Optimism and Pessimism While in Transit

Well, here I am in wacky Florida, as you can tell by this artwork I photographed in the Miami airport. It's a darn good thing I took this picture, because it's the only one I have from my adventures so far and without it I'd have nothing to blog.

In fact, let's jazz it up with various permutations of the Waterlogue app:

All my travel went pretty well, fortunately. On my flight to the states, I sat next to a very skinny man who face-timed with his lady friend all the way through cabin preparation, gate departure and taxiing to the runway, patently ignoring announcements from the cabin crew to turn off personal electronic devices. For some reason this really annoyed me. Why does he think he's special? I really thought he might just stay on that phone all the way through liftoff -- but no, he switched it off just in time for us to rumble down the runway.

Still, I decided I didn't like him, and I continued to silently not like him for the next nine hours.

I read a very entertaining book, "The Lost City of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston, who was part of an expedition a few years ago to find a mythical ruined city in the jungles of Honduras. He'd written about this "lost city" for The New Yorker and other publications, and I really enjoyed his account of using modern technology (lasers!) as well as good old-fashioned insect-infested, machete-whacking exploration to reveal the jungle's secrets.

I also caught up on several New Yorkers, including one featuring an article about whether the world is better or worse off now than in previous years. I don't know about you, but I often read the news and conclude that everything's going to hell in a handbasket. But the article (citing several books and authors) points out that by many measurements, life is better now than it ever has been -- humans are better at fighting disease and hunger, crime is down, life spans are increasing and more and more people worldwide are living better lives. (That's not to say there aren't trouble spots, obviously, and big problems like climate change will be ongoing challenges.)

Reading the news can lead to despair because news -- usually -- is about what goes wrong. That's just the nature of the beast. So CNN or Fox News or the newspaper turns into a long list of daily missteps and mistakes and accidents and lies and deceit, and wouldn't that bring anyone down? Perhaps it is helpful to see things in the broader context -- the arc of the universe bending toward justice, even despite Donald Trump.

I still wonder about the resource consumption required to lift us all up, and the environmental damage we're seeing as a result. I'm not convinced it's sustainable in the long term, even with all our human ingenuity. But in any case, it was an interesting article.