Midnight Ramblings

It is dark, the temperature is cooler outside. Things are quiet. Traffic nearby has slowed or vanished. Nothing, as the Christmas poem says, is stirring. Except me. Almost every night, around the witching hour, regardless of where I am or what I'm dreaming about, I am cast up from the depths of sleep into wakefulness like Jonah being “vomited out onto the dry land” of Nineveh by the great fish. I have no idea why this is. We’re in bed most nights by 9:30. Sometimes earlier, rarely later. Even on nights when we get home late and it’s eleven when we turn in, I still come kareening out of sleep at midnight.

It's not completely accurate to suggest that I'm merely waking up a bit. No, in fact, I come awake with a rush, almost as if I have been woken by some alarm or loud nocturnal disruption. I fly up out of bed, step into my house shoes, and quietly sneak out of the bedroom, hoping not to disturb Micki or our pups, and take a stroll around the house, checking doors, peeking out windows, and grumbling under my breath at this weird habit. The tendency usually ends with me having a handful of crackers or some other light snack, a sip of water, and then heading back to bed, where I spend several minutes trying hard to get the Bare blood pressure back to within appropriate sleeping tolerances.

Once, a few weeks ago, at about the same time that I would normally spring awake, a siren blared out front and, gazing through the windows, I noted a police car, it’s electric blue LED lights flashing frenetically, and a hapless driver, going through the rigamarole of a traffic stop quite literally just down the front walk. That really snapped my heart rate into high gear, and it was several quarters of an hour before I calmed down enough to drift back into the serene dreamless. Otherwise, the only disturbance to wake me comes from within. I have spent many a midnight pondering my odd behavioral tick. It has become a bit of a legend in our home, too.

Several years ago, now, when all the kids were staying with us in the unhappy wake of the pandemic, they would remark that the house was haunted. They claimed to see a “shape” wandering around the house, or they would hear doors close or floors squeal under silent tread. They said that there was a restless specter roaming the halls and corridors of our estate. As much as to quote Hamlet's injunction to the ghost of his murdered father unintentionally, they would say—and I’m paraphrasing here—, “rest, rest perturbéd spirit”. I scared them several times as they came down or over (as the case was) to raid the fridge, the larder, or the pantry. I was just sitting there, mournfully munching on leftovers or whatever was available. They would scream, I would feign fright just to take the edge off of the embarrassment, and then I would shuffle off to bed and lie there until the kitchen was quiet again, and then head back to scoop ice cream or chew on meatloaf.

I am sitting here writing this in the depths of the middle night, “This is thy hour, O soul,” as Walt Whitman wrote, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is that makes me wake at this time and come “fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.” It’s not like I set an alarm for it, and many nights I participate in a partisan argument with myself to let me sleep undisturbed, which is what I would like to be doing right now. Instead, I’m in the kitchen, leaning on our counter, munching on crackers and drafting this essay.

I have memories of Pop Bare being up at night, snacking like this, too. He was forever checking the outdoor lights, the door locks, making complicated snacks from various leftovers, and generally hovering in the kitchen at all hours, looking out the windows and wandering about. I can still see him, leaning on the counter, using his peanut butter-laden knife to snag another Ritz cracker from a pile and asking me why I was still up. If I inherited it from him, then I now at least understand why he was up. Whatever it is that wakes us, though, remains a mystery.

I will admit that I have had some truly peaceful moments at midnight. There is something about this dark world when your house is ninety years old. The floors creak and, if you're dedicated, you soon learn which parts make the loudest groans. Other than the timed lights, the house is wrapped in gloom, draining the otherwise brightly colored rooms to shades of grey. The usual scents of flowers, plants, cooking, or baking are gone, replaced by the odor of oiled wood and old books.

Sitting at our kitchen counter with my head propped in my hands, I have sometimes thought that one of the echelons of our venerable ancestors had a job as a night watchman, or drew lots to stand the midnight post upon the chilly battlements. Maybe some unlucky member of a prehistoric tribe or clan had the incredible misfortune to watch the family group as they slept and snuggled, clutching a staff or spear and hoping that the saber-tooth cat wouldn't approach until someone else’s turn to play guard duty. Whatever causes me to blast awake, it must come from some very deep biological imperative, born from eons of necessity and habit. I get this, of course. There is a natural and respectable urge to keep the cubs safe and make sure their mother’s sleep is unperturbed.

When the boys were small, I really did feel a kind of sudden and implacable watchfulness creeping in my veins at night that is most closely associated with a biological imperative. I often heard them cough or groan or whimper or get up for water or to use the potty in the deep watches of the night. I also heard our beloved Trixie growl or whine in her sleep from her bed in the kitchen. When Evan was still quite a little chap, he would sometimes sleepwalk. I caught him a few times and urged him back to bed without waking him. Once, I heard the hall shower switch on and was able to stop him from stepping into the scalding spray in his full sleeping togs. He mumbled something about cereal, and I ushered him to bed and covered him back and stood sentinel until I was sure he was back to sleep, my heart playing a country jig behind my sternum.

Eventually, though, sleep comes back to me, and suddenly, as if shot with a tranquilizer dart, I start to slump and my eyes droop. Then, avoiding the creaky and squeaky parts of the floors, I check the doors, peer out the front windows, and take in the silent and shadowy surroundings before heading back to our room. I scuttle back to our bed, quietly kick off my house shoes, and settle in next to Micki and gently try to get comfy without shaking things up too much. I must fall back to sleep hard, because I rarely wake again unless my bladder is full or our geriatric pug cries to go out. 

Until the alarm wails, I’m usually dead to the world, as the saying goes. These last few nights, I have taken my phone off the charger and brought it with me on my midnightly perambulations to jot down the odd things that come to me in the murk of the smallest hour. Whatever it is that wakes me, whether ancient habit or something more prosaic, I have spent countless midnights just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, floating about our old house unseen by most, rambling for reasons that I may never understand until sleep comes back to me. And as I write these last words, I feel the pull of slumber on my bones. I’ll say good night.

The Groundskeeper’s Lament

Join me, won’t you, on a leisurely stroll through my neighborhood. You’ll see craftsman style homes, some Cape Cods, some others strewn through leafy streets. Almost every home has a verdant yard, every yard an oak, maple, or dogwood, every flowerbed dazzling with hostas and shaped hollies. We’ve just missed the best part of the year, as all the irises and azaleas have bloomed already. There may be some day lilies and hydrangeas, though, and there are dinner plate-sized magnolia blossoms, like giant white stars in a shining dark green night of glossy leaves. 

If we take a closer look, though, amid all the greenness is a strange and insidious growth. Virginia creeper is slowly spreading its tendrils across the beautiful mulch under the front windows. Wild grapes are flourishing over the buttery gardenias. Invasive species, like privet and Chinese wisteria, pop up everywhere, not to mention volunteers of the more hardy trees, like elm and maple, and cedar. You’ll notice mulberry, too, if you wander around the natural areas, and poison ivy and mimosa, and liriope grass. There is wild yam (also a vine) and many other kinds of green things that are slowly taking over, covering, sprouting, trailing, creeping, and proliferating. Almost as soon as the temperature rises daily above 65 degrees Fahrenheit, the world and our neighborhood and our yard come to life with an army of plant life of wondrous assortment that refuse to be culled, plucked out, torn down, mowed, trimmed, pruned, shaped, dug up, burned, or sprayed. 

The irony of plant life is that we have obvious and blatant double standards regarding them. This past weekend, I spent two days carving into the lush growth, just to get some of our yard back. Without concern for getting enough water or sunlight, these ancient growing things extend three feet in just one day, while we spend our time plucking weeds in our garden and watering, just to make sure that our tomatoes, peppers, and herbs keep growing. The plants we want seem precarious and delicate, and finicky. The plants we don’t want can survive an eight-week drought, a nuclear winter, and still come back strong enough for me to have to go out and cut them back again. 

While griping copiously as I mowed, I noted that about 1/3 of our yard is dedicated to what my father-in-law called “natural areas”. Mainly, these natural areas are beneath our numerous magnolia trees. Unlike other deciduous trees, magnolias tend to be a little bit backward in their treeish schedules. When other trees are newly jade green in spring, the magnolia is beginning to cast off its huge, glossy leaves, which are thick and heavy, in preparation for its massive blossoms. In late summer, when other trees are bearing fruit, the magnolia drops its large cone-like seed hulls, which look for all the world like fragmentation grenades and quickly dull my mower blades.

This is forgivable, if you’ve ever smelled a magnolia blossom, you’ll know it is one of the best natural scents in the world and speaks to deeps within me that remind me of ancient summers long before humans walked in this part of the world. As the magnolia leaves clatter down, they land on an incredibly shallow root system, which makes mowing a real pain. I long ago decided to let the leaves just fall and cover the ground under the trees with crackling leaf litter. Most things are deterred by the heavy leaves, but some invasive species still grow up in those natural areas, and so, even in the twilight gloom under the magnolia's evergreen boughs, I have to spray and cut, to make sure the ivies and the creepers and privet don’t take over. 

I sometimes imagine myself like Macbeth, as he listens to the messenger tell him, 

“As I did stand my watch upon the hill,

I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought

The Wood began to move.”

In the Scottish play, this is a tale of doom for Macbeth, since the witches at the beginning told him that he would be king until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Little does he know that his enemies have cut tree branches to camouflage their advance to lay siege to his castle, signifying his end. But on a quiet day, when the birds are ducking the midday sun, I swear I can hear the vines and creepers whispering through the undergrowth and the faint keening of woody junk plants stretching under our decks. 

I work forty hours a week. When I get home, until we have dinner and clean up, it is time to think of getting ready for the next day so that we can get to bed early enough to make the next morning bearable. Our weekends are often busy, too. Whether we are off to book signing events or to visit the kids, or if we are hoping to grab lunch in our favorite cantina, downtown, then grocery shopping, or running weekend errands, doing laundry, cleaning the house, or just shattered from a very busy and dauntingly packed week, I sometimes just don’t have enough time to spend in the yard and grounds. 

Most years, I can find at least one or two days a week to get out and get ahead, but this last year has been busier than normal and more fraught with commitments. I had a good handle on the end-of-summer chores last year, and was feeling good about it, when Hurricane Helene came hurtling across our state’s western region, shunting our kids from their house to ours, from late September to late January. During that time, we were trying hard to make our home welcoming for our son and his wife and daughter, especially when he had to go back to their house during the week. We got to spend a lot of time with the baby, but it necessarily cut into yardwork time. Not that I minded, of course. Given the chance to be raking and mowing up leaf litter and sitting watching music videos and reading to the little bit, I’d choose the latter every time and twice on Thursday.

Somehow, though, after the kids were able to get home (it took four months for their Internet to be hooked up, in the daunting aftermath), we needed some time to deal with the poignant pain of missing them and transitioning back to our previous routine. Then, too, our eldest opted to move into where the other kids had been staying during the fall and winter, so there was a secondary transition. By my birthday, when I usually take a week off to get caught up on the grounds in preparation for summer, we were settling back into our quiet routine again. Except this year, instead of a week at my birthday, as usual, I opted to take the same week off as the local school system’s spring break, so that we could spend it together without really going anywhere. As glorious as that week was, though, instead of getting the yard and pool sorted, I spent it gamboling around town with my bride. Again, given the chance, I’d pick the latter every time. The green and growing things took full advantage

April streaked by and May is now waning and only by dribs and drabs have I been able to get anything close to caught up. This past weekend, plans we made were changed and so I was able to spend two whole days getting things reckoned with and uncovering the pool, but I still have so much to do. Soon, we’re headed to celebrate the long Memorial Day weekend with our kids in the mountains, and so, more time will slip by without a shred of work getting done at our house.

I say that, but our eldest has take real pride this year and tidied up a lot in the courtyard, which was a huge help and his talent for seeing things in 3D before the job is done, made taking the cover off the pool 99% easier than when I’ve had to do it myself in previous years. Nevertheless, even with a squad of helpers and the best tools, it would take me most of June to get things where I would like them.

Pop Bare says, “The grass will always have to be mowed.” It’s true enough. Just like a haircut, my vibrant, viridian lawn which looks neat and even, will soon be, to use the Pennsylvania German word, strubbly once again. No matter how many times I pull down and cut away the English ivy or the Virginia creeper from under my front windows, I’ll have to do it again. This year was somewhat off kilter and enjoyably so, but it won’t matter in the long run. Slowly, while I’m working at the library or visiting the kids, or just taking a much needed stroll with Micki to our favorite downtown haunts, the growing things will be making slow, almost silent inroads, like the sentient, carnivorous monster plant in a thriller I recently read. 

Someday, whether or not I am still as healthy and springy as I am now, I will have to hire a yard company to come out and deal with our grounds. I’ve watched one-by-one as our older neighbors have succumbed to the cookie-cutter landscaping that is the equivalent of a dollar store makeover. I will buy a riding mower sooner than give up the right to plan my own grounds. We Bares are stubborn and full of pride.

Though I will say that as I mowed recently, I was envisioning something along the lines of a vast English gardens in our North Yard. Instead of an acre of green grass, I imagined cutting the rectangle up into a series of beds, with swaths of paving stones between them and very little, if any grass present. I would plant yarrow and obedient and black-eyed susans and towering cone flowers and creeping flox, and every other kind of flowering beauty, so that, as the year progressed from early spring to late fall, something would always be blooming. It would mean less mowing, more love to our pollinators and a heaping helping of pretty for those passing through. We could even put a nice bench or a swing out there, or a table and chairs, so we could read and enjoy the beauty (if it isn't too hot).

Alas, none of that is happening soon. Not for lack of trying, but because until we’re both pensioners ourselves, there just won’t be any time. In the meantime, I’ll continue trying to keep more than a fingernail-hold on my outdoor chores and endeavor to reawaken my previous dedication to keeping things a little neater than I have this past year. 

The Wet, Steamy Car Windows of Modern Belief

Author’s note: Part of this essay comes from a paper written for a college class, and I’ve taken that topic and worked it into a newer form. Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper had a sheep problem, but in my own paper, I reworked it to make it a bit more palatable to modern eyes and brains, and my professor said that he felt Gettier would approve. Thanks to Edmund Gettier, I find myself considering sheep (or sheepdogs, as the case may be) a lot, as you will see, and thanks to my long-suffering professor(s) that last year of my undergraduate work, who helped me to feel confident enough to build on the shoulders of an epistemological giant. The following amalgam is also somewhat dependent on Malcolm Gladwell’s recent Revisionist History podcast episode called The RFK Jr. Problem.

Generally speaking, I trust science to provide better answers about the world than anything else. There’s a place for intuition, supposition, hypotheticals, educated guesses, of course, but science does the hard work of having to prove its positions and show its work. This doesn’t make science omniscient or always perfectly true. There’s still a lot out there that we don’t fully understand. Some of those things are foundational, like how life started on this planet, or what consciousness is, or how we explain sentience, and although we might take scientific fact as being more or less the epitome of verifiable truth, we must still be skeptically confident only, remembering that science often paves over its previous work as new things are discovered and new technologies grant us access to deeper secrets. 

I have long been a supporter of the idea that, where science fails, or has been unable to fill the unfilled gaps, philosophy takes over. Even philosophy cannot do all the work, but we know more now than we did when we were first spreading across the world as nomadic wanderers. And yet, we rarely stop to acknowledge what we don’t know and how those gaps are much more illustrative of our species than what we do know.

In the overarching realm of philosophy, the study of what we know is called epistemology, and within the framework of this topic, one of the most fascinating discussions was conducted by 20th-century philosopher Edmund Gettier. In a 1963 paper entitled Is Justified True Belief Knowledge, Gettier describes a problem of observation in which someone can be justified in thinking something is true and yet still not truly know if what they have observed is real. His several scenarios can be teased out into what are now called the Gettier Problems, where the breakdown of perception and observation is designed to point out the frailties in our system of observation and our desire to know things.

One of my favorite examples of a Gettier Problem involves a sheep and a sheep dog, though, in this case, with respect to Mr. Gettier, I’ve put my own spin on it. A father and son are driving on a rainy country road; the father is in the front seat and the son is in the back. Out of the foggy, wet windows, the green country speeds by. They pass a white object on the driver’s side of the car. The father believes that it is a sheepdog. The son believes that it is actually a sheep. Both father and son have seen the white creature, and both come to different conclusions. All the predicates for both things to be true are there, and it is reasonable to assume that both parent and child can trust their perceptive faculties. The next step would be to ask if either the father or the son was justified in believing what they thought they saw out the rainy, steamy windows. We would probably say yes. 

Both are justified in believing what they saw, making this a justified true belief (JTB), but how can they know what they think they saw is factual if they keep driving? One of my classmates hilariously suggested that the father turn the car around to prove his son either right or himself wrong, or vice versa. This pragmatic suggestion got a general laugh, but also struck me with a secondary problem within the thought experiment. At what point is it the responsible thing for the father and son to sit down and decide how they want to get to the root of the problem?

I could be accused of taking Gettier’s otherwise thought-provoking problem too far by adding the moving vehicle and the rainy windows, but I couldn’t help inserting a layer of ethics into the scenario, either. In real life, we rarely know (or choose to believe) things without an aspect of ethical grounding, even if we ultimately choose to ignore it.

In the modern world, we are confronted with Gettier problems all the time; though the scenarios are more varied (and reflected upon less). Many topics within the framework of public discourse wind up being not much better than the wet, steamy windows in my version of the Gettier thought experiment, and our access to information is such that we can feel as though we are justified in believing something or thinking that it is true and yet having no real ability to ascertain effectively whether it is actually so. The human faculty for certainty without or only partial evidence has been taking performance enhancers of late. When we liberally fold this abject certainty into the admixture, doubling down on our possibly justified true belief, we become guilty of an epistemological infraction and an ethical one. 

To better illustrate this, I will further maim Gettier’s original sheep/sheepdog problem and morph it to fit modern epistemological problems. Instead of a car on a rainy day, though, we will take a slightly more nefarious topic and a slightly more dangerous scenario than a wet country drive through sheep country. 

A few weeks ago, someone I know posted a meme on social media. The topic of this post made them quite angry, and they shared it not only on their feed but also sent it to the direct message platforms of their friends. In this post, the creator (who was not the person who shared it) claimed that a rotavirus vaccine called RotaTeq was killing way more infants than the public knew about. Almost all newborns get the RotaTeq vaccine, and infant mortality rates due to the rotavirus have decreased drastically since then. All the person sharing online saw was that a vaccine was killing babies, and they became incensed enough to share it vigorously.

Immediately, I was dubious. Not only because this post came from the Internet, but also because here was an example of a carefully wrapped but still overtly anti-vax propaganda. I knew, for example, that the RotaTeq vaccine for infants has been in the sights of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for years, mainly because he believed that the doctor who created the vaccine stood to get kickbacks if the CDC found the vaccine efficacious in stopping a deadly infant virus. Although the post did not explicitly invoke RFK Jr., I could see that whoever created the meme that this person was sharing was probably in the pipeline of information promoted by Kennedy and his league of anti-vaccine supporters.

Checking back across the rest of their posts for the last few years, it seemed to me that the person who shared this post was an otherwise reasonable and rational human, not usually prone to conspiracy theories or propaganda. They had taken this idea at face value and got upset by its claims. They saw a situation where blind faith in medicine and science was killing babies while the pharmaceutical companies raked in dough. What the meme was claiming could seem possible, even reasonable, in our nation today. For us, with a young granddaughter, it might be downright terrifying to think that a big corporation would allow a dangerous or deadly vaccine to be put on the market and get the government to legally require it, thus putting our little one in harm’s way. I also know, as most people do, that things are rarely this simple or clear-cut.

The Internet and social media platforms are very much like the steamy and rain-drenched windows in my version of a Gettier problem. We see something that appears real, true, and we might even say justified, based on the limited information that we get, and feel certain about it at first glance. Reading this post might even justify believing it because it feels true. In the modern day, we cannot, like our father and son duo, simply take these things without further analysis and drive on. Too much is at stake in the Internet Age. We owe it to ourselves and to society to take much more care in getting to actual knowledge.

Despite what the post claimed, RotaTeq has saved millions of babies worldwide from the devastating dehydration of diarrhea from infant rotavirus. Before its invention, babies were regularly dying, and medical officials were powerless to stop it. Just one vaccine has saved countless lives. Multiple vaccines are required for infants today, all of which prevent otherwise devastating diseases and death. As I mentioned, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is against the RotaTeq vaccine and has recently accepted a cabinet post as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

In his book, called The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. falsely inflated the number of children who died as a result of taking the RotaTeq vaccine, but he also claims that vaccines generally aren’t necessary or are dangerous or cause other horrible diseases. Famously, he claims that childhood vaccines cause autism, which isn’t even a disease. In Texas, where RFK’s anti-vaccine ideology has taken hold—dare I say become contagious—we are currently watching a potent strain of measles reach nearly epidemic proportions, killing people who refused to get the measles vaccine or have their kids vaccinated, likely because of RFK’s influence and stance, assuredly because someone so prominent is feeding the ideology.

This is where the breakdown between a justified true belief and verifiable facts can cause serious and deadly issues. The person who posted this nonsense online might have been reasonable to assume that there are dangerous side effects for some vaccines. They missed an essential step in their process when they shared the meme without checking the facts first. 

When we claim certainty without verification, we can very quickly cause serious trouble for others who are equally unlikely to check the facts before sharing. To strain the viral metaphor further, when we spread nonsense online without verifying it first, we become a vector for a virulent strain of credulity and ignorance that has actually reached pandemic levels in our nation. The nature of social media is to get us to spread things without verification, but even before social media, this wasn’t a new problem.

If we take a closer look at his work, we see that one of RFK’s articles about vaccines had to be retracted, largely because fact-checkers were able to prove that his work was based not on the efficacy of the vaccines, but on conflict of interest and corruption at the pharmaceutical level and on information that he either willfully or mistakenly got wrong. This hasn’t stopped him from making similar claims about other vaccines, like the COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, the measles vaccine, and others on podcasts, at the podium of his official role, or in his many books. 

I’m not inoculated against RFK Jr. and his anti-vax nonsense, of course. I could just as easily be one of the millions who take his word for golden truths because he appears to be an expert (even though he is undoubtedly not one). Rather, my own position is a simple but very effective one developed over the years: I don’t believe a thing that RFK Jr. says about anything. I don’t believe a thing any “expert” says about anything until I look up whether or not their claims are verified. This isn’t a universal position, of course. Some people are more believable, whose work is verified and vetted long before it ever reaches my eyes and ears. Some people actually do the work before they put things out there. Generally, though, if it elicits a strong emotion, comes with a heavy dose of political or religious ideology, or participates in any number of logical fallacies, I ignore it.

I am immune to RFK Jr’s attempts to drag people into fear of vaccines because the man is a lawyer, not an epidemiologist, and because most of the things he says are patently false. If Rolling Stone has to retract an article, it’s not likely that the facts are being sought in the composition. This is my position for almost everything that comes from the current administration, but also from the Internet. If we take the position that all of it is false until proven factual, we might not actually be so quick to share it just because it seems true, or because we are cynical, overwhelmed, afraid, having an emotional response, or because something is intentionally composed to agree with our biases. I tend to doubt something because I might feel tempted to agree with it when I see it online.

Perhaps ironically, when family or friends would approach me about things that they “read online” about the previous administration which flipped them into a rage of righteous indignation and I didn’t lose my mind with them, they would give me odd looks. When the same or worse things occur in this new administration and they aren’t equally upset, I have to wonder if the main point of the Internet Age is to get us all to be willingly stupid and moral relativists. 

My position is considered unreasonable by the people who believe RFK Jr. (et. al.). Maybe they are motivated to accept his claims because of his lineage, or because he is the nation’s top health officer, or because he is aligned with a particularly virulent strain of ignorance and moral imbecility that seems to appeal to the American political realm.

When I wrote my final paper for the epistemology class about the Gettier Problems, I added the bit about the moral necessity of finding facts to justify our beliefs. My point was that until the father and son go back and test their justified true beliefs, the thing they see can only exist in a kind of paradoxical unity where the object is both and neither a sheep or sheepdog. I got an A. 

I find that the problems that Edmund Gettier published in his paper are much more practical and realistic than just the interesting and diverting discussions about what we think we know. A potent parasitic code has crept into our critical faculties and caused us to believe things not because they are true, but because they agree with our political or religious affiliations or stir up strong emotions (or all of the above). We assume that because someone is on “our side” of the chasm of civil debate and social culture that we must believe in them no matter how ridiculous their claims are. This mindset has polarized our nation and is the equivalent of the father and son stopping the car and having a knife fight to decide who was right about what they thought they saw. Except in that case, neither of them was right, making the fight all the more useless and tragic, and hopeless.

There are many known unknowns and much that we have left to learn about the world. There are some things that we can never know. This is the nature of epistemology and of human experience. However, we have a moral responsibility to make sure that the information we put out into the world is not only verifiable but also more than just a justified true belief. We have to do the work, or else people who cannot tell the difference will get the wrong end of the stick and cause way more than just a polite argument about what’s knowable; it will be the thing that tears our society and our world apart.

Author’s Further Note: Because this is an essay about citing one’s sources, I’ve compiled a bibliography of sorts on the topics discussed herein. You may find them below.

Epistemology and Gettier Problems

1. Wikipedia: Epistemology
   
   

2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epistemology
   
   

3. Encyclopedia Britannica: Epistemology
   
   

RotaTeq Vaccine Safety and Efficacy

1. Merck Vaccines: Safety Profile of RotaTeq
   
   

2. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Rotavirus Vaccine Safety Brief
   
   

3. ScienceDirect: "Social media use and vaccination among Democrats and Republicans: Informational and normative influences"
   
   

Vaccine Misinformation and Social Media

1. Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health: "Vaccine Misinformation Outpaces Efforts to Counter It"
   
   

2. Science (AAAS): "Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on COVID-19 vaccine uptake"
   
   

3. CDC: Vaccines & Immunizations – Myths and Misinformation
   
   

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vaccine Claims

1. Rolling Stone: "Deadly Immunity" (archived)
   
   

2. Salon: Retraction of "Deadly Immunity"
   
   

3. NPR: "Fact Check: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Vaccine Claims"
   
   

The Nihilism Antidote

“We believe in nothing!” So say the trio of German nihilists and the secondary antagonists in the 1998 comedy film The Big Lebowski. This movie has become a cult classic, which is three parts muddle-headed mania and one part Dashiell Hammett-esque detective story. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, it is also probably the only film I know that uses the word ‘nihilist’ in the modern era. 

The movie is worth watching, even if just for its incredible quotability and off-kilter dialogue, and weird plot. For my purposes, though, the aspect I wish to focus on is those three nihilists. It’s not a word that we hear often. A nihilist is an individual who subscribes to nihilism, a philosophical stance that rejects fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, moral values, and inherent meaning. The word comes from the Latin, nihil, meaning nothing. Therefore, a nihilist, as that quote above confirms, literally believes in nothing.

This position might strike us as being somewhat less serious—or more unlikely in real life, but I beg you to read that definition again. “A nihilist rejects fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, moral values, and inherent meaning.” When was the last time you heard someone claim that how someone else lives, loves, sees themselves, exists, believes, votes, or organizes is evil? If you live in the same reality as I do, then almost every day, depending on which news organizations you frequent.

A few years ago, when the phrase “fake news” was going around along with terms like “witch hunt” and “hoax”, despite fact-driven, deep journalism, verified evidence and testimony, even recordings and video clips, we were told that everything was a lie. This is a foundational tenet of nihilism. The things that we depend upon to ground our epistemological (knowledge-based) decision-making mean nothing to the nihilistic worldview. Truth, facts, evidence, verifiability, cited sources, and corroboration are all meaningless. Similarly, we all have that one friend who is convinced that the world is flat or that the moon landing was faked. Almost everyone thinks these things are objectively true, despite our opinions, and yet, some people disbelieve them anyway, in stubborn disregard for the facts. That impulse to disbelieve reality is nihilism.

Nihilism also destabilizes the moral and ethical groundings of our experience by rejecting moral values as nothing more than fleeting preferences. When Kant stated that it was in direct antipathy to human morality to use someone as a means to an end, he was referring to nihilism. Choosing to use a person in this way is a complete disregard for their inherent value, both as a person and as a moral agent. Nihilists won’t stop there. They often use the language or overt support for religious faith or political affiliation as a reason for threatening, cajoling, coercing, extorting, bribery, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Organizations, religious and political groups, most often use their own dogmas as excuses to steal other people’s wealth or land or well-being to further cement their power

Finally, nihilists disbelieve in inherent meaning. The right to have the freedom to decide your destiny or find joy in what matters to you are specifically rejected by nihilism as lies or illusions. The basis of the nihilist motivation is that nothing has meaning, nothing matters, there is no fundamental understanding, no basic facts, no hope or dreams. There is only what might benefit in the moment, unconnected with reason.

This undoubtedly sounds familiar. The unpleasant truth is, most of us deal with nihilism and nihilists every day. From people looking at their phones while driving, to those who are actively tanking our economy for gain and dismantling the established resources that benefit all of us for “efficiency,” and every example in between, we are awash in hopelessness, apathy, disdain, disbelief, and disorder. We pay more attention to algorithms than to our loved ones, we are cruel to our neighbors, heartless to children, and we seem lost in indifference and ignorance. Even the things that people are usually motivated by have become merely a means to shout at others and accuse them of something.

These are all primary effects of nihilism. The secondary symptom is that it is extremely contagious. We might find ourselves shrugging about other people's plight, where once we might have been moved to help. We might know that some ideology is bad or harmful and yet we just can't quite care enough to acknowledge it and change our positions. We become unconcerned, disconnected, and morally lethargic. We begin to say things like, “It's not my problem.” The symptoms of nihilism show up when we think that the only solution to society's problems lies in hating things that used to be of benefit to everyone.

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What makes you happy? I'm not talking about things like ice cream or sex, which have immediate gratification but no long-lasting effects. Rather, I am asking about what virtues in your life make you happy. And by happy, in this case, I mean the definition of the word as Aristotle and the Stoics meant it; think fulfilled.

Happiness is one of those topics that might draw some of the symptoms of nihilism to the surface. Asking someone this question might push them beyond the tipping point. Not because they (we) are happy, but because we don't know what it means anymore. Happiness seems to be part of a fairy tale or the tiny, idiotic representation of life as portrayed in a sitcom or advertisement. There is no depth, no real experience, just the moronic, unreflective experience of glee without substance—happiness as a nihilist might describe it.

If I were to define terms, though, I would first address the idea of happiness, not as someone laughing all day, which might be akin to madness, or someone who is ignorant of the world and lives in a blissful daydream. Rather, I mean Aristotle's definition of happiness, which is eudaimonia: a well-balanced life of reason, discipline, and intention.

This big ancient Greek word is built from a triumvirate of smaller, yet no less important, concepts. If you think of a triangle, at each point there is a separate substructure or underpinning for the concept of eudaimonia. 

At the topmost point is areté, or excellence. For the Stoics, areté meant striving for personal excellence, or as Professor Scott Galloway once put it, “Get the easy things right.” In this case, excellence doesn't mean trying to be perfect. Instead it implies working toward consistency, thoughtfulness, and considered intention in daily affairs. To do something well and with care, whether you are mowing the grass, having a chat with a friend, or participating in a board meeting. If something is worth doing, the Stoics say, do it well. This is the ‘measure twice, cut once’ attitude in philosophy, but there is more to it than just an outward affectation. The determination toward excellence is not based on what you want people to think about you, like an influencer might try to build on Instagram, but rather a dedication to the internal work of doing things earnestly because it brings deep joy. This is the idea of Stoic action.

The next point on the triangle of eudaimonia is attempting to live life on life’s terms. The Stoics called it the discipline of assent. They understood that the world was wild and chaotic, that some things happened that had nothing to do with whether or not we were good people who try to make good choices. This can be quite upsetting, especially when someone in front of us is driving too slowly, or when a coworker is acting like a buffoon, or when we are blamed for something that we did not (and would not) do. There are things that we can control, the Stoics knew, and things that we cannot control. The second point of eudaimonia is to focus on the things we can control and try to handle the things we cannot control by accepting what comes and not losing our balance as we face the less-than-pleasant things.

A few weeks ago, I had a moment of real doubt regarding some people that I work with. I was upset, disappointed, and frustrated. For several moments, my blood pressure was up, and I felt very much out of kilter with myself. Then I remembered this key point of stoicism, and I took several deep breaths and asked myself a series of probing questions. “Can I change how people behave?” “Can I change how I respond to them?” “Can I expect them to do what I want them to do?” “Can I try to be better in my interactions with them?” What I realized as I thought it through was that there was very little I could do to change these people or how they acted and upset me, but I could change how I reacted to it. All I could do was accept that this was how things were and try to be more accepting in the future. I felt immediately better and this is what it means to “live life on life’s terms”. In a sense, if we really wanted to boil this point of the triangle down to something familiar to just about anyone, we could use the Serenity Prayer. “Seek the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference.” The Stoics wrote that when we are in harmony with the world and nature, we are accepting of what happens to us in the moment of existence and for them, this was an assent to our place and position in nature.

The last point on the eudaimonia triangle is a tough one. We must take responsibility for our choices as needed for those things we can control. This is the point in the discussion where our actions matter. Earlier this week, a colleague emailed me and gave me the somewhat unsettling information that I had missed two other employee emails in some staff-wide memos I had sent out. This whole time, I was lamenting that some people were not reading their emails and feeling pretty fed up with them, and then it turns out that it was my fault. Despite my own opinion, which was in error, I was the problem to begin with.

It took me a minute, but I swallowed my pride and confronted these two coworkers and apologized and took responsibility for my error. It was not easy, it was not fun, it did not feel like my first reaction, but once I had made my amends, I felt immediately better. It gave me the feeling of having offloaded the need to cast about for blame, or carry a grudge. It also gave me an opportunity to grow and remember that I make mistakes. 

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Each aspect or point of eudaimonia sets itself up as a remedy for nihilism and the worst most dangerous tendencies within unchecked human behavior. The best part of the stoic triangle is that it isn’t built to be a “self-help fad”. Rather it is a way for each of us to begin to find real fulfilment and meaning in our lives. The great thing about stoicism is that it requires no dogma nor forces us separate ourselves from others with magical beliefs, doctrines, or oaths and rules of conformity. Everything in stoicism is based on personal choice and can easily be modified to work as a compliment to one’s faith or philosophy. 

The exception will be if one adopts outward affectations in order to prove their belief system to others, whether political or social or religious, then stoicism will make it hard to continue in the insincerity. The Stoics worked to acknowledge being in the moment, living within the web of nature, understanding one’s place in the community, seeking to accept one’s mortality while not thriving either in the past, nor yearning for the future, but existing in the present moment.

The modern world has broken the idea of stoicism into a strange amalgam of taciturnity or lack of emotion, as if one is just being sort of grouchy and miserable, but doing so quietly and without much griping, rather like King Lear’s “marble-hearted fiend”. Instead, a stoic is someone who seeks happiness, not in riches or in excess or even in overt outward jollity, but by trying to live well according to the tenets of eudaimonia in the moment. It isn’t about avoiding or ignoring pain, but accepting that there will be pain and trying to find the good despite it. Not phlegmatic but benevolent, not self-deluding, but dwelling in the rigorous honesty that comes from trying to see the world as it is.

As our deeply unhappy world spins on, it can be quite upsetting to see how much regular people are becoming poisoned by the apparent lack of hope and meaning they see in the world. The real solution to the problem of nihilism isn’t promises of a new world to come or even falling hopelessly into the abyss of insouciance, but rather, to find that meaning within ourselves. One of the ways to find that meaning is to abandon the sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness that thrives in the nihilistic mindset and seek hope and meaning in the way that we interact with the world. Stoicism provides clear-cut and beneficial steps to make this happen.

Ironically, the philosophy of stoicism has grown more popular in some circles, perhaps directly in response to the fatuous casuistry of the nihilistic mindset. As words have begun to lose their meaning, stoicism doubles down on challenging us to say what we mean. As the world teeters on the edge of the abyss of self-delusion and credulity, where facts are lies and lies are truth—where 2+2=5, as Orwell says—stoicism demands that we lean into doing the work to be grounded in truth and provide verifiable sources. Where modernity has filled each day with another label to separate us from one another, stoicism brings us to the point of seeing how all things fit together in homogeneity and heterogeneity. Where the world set up cultural laws about happiness based on wealth or beauty or desirability, body type and skin tone, stoicism asks us to look at what is inside each of us and to plumb the depths of our spirit to find the beauty of living in the moment, the wealth of things deserving our gratitude and that the only thing to be truly desired is to live responsibly and with kindness.

The best part of Stoicism is that its followers do not seek to convert others. There is no dogma, no heresy, no apostasy, and no doctrinal tribunals. The efficacy of the philosophy is that its participants stand as an eloquent reminder of just how much there is to gain from purposeful living through personal responsibility, rigorous honesty, and thoughtful discipline in all our affairs. Despite what the world claims we ought to want for ourselves, while simultaneously promoting the moral imbecility of hopelessness and dread of the future seeded by hateful meaninglessness, stoicism can and will inoculate us against the very worst aspects of nihilism  

Stoicism has been around in one form or another since Aristotle. It is tried and true and well-established. And it is patently a remedy for all that is slowly eating a hole into the heart of humanity.

Welcome to May and More...

Flowers

I love spring in NC mainly because flowering plants love it here. Between the dogwood trees (of which we have one of each color, including a pale and a darker pink and a more traditional white), the azelias and rhododendrons, the violets and forget-me-nots and cowbells, the daffodils and crocuses, there is a great spectacle between February and May. Of all of these, though, my absolute favorites are our pale purple irises. 

These tall beauties were shared with us the first year we lived here, and I planted them not long thereafter. In the years since, they have grown full and have spread about, filling the flowery borders of the North Yard side of our property with beauty around the middle of April.

Their scent is my absolute favorite botanical odor, and their color is breathtaking. For Easter, Micki cut some and made a bouquet for our dining room table, which added considerably to our cheer. This year, I hope to beg for some bulbs from our cool elderly neighbors, who have two-tone dark and light purple irises in their front beds. I want to mix them in with our current ones, but also to spread them around the grounds a bit. They are starting to fade now, which always makes me sad, but I will say that, when they start in April, my love of this time of year comes alive.

What Month is it?

Which makes me think that, for spring, things are a bit farther along than I expect for this time of year. The trees are all darker-leafed, their catkins and pollen pods came early and it has been unseasonably warmer and drier for spring, but also more than usually humid already this year. 

After such a brutally cold and snowy winter, I figured spring would be slow and stiff and limp a little from its frosty snooze, but things have really bloomed and unfurled. That makes me worry that we might have a dreadfully hot summer. If so, I may be in for it, as in, inside for the duration, or really in for it, as my heat tolerance has gotten far less resilient of late.

Other People's Blogs

Look for an essay of mine at the blog at this link. There are plenty of other, better writers contributing, but this one will be my second for this site. While I have been pushing my fiction short stories, I worked on my essay for this other site, and for all the effort it took, I'm quite proud of it. Our niece, Alex, deserves some credit for getting me through the tough composition. When I shared the final copy with her, she said it was strong. For a high school English teacher, and for Alex, that is high praise indeed. I am indebted to her keen eye and her unwillingness to do anything but straight shooting in that process. 

And so back to DRO and starting year 3

This April, I finished two years of writing about 40 essays per annum for Dave Rambles On, which surprised me. Nine short stories at the Shadows Lengthen blog site on top of that (well, one I didn't publish because of the dreadful hurricane last year), that's pretty good progress. As usual, when I switch formats, I get a bit backed up with the other genre. I have a much less daunting feeling about writing one essay a week, now. It feels part of my routine, expected and required.

These next few months are always the busiest. Micki’s 4th book in her series releases (more on that soon), other big changes are in the works for her, as well, which I will say more about in June, Summer Reading is starting at the library in June, as usual and then of course, we're going to the beach as a family again this year in July, so there will be plenty to write about, I hope even just before autumn.

Some weeks I have felt (oh shoot, I have to work on my essay!) a little overwhelmed by the responsibility, but generally I enjoy it and I certainly hope that you enjoy it, too. 

Topics Coming Soon

Aliens, the papal procurement process, grass alternatives, gardening, hoses, stoicism, gym territoriality, and nutrinos are all things I’ve got on deck. As usual, the world will provide other topics, and my scattery mind will fixate on things that wouldn’t seem like a fun essay to write or read, but I’ll put them in anyway. As usual, whether you read them is up to you.

I write the following sentence every year, but so far, no one has submitted anything, which is fine, but if there is something that you want me to write about, please let me know. I’m also happy to answer questions, take challenges on my citations and sources, and opinions, and generally work to make the product better.

And so, we’re back at it. See you, as my friend Rich Powell often says, in the funny papers!