Overdose, accidents and gun violence.

"More than 140,000 Americans have already died from the coronavirus, meaning that in the span of six and a half months, SARS-CoV-2 has killed more people than the number of Americans who die each year from opioid overdose (46,000), traffic accidents (36,500), and gun violence (40,000) combined." 

"The COVID-19 pandemic isn't subsiding in the U.S., with more than 70,000 new cases per day as of July 15."

Source: The Motley Fool 

While all living things will die in some way, from some cause, at some time - it is unfortunate that we plummet the worlds resources and refuse to hold in check our privileges, while more persons die earlier than is necessary - if only we cared more and acted differently.

Toward eupan ~

~ marty alan michelson, ph.d.

Caring for what we know and don't know - by Wendell Berry

Late Summer Fields (2018)

• • •

To care for what we know requires
care for what we don’t, the world’s lives dark in the soil,
dark in the dark.

Forbearance is the first care we give
to what we do not know. We live
by lives we don’t intend, lives
that exceed our thoughts and needs, outlast
our designs, staying by passing through,
surviving again and again the risky passages
from ice to warmth, dark to light.

Rightness of scale is our second care:
the willingness to think and work
within the limits of our competence
to do no permanent wrong to anything
of permanent worth to the earth’s life,
known or unknown, now or ever, never
destroying by knowledge, unknowingly,
what we do not know, so that the world
in its mystery, the known unknown world,
will live and thrive while we live.

And our competence to do no
permanent wrong to the land
is limited by the land’s competence
to suffer our ignorance, our errors,
and — provided the scale
is right — to recover, to be made whole.

• Wendell Berry

A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015

I gave up on Facebook

I gave up on Facebook two years ago.

Even though I used the platform intentionally to be positive and a peacemaker - I realized the platform became a breeding ground for dissension, strife, and attacks.

It seems to me what I experienced on Facebook is becoming more "mainstream" in everyday interactions.

It feels to me that people are more bitter, more condescending, more aggressive and more willing to be caught up in petty dissent and/or outright flagrant arguments - in the grocery store or at the gasoline pump.

It makes me sad.

We can be better.

We can be peaceable.

We really do need each other.

The future of human flourishing - and the flourishing of all living things - depends on our communal care.