Human Speed

I wrote this in 2017, and didn’t realize I hadn’t shared it, but not much has changed..

I bought some cherries at the farmer’s market on Sunday. I looked around, since the ones I saw were expensive: $8 for a large pint. It seemed that they cost less last year. I went to the youngish guy with the tattoos who has fruit that seems organic — bug spots, smaller, riper. He usually has deals, and if the scale is on your side he’ll throw a couple of extra plums in to even out the bunch.

“Sorry, season’s over,” he said. “It was a short one this year.”

I bought some from the one kiosk selling them. The older farmer bustling in the background said it was probably the last week. They wouldn’t have anymore.

I started thinking about our food supply, dying bees, droughts. Things we take for granted can just disappear. Industrial farming has taken a lot of the nutrients out of our food, so even when we’re trying to eat healthily, a lot of what we buy is tainted or shiny in presentation but empty of nutrients. It’s tempting to make a jab at our culture, that our food is an analog to it — fattening, shiny empty, but that’s too easy. I worry we won’t have enough one day. It is happening other places. Money can only get you so much. I couldn’t find organic apples for months, and I was told it was just a bad year. The non-organic, shiny, non-nutritive ones that you’re not supposed to eat because they are sponges for pesticides were plentiful.

I was at the gym, and saw pictures of Isis in Iraq, taking over cities. I’ve become so cynical it would not surprise me if Dick Cheney and Haliburton we’re funding them. I read the other day that Haliburton profited something like $137 billion dollars from the war in Iraq. A war Cheney started, and is now trying to hang on someone else. He is pure evil. But war profiteers are not new, it’s just been a good harvest for them. A cherry year.

I worry that the rhetoric he and other conservatives spew about guns, about freedom, somehow equating the idea that guns keep America free while every day another child or another innocent bystander dies from some idiot with a gun, will cause these people to mobilize under some religious banner and turn us into a terrifying theocracy. I typed theocrazy by accident, and that may be more apt. I always want to tell religious nuts to go and live in an actual theocracy for a year, and if they survive, come back and tell us how free it felt to them.

My brother had an Afghan hound several years ago. The joke was that the dog was pretty but not very smart. If you had the dog in your car and you were anywhere near a street, the dog would try and jump out as soon as possible to run away from you into traffic. Ironically, the dog’s name was Freedom. You would call after him “Freedom!” and he would look briefly at you, and run toward danger.

I’ve been thinking about that dog lately in regard to what’s happening in our country. It feels like the debate over gun control, media, Wall Street greed, and well, everything, seems to be a debate over “freedom.” For some freedom is absolute, including self-harm and harm to others. The argument seems to be that it doesn’t matter what you do, because it’s a free country. I can buy as many guns as I want and shoot them wherever I am because I’m a good person. I’m not a bad person with a gun, and even though it’s more likely I will be involved in some kind of violence because I have a gun in my house, I’m allowed to do that. I’m free. I can run into traffic if I want to.

I heard a story on the news this weekend about the slums in Brazil, how outside an expensive new stadium, people are living in a city that must be traversed by boards above still flooded waters, filled with dog excrement and refuse, which causes sickness and death — especially young children. Millions spent for the world to watch grown men play a game for entertainment, while people die around the corner. We do like to distract ourselves.

Maybe we’re not meant to know what 7 billion people are doing at every moment of every day. It doesn’t affect our day-to-day lives. I draw incorrect conclusions from history, and at times it seems dark. My evidence, like any bad scientist or journalist, is anecdotal. It’s too emotional. It doesn’t always go south, though, does it? There’s still hope we can fix our food, feed people, have enough water, solve our murdering each other in the streets and ignoring the suffering for the sake of a good time, right? “Lighten up,” I hear someone say. It’s only a game.

Reading Annie Dillard’s fantastic essay about seeing a full eclipse, I was struck by her description of people screaming at the precise moment of eclipse. Apparently, it’s quite common. The moment, she says, is a moment when you see just how fast we are moving, hurtling through space. It’s shocking.

We’re obsessed with speed — cars, planes, internet — what’s the fastest? As a people we want to get there faster, get it faster, experience it faster, more than likely to experience, get or have more and more. Our human speed, though, is about three miles an hour. That’s the speed we walk. We need horses, motors, computer chips, to move quicker and bring things to us faster.

When do we top out? Will the ultimate experience of being human actually end with us sitting still, experiencing visual, aural and oral stimuli as fast as we possibly can? Moving so fast we sit still? I’d doubt that science fiction scenario, but I wonder if our current feeling of capsizing, of shutting down, of destruction, is a reaction to that speed.

It’s probably not an accident that there’s a resurgence of old ideas, like the Flat Earth Society, a group who actually believes, contrary to actual visual fact and experience, that the Earth is flat. Maybe what science is telling us is so scary it’s easier to return to having our heads in the sand. It’s probably why people are also turning to religion as well, pulling back because there is some comfort in the slowness and trying to find something easier and some meaning or explanation. There’s a sense of community and space and silence. For Yom Kippur this year, I took the day off. I turned off my phone and didn’t look at my computer. I read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Sabbath. I took a walk around Echo Park Lake with a friend. It was a blissful day. They can’t all be like that, but sometimes not knowing what’s happening everywhere, but only where my feet are, is like a day at the spa. I won’t put my head in the sand, but sometimes deciding where to look is a healthy, useful option.

At the booth that had the cherries, I picked up a few quarts to see which were the best. The woman behind the table assented to my choice. As she dumped the cherries into a bag there didn’t seem to be as many as when they were packed together in the small green box. I am savoring each cherry.