Personal essays
In good times and bad
The burning river
Growing up, my city was the butt of many national jokes.
Not the tiny town that I grew up in, but the closest big city - the city we identified with, the city with the museums we visited and the sports teams we supported: Cleveland.
Any time we talked to someone about whose city was better - because when you’re young you have stupid discussions like that - the other person would inevitably say, “yeah, but your river caught on fire.”
And that was pretty much the end of that. Because it did.
There were comedy sketches of people calling to report a fire and explaining that, no, it was actually a body of water that was on fire.
“What’s that,” the imaginary fireman at the other end of the phone would say, “your river’s on fire?”
The Cuyahoga river caught on fire in June, 1969.
Actually, the comedy sketches were all wrong. No one was surprised. The river had been catching on fire for years.
In fact, the picture of the event in Time magazine that showed a fire boat fighting the fire weren’t even from the 1969 fire. That one was put out pretty quickly and easily. The pictures were from a fire in 1952.
No one was surprised.
But this time, in 1969, after years of industrial dumping of waste into the river, something had to change.
Of all people, Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and the Clean Water Act was passed two years later.
Feeling better
A friend of mine dated a woman who had bipolar disorder.
She would have long periods of depression. She would emerge from these lowest of lows and head to weeks where she felt the highest of highs.
More than one doctor suggested medication to smooth out these extremes and she reluctantly agreed.
She initially did much better. The next few times that she descended into depression she found it more manageable.
But then when she headed back to her next high she stopped taking her medicine.
Why should she? She felt good. She didn’t need to take anything.
In fact, why would she want to take a drug that took the edge off of all of this great energy and mood she was encountering.
The why was because she couldn’t anticipate when her next low would come and now she faced it without the medicine and it was too much for her.
Measles
I got a measles booster about a month ago.
My doctor said that they could test me to see if I still have enough of whatever it is that this vaccine gives you to prevent measles but that at my age I might as well just get the shot.
I don’t think I would have bothered to get the booster if there wasn’t an outbreak.
If the proverbial river wasn’t on fire, I might not think about whether or not I should toss this apple core into the water.
But there is an outbreak and it’s mainly caused by unvaccinated people.
In a way it’s a societal bipolar disorder.
Until the past few years there haven’t been any measles outbreaks so why should we bother getting vaccinated.
I mean, I feel fine. No one gets measles anymore, this vaccine is just some (fill in your conspiracy theory here) perpetrated by (fill in your favorite villain here).
And so the percentage of people vaccinated dips below the magic number of 92% and an outbreak happens.
It’s why we need to get vaccinated when we’re enjoying the highest of highs - when there are no measles in sight.
Coda
It’s not just measles. Our water is clean, our economy is solid, unemployment is down, our flights are relatively safe, our weather forecasts are really pretty good - why do we need to pay all this money for these big pieces of infrastructure that make them that way.
I heard an interview with Michael Lewis in which he tells the story of a scientist dropping mannequins in the water to see where they drift.
First, if at this point someone wanted to ridicule his work it would have been easy to do so. Some MAGA Congressperson could wave around a sheet with the money he was given to dump mannequins in the water and watch them. What a waste of taxpayer money.
And then someone washed overboard in a storm and the Coast Guard had to figure out where to look. They used the results of the mannequin studies to rescue the man before he drowned.
To me - that’s science. You build up information not knowing what it might apply to and then you use it in ways that may or may not be anticipated.
It turns out the rescued man might still vote against spending his tax dollars for that research. While almost drowning, he found religion and no one could convince him that anything but prayer led the Coast Guard to him.
I have nothing against people who find power and/or solace in prayer - but thoughts and prayers by themselves don’t keep our kids’ schools from being shot up and they don’t cure measles.
We need to find, develop, and take the right medicine in bad times and we need to continue to take it in good times.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 263. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe