Luce Writer

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

ENHANCE

For example: I was recently trapped in long-distance transportation with a man who apparently didn't bring any tissues with him and proceeded to sniffle on a predictable cycle of one wet sniff every 15 to 25 seconds for approximately three hours. To prove that this is ridiculous and I am not overreacting by being annoyed, that is about 1 sniff for every 20 seconds, or an estimated 540 sniffs. 3 sniffs a minute. That's ridiculous.

I don't normally consider myself a petty person. I don't normally do anything with this information. It's just for me: a way of asking myself, "am I having an episode of some kind right now, or is this actually bullshit?".

Once, however, while on stationary guard with another security worker I did in fact contribute to his firing by running the calculations in a fit of internal frustration and concluding that- in addition to routinely arriving 45 minutes late to relieve me for my only lunch and toilet break- he was also absent from our assigned area of operation for a legitimate and easily-proven 78.9% of our shift.

(It was a low-traffic location. I had a lot of time. I made a pie chart.)

Anyhow, this is all to say that my personal productivity is something I take great pride in, and my brain is normal.

And- after running the numbers- it appears that while my productivity has increased 54% in the past year, compensation for this labor has increased an effective 1.5% adjusted to inflation.

And I'm mad about that.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.

Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.

Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.

The best part is the local city council's reaction.