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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

survival

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The virtue you don’t want tested

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can. —Frida Kahlo

Endurance. Perseverance. Persistence. Inner strength.

Each of these virtues draws praise in an era that worships the rugged individual who conquers circumstance with dogged will and fortune (but mostly dogged will).

Three months after the US presidential inauguration, the shine of “resistance” has dulled. So has the popular hope that we can abbreviate the next four to eight years; that we might not have to keep feeling the chaos, the uncertainty, the confusion, the ambiguity; that we might not have to keep watching headlines like the ones we’ve seen this week.

It may be true that “we can endure much more than we think we can.”

It certainly isn’t true for everyone.

And it’s an idea that, even under the aegis of common penal rhetoric like “no pain, no gain,” we don’t really want to test.

I have limits, and I’m sure Kahlo’s right that I’m more limited by what I think my limits are than by what they actually are.

But I don’t want to know how much we can endure, not when I watch what my siblings in Syria and Egypt and Myanmar and Michigan and South Dakota are enduring already.

Perhaps the reassurance that we can endure trauma motivates some people to hold their courage through it all. I’m hoping instead that it doesn’t give the rest of us cover to stand aside and merely look.

We need one another to do more than that. Much, much more.

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Sagan on Illiteracy

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe—the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us.

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.—Carl Sagan, The Demon-haunted World

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Humankind as Plague

Big Think‘s Tauriq Moosa revisits Alan Weisman’s World Without People. Star Trek fans might recall Q’s first trial of humanity on The Next Generation. Moosa asks: how could we justify human existence to such aliens if evidence for our value is limited?

Are We a Plague? Well, That Depends

Climate change and imported disease may have killed them, but most paleontologists accept the theory Martin advocates: “When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose.” He is convinced that people were responsible for the mass extinctions because they commenced with human arrival everywhere: first, in Australia 60,000 years ago, then mainland America 13,000 years ago, followed by the Caribbean islands 6,000 years ago, and Madagascar 2,000 years ago. — Alan Weisman

As Moosa explains, writers, scientists, and philosophers have been exploring whether humanity is Earth’s boon or threat or some indeterminate combination of both for several centuries. Their question remains unsettled, though: there’s still too much uncertainty about environmental stability, population levels, geo-cycles that are beyond human interference, and the impacts of our technologies on life and the systems that supports life.

Check out the World Without Us and Scientific American websites for some engaging graphics, like New York City from Day 2 through Ice Age.