSM (the psychiatric diagnostic manual) lists 297 possible conditions. If need be, there just might be something for everyone if that’s the unprofessional route we choose to go!

What matters more, of course is to take seriously those who are truly disabled by their conditions. And to hold ourselves and others to account when they emit noxious words, tones, and gestures that they know are offensive. “There is a stark difference between uncoordinated movement and making the same gesture twice, without hesitation and as a fast movement” adds Lauren Dawson, a neurodiversity coach. So, too, lest we be accused of protesting too much by blaming a diagnosis or our childhood unconscious seeking power and attention from others, sometimes the best thing to do is to apologize when we have offended people…not a forte of the current Masters of the Universe, but certainly a life skill lost in practice to too many educated people!

References
Augustyn, A. ‘Chorus’. Encyclopedia Brittanica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/art/chorus-theatre
Cotler, I. (2025). ‘We must fight anti-semitism 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz’. Time. Retrieved from https://www.aol.com/news/must-fight-antisemitism-80-years-115645616.html
Freud, S. (1920) in ‘From a trauma perspective, Freud’s fort-da game replaces Oedipus’. (2015).
Trauma Theory. Retrieved from https://traumatheory.com/freud-from-a-trauma-perspective/
Kaiser, D. (2015). ‘Hitler and the Grand Mufti: What was Really Said’. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/4084301/hitler-grand-mufi-1941/
Kelley, A. In Broadwater, A. (2025). ‘Some are excusing Elon Musk’s disturbing salute as autism – and autistic people have thoughts’. Huffington Post. Retrieved from https://ca.news.yahoo.com/excusing-elon-musks-disturbing-salute-233659427.html
Laird, J. (2024). ‘Elon Musk goes all Star Trek as his sightgiving Blinsight brain implant gets FDA ‘breakthrough’ clearance. PC Gamer. Retrieved from https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/elon-musk-goes-all-star-trek-as-his-sight-giving-blindsight-brain-implant-gets-fda-breakthrough-clearance/
Lapin, A. (2025). ‘How did the ADL conclude that Elon Musk did not give a NAZI salute? He doesn’t say.’ Jewish Telegraph Agency.
‘Terran Salute’ in Star Trek Episode ‘Mirror Mirror’ (1967) Star Trek. Retrieved from http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/39.htm and https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Terran_salute

The young lions, neophyte Queens and Kings of the continent, wonder “what are those bugs gonna do with that and how do they know where they’re going?” After all, the massive spheres of sustenance are much larger than the insects can possibly see over. The answer to this simple query reveals much about the nature of knowledge and the differing ways in which we seek it. Dung beetles, it turns out, navigate not with their eyes on the literal prize, their destination, but by keeping an eye on the stars in the night sky above. These industrious gatherers of excrement navigate by triangulating their humble, earthly location with the shifting position of celestial objects far, far, away.

Perhaps lowly dung beetles are the best animal expression of Oscar Wilde’s famous line “each of us is in the gutter, but some of us are gazing at the stars.” To be sure, they express the to each its own version of common sense so often missing in culture, academia, and politics – a realm where the egoistic desire to be right, and to make others aware of ones’ righteousness, often gets in the way of that most innocent aspects of thought: raw curiosity.

Students, Stars to Be, Guided by our Chosen Stars

In a sense, we choose which stars to follow as students and thinkers. Our different evolving beliefs and academic objects of intrigue can lead us to forget that that ours is a solitary journey; no matter how much we share with our fellow humans our journey is as unique as the pattern of sand on the paw of a lion. Yet, as we grow and learn, our learned assertiveness can, basically, lead us to see others as dung beetles and be utterly befuddled by the seemingly nonsensical goings-on of their lives and minds, intellectually in the scholarly landscape and, more fundamentally, in the realm of life choices.

To each differing sustenance appeals, and this extends into the realm of philosophy. More comfortable terrain than the gossip-laden aforementioned life choices arena. As humans sharing a species ontology with billions of others, we all-too often assume that what we value most, what truths and methods by which we purvey our ideas and survey our realm, must apply to others of our ilk. If only the others would see things the way we do. Sigmund Freud noted wryly how the education of young people often amounts to finding a band of like-minded minions to this or that political posture: “a young man has to learn to suppress the over-weening self regard he acquires in the indulgent atmosphere surrounding his childhood, so that he may find his proper place in a society that is full of other persons making similar claims” .

Perhaps awareness that truth and education is about more than finding solidarity with others is what progressive pundit Julie Roginsky meant when she expressed empathy with parents who say, “Wait a second, I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns.” At the lesser, but no less egregious, level an awful lot of our peers cling to social media certainties to express what ought to be a more thoughtful academic pose as relates to current events.

References
Freud, S. (1963). Character and Culture. New York: Collier Books.
Kroen, G.C. (2013). ‘Dung Beetles Navigate By the Milky Way’. Science. Retrieved from https://www.science.org/content/article/dung-beetles-navigate-milky-way
Roginksy, J. In Schorr, I. (Nov 2024). ‘Democrat Strategist on CNN Absolutely Lose it on Dems for not Knowing how to Talk to ‘Normal People’: ‘Not The Party of Common Sense’. Mediate. Retreved from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democratic-strategist-on-cnn-absolutely-loses-it-on-dems-for-not-knowing-how-to-talk-to-normal-people-not-the-party-of-common-sense/ar-AA1tH6GQ

Shortly the udderly oversimplified tale of the single causative cow went the way of crying over spilled milk. Instead, the real multiple causes of widespread urban fires led to new housing standards and building materials more akin to the Three Little Pigs, the latterly and safest of which built his house out of brick. But we have to fireproof our minds in some ways too in the face of cultural hysteria. To apply our best practices academically, it behooves us in these times of blanket climate anxiety, with narratives of collective human blame acting in place of that notorious skittish cow, to look behind simple explanations that fan the flames of existential concerns.

Into the Weeds, Into the Deets

Chicago’s 1871 urban fire followed on the heels of many throughout history, in renowned cities like Paris and London and Rome, and set about to efforts to avert future catastrophes. And so we find ourselves today with the urban fires in Los Angeles, preceded by huge and similar blazes in Oakland, California way, way, back in 1991. In both climates moisture was followed by drought and, like a disinterested pupil as a long lecture unfurls, many signs of life dried right out.

With ecology rather than emotions in tow, let’s have a perusal at some expert perspective on the LA fires. To be sure, hurricane force winds and an inexplicably dry reservoir left to contractors to maintain, though they seemed to have tarried, are factors – but most of all the blanket term climate change is evoked as the cause of the calamity.

Jack Cohen, an ecologist from Missoula, Montana, author of thirty books on fire prevention, summarizes what he sees as the fallen womb of assuming that urban fires are the same as forest fires. “When you study the destruction in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, note what didn’t burn: unconsumed tree canopies adjacent to totally destroyed homes. The sequence of destruction is commonly assumed to occur in some kind of organized spreading flame front—a tsunami of super-heated gases—but it doesn’t happen that way.” In reality, houses, abandoned after evacuation orders, set one another alight like birthday cake sparklers. And, ironically, like conifers in an actual forest (remembering that LA is of a hilly grassland setting rather than a boreal forest). “In high-density development, scattered burning homes spread to their neighbors and so on. Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.” Like gossip spreading in the hall of a community centre, or paranoia in a social media forum, the hottest fuel of an urban fire is in the houses.

In recent decades, affluent aesthetics reduced an acceptance of concrete as a desirable building material; “defenses lapsed” despite warning signs that urban fires were by no means history. “The 1991 Tunnel fire in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills marked the start of the modern era of urban fires, destroying 2,843 homes.”  That was over three decades ago, long before climate change was the go-to culprit. Treating urban fire risks need not be about fixing the planet, in other words. Historian Stephen Pyne concludes that “we don’t have to solve climate change in order to solve our community wildfire risk problem” because, in truth, managing fires in tight urban settings has less to do with the fire itself than to the places it goes. Whereas no one can overcome a mountain ablaze with dry timber, any of us can, and perhaps have, stamped out or otherwise contended with a blaze in a carpet or kitchen. And on the domestic front, keeping dry areas moist, even if they consist of dead material, protects them from fire. The good news, then, is that we are far more able to prevent urban fires than immense woodland infernos, the likes of which are more common in rural Canada. Yet, Cohen steps in to reminds us that we have to overcome myths about fire that prevail even in urban settings. “The assumption is continually made that it’s the big flames” that cause widespread community destruction, he said, “and yet the wildfire actually only initiates community ignitions largely with lofted burning embers.”

Those embers flying through the sky in the forest (firebrands in forest fire lingo) find a buffet of burnable trees and woody debris. Yet in an urban setting the raw material of the fire is less dense and girthy. While conifer trees alight candle like twinkle-toed Tinkerbells and possess raw power when aflame, in urban settings the more sinewy manner of shrub and tree growth gives a more nuanced outcome to a given neighbourhood. It’s the houses and their rooves that make the sparks that spread the flames. So, a fire is not an unalterable force if managed properly in an urban setting.

References

AG Staff. (2017). ‘Are Australian Eucalypts to Blame for California’s Wildfires’. Australian Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2024/11/takayna-tarkine/

ABC News (Australia). (2025). ‘Scientists say Fire-Loving Tasmanian Blue Gums Not To Blame For LA Fires’. MSN.com Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-au/science/ecology/scientists-say-fire-loving-tasmanian-blue-gums-not-to-blame-for-la-fires/ar-BB1rd3XG

Curwen, T. (2025). ‘Inconvenient Truths About the Fires Burning in Los Angeles From Two Experts’. Yahoo. Retrieved from https://www.yahoo.com/news/inconvenient-truths-fires-burning-los-110032208.html

Emery, T. (2024). ‘Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow Was Not to Blame’. Herald News, for Lincoln and Logan County. Retrieved from https://newherald.news/mrs-olearys-cow-was-not-to-blame-p26491-103.htm#gsc.tab=0

Hamilton, M. (2025). ‘State to Probe Why Palisades Reservoir Was Offline, Empty, When Firestorm Exploded.’ LA Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline

St. George, Z. (2016). ‘The Burning Question in the East Bay Hills: Eucalyptus is Flammable Compared to What?’ Bay Nature. Retrieved from https://baynature.org/article/burning-question-east-bay-hills-eucalyptus-flammable-compared/

Historically speaking, bougy’s linguistic and cultural origins abide on an opposite pole to the expansive, globalized, think-globally-and-act-locally concept of your typical well-connected and upwardly mobile citizen.  The bourgeois sensibility has its origins within the term bourges, a word for a large market town of artisans and shopkeepers, and deeper than that to burg, denoting medieval walls around a castle or town.  In other words, the stuffiness and pretense of living behind walls, or demanding their erection to protect one’s marketplace (of goods or ideas), coincides when hoity-toity methods and dress appear.  But, as the Industrial Revolution ascended, the upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie, frugal in spirit but ostentatious in ambition, differed starkly from the glitzy-but-vacuous, bloated aristocracy.  Castle walls gave way to walls around merchant depots.

Only behind walls that protected their markets from highwaymen and hordes did the bourgeois class arise and consolidate their power into modern banking and industry—a fact described in the 18^th and 19^th centuries by thinkers from Karl Marx to Adam Smith.  To be strong and free, economically, requires that markets be free to operate within a relative zone of serene sanctity.  It’s like a scene from a novel.  Think here of the dulcet tones playing from speakers inside a shopping mall that has just opened for the day.  Only a few market-goers line its halls, furtive, almost, under the owl-eyed scrutiny of hired goon rent-a-cops who, besides sensing the impending end of their night shift patrolling the parking lot, also have to shift their focus from their on-duty drug deals to picking up their children from the ex, thereby to drop them off at school.  An ideal market setting, in other words, is as regimented as a military barracks – no photos, no protests, and nothing out of the ordinary is permitted.

The recent graduation of an acquaintance from Sprott-Shaw community college, an archetype of pay-as-you-go no-nonsense education, reminded me that, in the popular imagination, the whole function of schooling is to find some way to serve our economic masters while simultaneously protecting those ruler’s dignity by collaborating in various ways with prevailing ideological notions.  And oh yeah: pay one’s own bills.  We aren’t just asked to “put a smile on”; we’re supposed to swallow the spirit of Capitalism as our forebears ate a communion wafer.  Perhaps it’s a semi-conscious awareness of this playing the part of loyal ideological toady that leads us in 2024 to at times deploy the derogatory label bougy.

Propping one’s image up in a mirror of respectability came to be associated with an emergent business class, always leeched onto and protected by minions and fandoms, but also, crucially, by an emergent intellectual class.  At Athabasca, far from the show-up -and-shut-up sensibility common amidst some of our more vocational-minded peers in other settings, we hopefully are studying not only to learn and grow but also to draw our own conclusions from the world without feeling infernally impelled to force our opinions onto others, as happens in a litany of online settings.

Humour helps. In making light of a situation, think of how the phrase bougy shines light on the Sisyphean futility of really putting oneself across as more respectable than one’s essence.

Here Bob Dylan, poet savant and songwriter of Baby Boomer generational rebellion and intrigue, gives his take on bougy tendencies amidst the ruling class:

“In 1838, Mexico and France went at it when King Louis-Philippe discovered that an expatriate pastry chef named Remontel had not received reparations when his Mexican cafe was ransacked by looters.” (213)

Karl Marx in his time concurred:

“In the course of 1843 Marx came to agree with French socialists about the ‘bourgeois’ character of modern representative government.  Its nature was summed up by the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Phillippe.” (103)

While our distance education takes us nowhere but the confines of our home-scape and landscape, we can find affinity with thinkers who lived outside the walls—literal in terms of private property, figurative in terms of intellectual rights—of an ascendant business class society.  Bruno Bauer was one philosopher who fits the bill of philosophic self-awareness:

“Bauer took up farming in the Berlin suburb of Rixdorf, mainly to support the orphaned daughters of his brother.  Despite the miserable existence in “a wasteland, a scenic stupidity” he remained intellectually engaged (102).  His conclusions about the culture he saw around him are not so far afield from those filed by the likes of Naomi Klein’s assault on consumer culture logo fetishes and superficial designer aesthetics.  In Bauer’s time, the issue was a two-month display of a Holy Relic: the Holy Robe of Trier.  Like an activist aghast at a stampede of shoppers lining up in unison for the release of a new iPhone or the hawking of a limited number of Taylor Swift tickets, Bauer saw the Robe as inescapably a sign of the an emerging modern culture of sallow superstition mixed with intellectual superficiality.  From this spectacle, Bauer concluded that, where it mattered most, society was “a mass that stirs only dully and that can scarcely be raised from its indifference”.

To overcome this entrancement with symbols of authority, in 2024 bougy terms, this means neckties or dress shoes, Bauer prescribed a questioning of any unified truth conveyed by authorities.  “There is no longer any religion when there is no longer any privileged religion.  Take from religion its privileged position and it will no longer exist.” To this end, speaking academically, awareness of the heterogeneous nature of truth, not least of which interdisciplinary methodological methods of knowledge production that vary depending on which ‘ology you adhere to, might be the ultimate form of atheism as it relates to cultural hegemony.  But we have to be careful: the world is full of people convinced that they have questioned authority, been sanctified with certain truth and method, and now feel tasked with spreading their new gospel, political or personal or both.  To this tendency, be it backed by a degree from a university or merely by a weekend binge-watching speeches and pundits, Dylan provides a final rejoinder:

“You’re high principled, chivalrous and Mr.  Respectable, Mr.  Don Juan, but you don’t have to pretend with me.  You’re the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud-the stool pigeon, the scandalonger-the prowler and the rat…You’re the hardliner for fair play and a square deal, just as long as you’ve got your irons in the fire and enough on your plate.  Muckraking, chaos and bedlam, you’re a party to it all.” (207)

Delineating aristocrats and bourgeoisie gives a sense of how, in Marxian theory, one ruling class replaces another as history unfolds; the fact that the bougy person today appears to be a denizen of the upper crust reveals the invariable fact that, some day, those who run society will experience a fall from grace.  Maybe.  Anyway, as students, we seek to find meaning where raw assumptions hitherto prevailed.  And so next time you resort to an urban dictionary epithet remember that you also possess an opportunity to promote a little historical awareness.

In other words, conflict in an ocean of theories or a marketplace of ideas can say more about our egos than about our better impulses.  Education can be a seething stew of concepts, each treated like an item to be hawked on a fairground or at a Christmas craft sale.  Yet, lifelong learning suggests that we treat the task of our studies as an end in itself.  One that, while changing our lives and those around us, thereby changes the very methods by which we express ourselves.  To pick and flick the bougy out of our countenance we must first admit its presence!

References
Bauer, B.  (1809-1882).  AZQuotes.  Retrieved from https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-there-is-no-longer-any-religion-when-there-is-no-longer-any-privileged-religion-take-bruno-bauer-80-33-70.jpg
Dylan, B.  (2022).  ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’.  Simon and Schuster. 
Marx, K.  & Engels, F., Gareth Stedman-Jones (Edited by).  (2014).  The Communist Manifesto.  Penguin Classica.
Thuglife, T..  (2005).  Urban Dictionary.  Retrieved from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bougie..
Wilde, O.  In Tearle, O.  (Loughborough University).  Interesting Literature.  Retrieved from https://interestingliterature.com/2021/07/we-are-all-gutter-but-some-looking-stars-wilde-meaning-analysis/

Violence, verbal but especially physical, arises, in a sense, as an extension, a spectral enhancement, of lingering dissonance between how one feels on the inside and how things are and how we present ourselves as being on the outside.  Words can hurt, as we know, and injurious sentiments matter—a reason why respectful dialogue in all spheres of life is a hallmark of emotional and academic maturity.  Indeed, it’s worth noting here that, as we age, we come to realize that emotional maturity is less about calendar age than we’d assume.  Adult humans, ourselves included, experience inner tectonics of feelings that occasionally, or, in some folks, with disturbing regularity, emit eruptions of fulsome vile: spewing forth as verbal gunfire.  In this sense, the cold war of internal diplomacy, whereby a person learns to live with the natural discrepancies that arise in life between wants and needs, can give way to violent discursive eruptions (or worse).  And perhaps for this reason, the current in vogue concept of functional freeze is so timely; this is where a person achieves “bare minimum basic functioning” while feeling increasingly deadened and desensitized, emotionally, on the inside.  Perhaps there’s no telling how such people may react because they’ve literally lost touch with how to feel alive as a human being.

Normal interaction in society implicates the animal instincts of our human essences where, as we know, the most dangerous wild beasts aren’t the ones running their normal course of life.  The most dangerous creatures in nature are the ones who are literally constrained, monitored and domesticated, physically abused, and nutritionally maltreated in such a way that they have no means of natural response but by recourse to their normal instincts.  The gunman “was quiet, but he was just bullied.  He was bullied so much.”  Instead of being risk adverse, which all animals have evolved to be given the lack of emergency rooms in nature (let alone wait times), animals that experience constant external physical duress are prone to lashing out.  Orcas and tigers have in recent years attacked their masters, for instance, and, depending on how you frame it, the 50% divorce rate in our culture says something about the unstable power dynamics in the modern family.

Language itself connotes this tendency for general instability in humans, with phrases like “cagey”, “angry as a bear” and “ornery as an old sow” (a gender-neutral sow, of course).  In a sense, because we cannot totally comprehend the irruptive dangers of living amidst unbalanced people, people who seem normal enough until they snap or who are always going off the rails (thus implying a train with a given destination that it now chooses to eschew), we tend to misunderstand ourselves right when we need to comprehend them most.  People who snap, who become violent, who in a classroom throw their papers off of their desk, storm out of a meeting at work, or flip over a board game table when they are losing, are not people functioning in a highly attenuated, evolved, state.  They’ve instead come to express the rarest of maladies, the disease of, if you will, not staying true to their authenticity.  After all, as we learn to understand ourselves, none of us honestly sees ourselves as callous, abusive, or uncaring.  Our self-awareness isn’t designed that way.  We have to be generous with our delicate, fragile, egos, such that when we lash out its only as a last resort—knowing, as we do, the repercussions.  We’ve all had moments where we claim to have not been ourself in an instant, or even for a number of hours or years.  But, tragically, some folks seem to get stuck that way.

So maybe, if you or someone you know seems a candidate for the functional freeze category, or just seems a bit out of sorts while largely functioning normally, why not blithely ask them how they feel on the inside? The young man who shot at Trump was an awarded science and math pupil and wasn’t known as a “Trump hater”; quite a fact given how few of us can emit flatulence without striking, symbolically mind you, someone in that camp.  Clearly, though, empathy is what people need if they are doing so poorly that they would lash out at others, to their peril.  And a sense of humor to lighten the mood.

We don’t need a course in therapy to know that a good portion of the suffering population will be pleased to give us a rundown of their current grievances, whether in life, in family, or in current events.  And if they do need coaxing, try giving an example from your own life that matches the functional freeze spectrum (or another, to be detailed next week).  It never hurts to reach out to people so long as you don’t claim expertise that you lack; we are all equal in human wisdom in terms of how many years we’ve been alive, after all.

We are all students of this thing called life.  We each of us feel a panoply of human sensations.  Some of us, regrettably and, reminiscent of the avuncular phrase to toddlers that if they scowl too much their face will stay that way, seem to get frozen in an existential grimace.  Miserable is the one “that way” what will surely never have a happy parade with floats and helium balloons.  Believe me I know, as a founding member of a local community college pride club.  Curmudgeons are not joiners, unless it’s to join in a kvetch session about this of that cultural pariah.  Functional freeze likewise typically isn’t something for the Eeyore’s in our life, who wear their miseries gladly on their sleeve.  Functional freeze affects the pleasant, even-tempered, peers among us who seem to have all their ducks in a row, all their caboose away from a moose, and generally to be doing fine in life.  The thing to remember, then, is that to see if oneself or others has functional freeze (or another mental health condition) we want to remember that we’re all mostly water, ideally thawed water, and people in their heart of hearts want to thaw, to be understood and respected, and that mutual respect might be the best defence of all against unscripted violence and cultural calamity.

If we’re really fortunate and effective we might even be able to channel some poetic life wisdom from the author Henry Miller, who wrote:

“Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, serenely, divinely aware.  In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.  No why or wherefore, no direction, no goal, no striving, no evolving.  Like the enigmatic Chinese sage one is rapt by the everchanging spectacle of passing phenomena.  This is the sublime, the a-moral state of the artist, she who lives only in the moment, the visionary moment of utter, far-seeing lucidity.  Such clear icy sanity that it seems like madness.  By the force and power of the artist’s vision the static, synthetic whole which is called the world is destroyed.  The artist gives back to us a vital, singing universe, alive in all is parts.”

Icy in a good way, in other words, icy enlightenment in our veins! And from there, perhaps the floodgate of illumination (our own included) may gush forth.  Just as a small stream can lead a glacier to calf, offering up even a trickle of empathy might lead an appreciative tear to appear on the sloped countenance of our interlocutor’s visage.

References
Miller, H.  In Popova, M.  (2021).  ‘Henry Miller on Creative Death’.  The Marginalian. 
Khiron Clinics.  (2023).  ‘Unwrapping the numbing grip of functional freeze’.  Retrieved from https://nypost.com/lifestyle/what-is-functional-freeze/
Steinberg, B.  (2024).  ‘What is ‘functional freeze’? New York Post.  Retrieved from https://nypost.com/lifestyle/what-is-functional-freeze/

The Fly on the Wall has been a part of The Voice Magazine almost as long as I have.  Having a “Best of” without it simply wouldn’t be a fair representation of the Magazine.  This reader recommended installment from our July 19th edition was interesting because of how it tied in to current events while touching on the common themes of the Fly on the Wall: language, psychology, society, and how education improves all of it.

At the broadest level, life’s motion towards goals falls into two categories: there’s pull factors, when an outcome is so desired that it veritably hauls us towards its general direction.  And then there’s push factors, where deadlines and socio-economic vagaries thrust us into a camp of life changes.  Sometimes, though not for we cushy student types, literal life danger forces us out of our comfort zone.  These latter forces, push factors, can be truly existential in the nature of hunger and violence.

Leaving destitution in search of the gift of a better life occasionally leads great masses of humans to travel across the planet.  Famously, in America, Ellis Island in New York received waves of trans-Atlantic migrants in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.  And in Canada repeated influxes of new settlers have populated the land that, a Spanish-speaker once agreed, could have gotten its cartographic name from “Nada” – here is nothing…  a cruel testament of views toward Indigenous Peoples.

Canonized in history books and touchstone family films like An American Story, characters like that film’s young mouse Fievel for decades personalized the imagined spirit of neophyte citizens of the American culture.  Fievel wasn’t any mouse, though—he was an explicitly Jewish mouse, as his parents illustrate at the outset.  “To you every night is Hannukah!” scolds his mother to his father.  This spirit of eternal blessing is crucial to the sense of moving towards something better, rather than flight from something untenable—a fact our peers sometimes miss when they jump fancifully into a new year without their common sense in tow.  And the fact that culture matters, our background and what we believe in and what we celebrate as a life worth living, well, that is the difference between a true nation and a mere double entry accounting patchwork of payroll recipients.

You see, Fievel was not only new to the nation and thus a metonymy for the latter-day American colonizer experience—he had also lost his family and, with the help of the American ideology of fearlessly pursuing one’s destiny, the film is about his aim to re-achieve unity with this family and with a meaningful life.  As we know too well that when we or our fellow Canadians are alone on the Holidays few things feel more empty and joyless.

So here are a few of summary snippets from Fievel the rodent hero:

Henri: I know, my little immigrant.  You want to find your family.  And you will.
Fievel: But how? They’re so far away, and it’s so big.  I’ll never find them anyway.
Henri: J’me excuse pardonnez, but did you say never? So young, and you’ve already lost hope! This is America, the place to find hope.  If you give up now, you will never find your family.  So never say never.”

This presumably teaches youth in the audience that anything is possible with hard work and diligence – in our elementary school gymnasium as we all sat on the floor that’s the impression we received, anyway.  That, and a sore backside.

“Papa: In America, there are mouse holes in every wall.
Mama: Who says?
Papa, Tanya, and Fievel: Everyone!
Papa: In America, there are bread crumbs on every floor.
Mama: You’re talking nonsense!
Papa: In America, you can say anything you want, but most important – and this I know for a fact – in America, there are no cats.”

Besides the Depression-era Roosevelt promise of a chicken in every pot, this quote illustrates the idealistic belief that, unlike in despotic regimes the world over, in America individual freedom from tyranny is as real as the life of a mouse living free from fear of cats.  And, as the film shortly shows, equally as unrealistic.

Being a fairy tale fantasy sort of film from almost a half century ago, it’s hard to imagine that people today would believe the metaphoric line that there are no proverbial cats in America.  Yet, as surely as that the glow of the Holidays leads to the hum-drum reality of a New Year – replete with unrealistic expectations dashed upon the rocks of stolid life circumstances, in the present epoch millions upon millions of migrants continue to pursue their dreams by moving to North America.

In fact, according to the ultra-progressive New York Times, “total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.  That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States.  Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S.  population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.”

In other words, there have never been more Fievels with a family entering American shores (or deserts).  Which implies that there have never been more push factors of poverty and pull factors of hopes—for a job in a chicken slaughterhouse, for instance, doing work (like the animals Fievel encounters, who perform a series of ignominious vocations) that citizens eschew.

Nevertheless, what the rubber soul of migrant reality in a historical context reveals is that some historical migrations are more dire than others.  While interviewers at the US southern border reveal horrifying sights—like the two-years-old being escorted by teenagers with no parents in sight, who when asked her age held up two fingers and proudly said “dos!”, and new arrivals whose only English speech are the key two words “life danger”, there is one fairly recent historical outpouring of humanity that stands alone in terms of stark desperation.  I’m speaking here of the Holocaust-era exodus of Jews from Western Europe – in the wake of the ultimate bad cat, the Fuhrer of Germany.  It’s one of many pogroms and atrocities against the Jewish people through history, and it most clearly shows push factors at work.  Forced to leave home with bleak prospects, these migrants had it as rough or rougher than any in history.

One such figure was the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin – with fellow travellers he sought to escape into erstwhile-neutral (but still fascist, under General Franco) Spain.  Over the Pyrenees Mountain range, no less.  Benjamin’s life’s work was far ahead of his time; he had penned crucial treatises about the effect of mechanical reproduction on art and had wondered about the nature of the human spirit in an age of increased automation, alienation, and mindless productivity.  His writings, worthy of the many in-depth studies they’ve spawned in later generations, centre upon the core Marxist dictum: how best can humanity’s species-being, our core creative essence that leads us to be a monkey above the troupe, a creature capable both of reasoning intricately and feeling deeply, find fulfillment in an age where technology proceeds like a dynamo alongside misery growing by the day?

Settling accounts with history, and for us that includes our personal history of joys and failures that have brought us to the precipice of another year, perhaps requires less to-do lists and new year’s resolutions, less well-meaning therapy sessions or TikTok how-to videos, and instead a truly poetic turn.  Benjamin implied as such when he wrote:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.  His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.  This is how one pictures the angel of history.  His face is turned toward the past.  Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.  This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin here asks us to see the truth in our times and to face the future honestly.
So in a sense, push and pull factors combine within life as it is lived.  Just as many of the migrants crossing into America own cell phones and paid tens of thousands of dollars to cartels for their passage, implying relative affluence (if not akin to Fievel riding steerage across the Atlantic) it is not merely in pursuit of meals and a job that they migrate – something more ephemeral and thematic and powerful is going on.  It’s motion based on hope, a fact tragically diminished in other tragic historical instances of human relocation, such as escaping from the NAZIs.

For Benjamin, his passage from death was not about a mystic faraway land where all dreams come true.  His transit was about survival, plain and simple.  But he did not survive.  About to pass through a NAZI road block he ingested poison rather than be captured alive.  His is a stony reminder that our lives and success are not promised to us. We have to work for them and we have to choose as best we can when faced with difficult options.  The holidays are just that, a holiday from life’s events impending as surely as the turning of the earth and the shifting of the tides.

But by parsing out the forms of fear and hope that lead other people to migrate in far direr times and places, hopefully we can shine some light on our own journey into a new year.  If we are honest about the blessings and possibilities, as well as the challenges and dangers within our lives, we can march forward confidently into the undiscovered country of the future.

Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year to All, May 2025 Bring You Abundant Success!

References

Benjamin, W.  (1892-1940).  Quote retrieved from

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1860.Walter_Benjamin

Freudberg, J.  & Geiss, T.  (1986).  An American Tale.  Stephen Spielberg Presents a Don Bluth Film.  Quotes retrieved from https://www.ranker.com/list/the-best-american-tail-an-quotes/movie-and-tv-quotes

Leonhardt, D.  & Sun, A.  (December 2024).  ‘Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in American History’.  NY Times Reprinted on MSN.com.  Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/recent-immigration-surge-has-been-largest-in-u-s-history/ar-AA1vF7Za

Schroeder, J.  (2024).  ‘Indiana Attorney General Asks Tyson Foods to answer questions about migrants working in Logansport’.  FOX59 TV.  Retrieved from https://fox59.com/indiana-news/indiana-ag-asks-tyson-foods-to-answer-questions-about-migrants-working-in-logansport/

Sheffield, T.  (2024).  ‘2 Year Old Migrant Girl Arrives at US Border Looking For Her Parents, Authorities Say’.  People Magazine.  Retrieved from https://people.com/2-year-old-migrant-girl-arrives-at-us-border-looking-for-her-parents-authorities-say-8751691

UN News.  (2022).  ‘More Than 50 000 Migrants ‘Die in Search of a Better Life’’.  United Nations.  Retrieved from https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/11/1130997

“Sarah…Sarah…I can’t breathe…help!” She videotaped the whole event, believing in her preposterous wisdom that she was teaching him a lesson for what she perceived as his uppity mannerisms earlier in the evening.  No child in time-out had it so bad, although tales of cupboard barracks do abound only a generation hence.  All this to say, the “it could always be worse” mantra can make our real-world schoolwork struggles a bit more bearable.

Life itself can induce anxiety but at least, unlike the victim, we can still breathe.  What a horrific scene: Sarah’s victim, and in a small sense, the whole existence of life.  Trapped inside our flesh suits while our mind implies, by nature, that we are looking out and expressing our whims toward an audience—if we can escape first.  First there’s the inner treadmill upon which our mind’s eye circulates and self-critiques all in the general direction of producing some actual speech.  Indeed, a recent Scientific American article notes that we don’t actually need words to think.  Research reveals that “language and thought are, in fact, distinct entities that the brain processes separately.  The highest levels of cognition—from novel problem-solving to social reasoning—can proceed without an assist from words or linguistic structures.” So at least we’re not trapped in life by our ability to use words; we can rest assured that the essence of our being is special even if we lack the words to say so.  That’s one misery out of the bag, anyway.  Yet, to write effectively, we do have to be able to put our genius sentiments into some sort of order.  From malleable origins, our mind creates cogent sentences, paragraphs and, finally, a fully fleshed out thesis.

Sometimes we have to exit our mental box to overcome mental barriers and to be relatable to our target audience, because audience matters, be it a professor or a peer. In today’s world each of us knows that at a moment’s notice we can produce an internet video that curates our life’s essence down into a short media-friendly snippet.  Prior to Wi-Fi and smartphones this privilege was the realm of a chosen few, largely those who made their nightly appearance on the TV news.  Toward the tail end of the TV era, comic strip duo Calvin and Hobbes made some hay from the inchoate potential for us each, as pop artist Andy Warhol predicted, to have a fifteen-minute moment of fame– to be one’s own current events guide and news anchor, in other words.

In an exchange Calvin said “Look, Hobbes, I cut a cardboard box to make it look like a tv screen!  See I just hold it up (to frame my face) and it’s just like I’m on TV.”

Hobbes replied: “Wow, your own show!”

Then a bit of late 80s and early 90s reality kicks in; Calvin intones “Too bad I can’t really force my way into millions of homes each day.”

Then, he’s stricken by an epiphany: “On the other hand, no one in this home can turn me off!”

Now, for we who have shared a home with youth, we know that the ability to retain a reprieve from all the hue and cry that emanates from their cell phoneis a real struggle.  But the reality is that today’s society is replete with folks who have ever so much to say – and do so online more or less constantly and with reckless abandon.  The question in 2024 becomes, “how has the long and winding journey between mental sentiments and verbal emanations been altered?” given that we each are at once an almost constant audience and perpetual purveyor of news, views, and commentary.  Have we lost the ability to think independently of the social interactions endemic to social media? What about Rodan’s famous sculpture, The Thinker; where a lone individual citizen sits with his heart and mind presumably affixed on the deepest of thoughts?  Has isolation withered on the vine such that, irony of ironies, we’re now trapped in the manner of an actor—like the Jim Carey film The Truman Show—forced to forever be on the stage?.

Attendant to this dilemma is how any of us can unplug from the social media and Wi-Fi realm, whether for a day or a lifetime.  But that few of us do suggests that the substance itself, the reality of being in public, connected to the world, itself functions like an addictive substance.  And a straitjacket.  A suitcase whereupon our very personas become our prison.

Let’s consider the namesake of Hobbes’ human sidekick: Calvin.  A full four hundred years ago John Calvin, an earnest theologian, was pondering similar topics:  what if we were predestined to basically end up happy or end up sad (consigned to heaven or hell)? Like being tied to our reputation and our appearance in the eyes of others, which if we’re honest we have little control over when compared to our written or musical expression.  The visual realm of the internet implies a certain external and coercive control over our fate.  Perhaps it’s for this reason there’s so many makeup and workout videos.

Anyway, to Calvin, an all-powerful God who had created the universe and set in motion the lived reality we know of as time, where one thing happens and then another and then another, each in distinct succession in an expansive line over the horizon like an eternity scroll on social media, would, being God, by nature know in advance within his diorama of human drama the outcome of each life, each moment, and each word.  He’d know for sure who was going to go viral and whose video would induce groans from whose spouse.  Even our thoughts were not truly our own, in this way.  It’s a bit like how each side of a political divide assumes that the other has fallen victim to egregious cultural brainwash.

Calvin put it thus: “God is said to set apart those whom he adopts into salvation; it will be highly absurd to say that others acquire by chance or by their own effort what election alone confers on a few.  Therefore, whom God passes over, he condemns: and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines for his own children.”

Talk about the ol’ “some of us are born on third base, privileged, and some of us are born on first base” and that whole trope – to Calvin we are literally predestined no matter what we do!

So at least we aren’t living in a Calvinist world, where our fates and therefore our motivation is problematic–we are surely, at least academically, masters of our destiny!  Sure, we can feel excessively contained by circumstances or the beliefs of those around us, or our own conflicted worldviews or personal issues, but in the end we are the ones who send in each essay or make each life choice.  And hey, our labours are all relative and not life and death: to express ourselves, like a would-be podcast host or another sort of soap-box specimen, is not to pronounce the truth so much as to convey our truth.  That’s why exam questions typically incite various possible answers, such as in compare and contrast questions.

No matter how much content we add to the digital morass, we also re-create many of the same limiting worldviews that we might like to imagine our education helps us overcome.  Maybe it helps to get back to our nature, our inquisitive essence as beings that wonder.  When we think outside the box, like a burrowing owl poking its head out from a knothole in a tree stump, we truly challenge ourselves.  Like Law School students diligently trained to acquire a deep understanding of alternate views, we might want to remember that, even when we feel ourselves exiting the tight confines of rigid certainties, within the bright light of day we might actually amount to little more than a distraught toddler who reaches ominously for his backside.  Plaintively, s/he wails “Help, the turtle is poking out it its shell!” Because just as every meal meets its fate at the business end of our digestive tract, each idea and belief can also appear as its opposite.  Everything gets out in the end, one way or the other.

References
Boone, S.  & Torres, J.  (2020).  Evidence in Court. Retrieved from https://www.courttv.com/title/graphic-video-sarah-boones-boyfriend-begs-to-be-released-from-suitcase/
Calvin, J.  (1559).  ‘Institutes (Quotes and Commentary)’.  Retrieved from https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/tensions-in-calvins-idea-of-predestination/
Carey, J.  (1998).  The Truman Show.  Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/
Stix, G.  (2024).  ‘You Don’t Need Words to Think’.  Scientific American.  Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-words-to-think/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Watterson, B.  (1987-1994).  Calvin and Hobbes.  Retrieved from https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/tensions-in-calvins-idea-of-predestination/

Working alone in a room with just oneself and one’s chosen inanimate influence—coffee, for instance—can lead to a rabbit hole of inertia.  Inertia that leads us, like an apple on a flat table, to go nowhere fast.  It’s that time-honored first law of Newtonian physics: “an object at rest tends to stay at rest.” Yet, wherever the flux and flow of creative juices exist there’s a metaphoric link to the hard-and-fast realm of physics where possibilities are merely one external shove away.  Sometimes we have to be our own external influence, by reminding ourselves that our future self is dependent on our stagnant, flaccid, current embodiment of lithe academic activity.

Perhaps we’ve all had a day with no work or play, just straight life recovery where, as morning shifts to afternoon our mind shifts to the reality that we have not, as it were, done anything at all but been at rest, even as our coursework or hobbies go untended and undone.  Here the nature of the cosmos intertwines like a vine with the possibilities that we prevent when we don’t have an exit plan from our supine state.

Now, to be fair, the undoing of best-laid plans and study schedules falls more under the concept of entropy—whereby the universe is said to slowly but inexorably be shifting toward a realm of chaos and disorder.  It’s as though, left to its natural devices, the universe literally works against our constructive efforts towards efficacy.  But entropy’s very undoing, or not-doing, if you will, besides being intriguing in a Zen-like way, also more clearly illustrates the law of inertia which “states that every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.  This tendency to resist changes in a state of motion is inertia.  If all the external forces cancel each other out, then there is no net force acting on the object.” To be productive, in other words, some first move has to be triggered.  For something to happen, things have to happen, speaking tautologically.  Fortunately we humans have minds of our own, and it behooves us, then, to realize that our better angels of productivity must be actively called into service

Resisting change, motion in a creative human way, is as natural as apple pie for students the world over.  Learning, unlike gaming, takes effort that does not come naturally; we have no law of physics to metaphorically rescue us from our own languor.  In fact, the way of nature seems stacked against us delving with efficacy into our studies.  Only the most diligent, or perplexingly inspired among us, can honestly say they are drawn out of their realm of inertia and moved, thematically as well as physically, toward that textbook.

So perhaps to impel some action, to get us out of inertia study doldrums, we might have to contravene the old belief that one best not compare ourselves to others.  We might, to realize that we want to go somewhere, both academically and in life, spend a moment looking at where we’ve been, or where others are and have been.  Here pop culture celebrities can provide some countenance to our tendency, when they deign to open up about their oft-sordid pasts, to just do nothing, or anything rather than our schoolwork.  We can learn from other specimens to see our fate lest we fail at our schooling efforts.   The world is, as we know from demographic surveys related to political reporting about voter intentions, absolutely awash with folks who didn’t finish high school or who fall into that famed “some college” category – not finishing a four year degree, in other words.

And darker than that are those among us, perhaps even our past selves, who engaged in crimes of larceny or sins of the heart before our better impulses sent us on our way to a more edifying future version of ourself.  The beloved country/pop singer Jelly Roll explains how his inner inertia has given way, relatively late in life, to an avowed desire to do good and be good, to actively motion himself to a place in life and in relations that won’t bring shame to his conscience and peers.  This after jail time and probation after being convicted of theft in order to supply his teen Cannabis habit.

“I had no business taking from anybody,” Jelly explained.  “Just the entitlement that I had, that the world owed me enough that I could come take your stuff.  It’s just what a horrible, horrible way to look at life and people.  What a horrible way to interact with the Earth.”

“I took zero accountability for anything in my life.  I was the kid that if you asked what happened, I immediately started with everything but me.  And it took years for me to break that, like years of work, solid work to just like break that.  It also has taken years of work for me to even forgive that kid.”

Suddenly it may dawn on us in our lives that the desire to fulfill ourself academically, though overcome by inertia and the tendency to stay in bed or stay in our rut of non-productive activities, relates wholly to our future selves.  We want to look back and be proud of who we were and how far we came on our life journey—ideally with a pinch of humor to go with that wisdom.  Even while hiding in our beds from life’s angst and sharing memes along the lines of “the fact that I cannot explode into a thousand bats to escape awkward social situations is a constant source of irritation” the very fact that our future self is there with us as a sort of hall monitor, can be that teensy shove that leads us in a productive direction.   After all, the will to escape a situation is itself an inborn drive the likes of which can rarely be overcome once thrust into action—like feeling the rhythm and finding oneself dancing.  We don’t always realize how heartfelt our actions are until years later.  All we can be sure of is that we do have to face life and overcome dilemmas—sooner or later, like or not, inertia will be overcome by that thing called life.  And in that realm at least, physics really does apply to the social realm.

References

Hall, N.  (2024).  ‘Newton’s Laws of Motion’.  NASA Glenn Research Center.  https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/newtons-laws-of-motion/

‘Roll, Jelly & Aniftos, Rania’.  (2024).  ‘Jelly Roll Says He Wants To Have A Conversation With the People He Robbed 24 Years Ago: I Hope They Would Forgive Me’.  Billboard.  Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/jelly-roll-says-he-wants-to-have-a-conversation-with-the-people-he-robbed-24-years-ago-i-hope-they-would-forgive-me/ar-AA1sfOqW?cvid=36e16a458ceb4d8c9ae3f9612e7b7025&ei=29

‘1000 Bats Meme’.  (2024).  Retrieved from https://www.threads.net/@baphomets_bby/post/C_cVCKONPI_