Modern Problems

April 2024 

The other day a geomagnetic storm sped by our planet and generated the Northern Lights as far south as Florida.  Highly unusual!  Actually, almost unprecedented.  Everyone was enthralled with the beauty of this phenomenon. Even as it threatened to disrupt telecommunications and knock out our fragile power grids.

They were indeed beautiful, as I can attest. They brightly lit a semi overcast sky in Michigan for me to see.  But I must admit, they made me a little paranoid.  I have a vivid imagination. I could envision my laptop getting fried, all my zip drives toasted.  Everything I have ever written would be lost forever.  Not to mention the potential for our planet to get roasted, like a marshmallow on a stick.

This made me ponder all the unique stuff that goes on these days.  Things that are hard to explain and nearly inexplicable. Things that are just curious. And things the media sends us on a mental wild goose chase over, while they try to sell us stuff as we browse social media or news on the internet.

Let’s talk for a minute about balloons from China.  I know that was a while back, but it created quite a stir. As I thought about this, I reasoned we were being just a tad ridiculous. Like China doesn’t have a higher tech means of watching us?  Like they don’t have sophisticated satellites like we do? One’s that can likely tell you the color of socks Joe Biden is wearing today. But we do like to worry about the obvious and ignore the obscure.

Speaking of satellites, I saw Starlink make its way across the sky the other night. If you didn’t know it, Starlink is a satellite internet constellation. A set of interlinked satellites that help provide the internet to areas lacking in terrestrial coverage.  These have been deployed and are owned by the American aerospace company SpaceX.  You know, Elon Musk.  That really rich guy.

Starlink consists of over 6,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. It looks quite amazing as it snakes across the sky.  But it makes you wonder.  Like what else can those things do besides provide the internet?  Do we think China would mind if we took a look at what they got going on? And, by the way, do we really need more junk floating around up there.  Not too long-ago SpaceX launched a car into space just for fun. What’s next?

We had a solar eclipse last month too.  That generated a ton of media attention and a great deal of interest.  It was actually kinda fun!  But all I could think about was how the media was creating peripheral stories around a highly natural occurrence.  Literally creating news. And of course, conspiracy theories. Oh yea, they failed to mention these total eclipses happen once a year or so, just not across middle America.  A fact that might have diminished the story. Regardless, it created a lot of enthusiasm and an economic boon for the cities and towns in the path of totality. 

Last summer was a really strange one in Michigan and along most of the northern tier of the US.  Grass fires in western Canada furnished smoke that darkened our skies for weeks at a time. Providing a bit of a post-apocalyptic glow. It made for some beautiful sunsets, but it sure took away a bunch of blue-sky days.  All this being sent by a country that won’t even let us bring more than two cases of beer back over the border. And can’t even put a decent NHL team together.

It’s also been a year of curiosities.  Did you hear about bio-illuminating petunias?  How about those earthquakes in New Jersey? It’s been a constant stream of odd “stuff”.  Like emergency doors blowing out of airplanes, a rash of UFO sightings, weird concerns about commercial aircraft leaving chemtrails and the conspiracy theories around them.  Not to mention the whole El Niño or La Niña thing affecting our weather.  What’s next?  There is just so much to think about.  So much to distract us from other pressing issues.

Let’s talk about some real issues, like media substantiated misinformation and disinformation. Or the growing societal polarization in our country that is fueling political gamesmanship and ineptitude.  Or how about cyber insecurity? And let’s talk about the growing concerns around artificial intelligence? 

These things are the real deal.  At least as far as most intelligent people are concerned.  Technology is moving fast, and ethics can’t seem to keep up.  By the way, why when we say, or think, of technology do we always feel like it is a cultural advancement? Because very often it is not.

All this to say that we all seem to like to worry.  We like a good story. But we often like worrying best about the wrong stuff and stories that have very few facts behind them.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  What could be more entertaining than bio-luminescent flowers? Or when our sun burps electromagnetic radiation our way.

When I was growing up, I was always scared to death of radiation.  Nuclear war was on my mind.  The media back then helped fuel this, and likely with justifiable cause.  The threat was real.  To compound this, my older brother regaled me with stories about when he was in school in the 1950’s, they practiced hiding under their desks in case of a nuclear attack.

I’m sure the danger of nuclear war was then, and likely is now, very real.  And certainly, the prospect of this happening is horrific.  However, a nuclear explosion anywhere in the vicinity would certainly find you, even if you were hiding from it. Especially under something as rickety as an elementary school desk.   The outcome would be the same.

My point is, how long can you go on worrying over stuff like this? It begins to monopolize your life.  Sapping the enjoyment out of it.  So as far as nuclear war goes, I stopped worrying long ago. But I still have worries.  Now I have concerns about the things that get in the way of seeing the real problems.

In Roman times, satirists used the term "Bread and circuses".  This is a metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. Things given or presented in an attempt to please or distract disgruntled people. This has been a technique used for millennia, mainly by governments, to provide people with things to do, see, or think about, which seem to make their lives more enjoyable. This is done in order to stop them complaining about important problems.  The real ones.  And we have a few of those.

Think about this.  Are we not often guided by the media or politicians to think about the superfluous?  Don’t we seem to drown in misinformation while starving for facts? This often leads to us gaining what we believe to be knowledge but sacrificing wisdom. We are not interpreting the facts ourselves; we allow others to do that for us.

We must be conscious of this.  Not so we enjoy life less, but so we understand the true problems we face in our lifetimes.  So that we may stop worrying and spend more time trying to help fix them.  Our grandchildren, and their grandchildren will appreciate this. We need to leave them with a world that has fewer things to worry about.  They will have their own modern problems.  Let’s just not make them the same ones that we face now.