I knew exactly what the text meant. It was late at night. A friend and I needed to fix the wording on a business document. I hit the Reply key to say what corrections I was making, when we could meet, where . . .
Bot Bully beat me to it.
“Sure!” he offered. Or, “Sorry, I’m busy.”
Who the heck does he think he is? He knows my mind?
Apparently. In the olden days, we used to think for ourselves. Actually, I still enjoy thinking for myself — but it’s getting tough.
“Awesome!” says Bot Bully before I get a chance to respond to somebody who sent a text containing the word ‘win.’
Someone else mentions ‘sick?’ I might have had a human-intelligent response, but here’s the Bot, butting in with “Get well soon!” or “So sorry!”
I worry that auto-think may eliminate brain cells altogether. If Bot Bully already has the answer, does human messaging have any role in our future? Artificial Intelligence v Human Brain? Bot Bully is winning.
For instance, atop my email list as I open my Inbox, suddenly here are red-emblemed Priority! messages. When they start appearing in all caps I will know our president and his co-chief Elon have taken over Apple Mail.
I miss the days when I could figure out my own priorities.
As I was typing the above, a pop-up bot announced that Genmoji and Image Playground are now available on this machine. There go my creative-illustration brain cells.
So okay, I get that AI is here, and wonderful, and all that.
I could hardly stay up long enough to make coffee. Got a little better, thought I’d go to the grocery store — less than a mile walk with my customary grocery bag/backpack, something I do several times a week. Halfway home, I had to call a Lyft.
Maybe you’ve had similar struggles, and you understand? Even if you’re not a Certified Old Person as I am — costant fatigue, nagging anxiety not unlike a headache that’s about to crash land just behind your temples?
After a couple of total-exhaustion days, I figured maybe it was a blood pressure issue. I have a fancy BP machine stashed in a cabinet that was bought long ago for some obscure reason. So I took my blood pressure throughout the day. 130/70. Maybe a little low? I don’t pay a lot of attention to these things as a rule.
Suddenly, however, it shot up! It was 160-something over 80-something! Now I’m really worried. After getting these sorts of readings, or worse, throughout an hour or so, I’m hearing alarm bells.
By then it was nearly 8 p.m., but I was sure I might go into cardiac arrest or something at any moment.
So I called the Kaiser advice nurse. I love the Kaiser advice nurse. He or she will always listen patiently to my complaints and either offer guidance or send me straight to the ER as the case may require.
We talked at length about my medical history and my symptoms. I described the exhaustion, my life in general over the past few days, my increasing concern over what seemed to me some sudden wild BP swings. As usual, I liked the advice nurse a lot and felt she was carefully internalizing my information and analyzing the situation.
After a few moments of reflection, she made a diagnostic recommendation.
(In response to two reader requests – the second prompted by Shock & Awe executive orders and repercussions in the past few days – I’m posting this essay which appeared earlier on Medium and Substack. If you’re interested in political observations, specifically re acts of kindness and how to support them, you’re invited to visit The Optimistic Eye where those are posted on Fridays.)
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Monday afternoon, January 20, 2025:
I couldn’t watch the inauguration. I’ve watched inaugurations since they were first televised, and listened to them on radio before that. Presidents I admired and presidents I opposed; mostly I wished them well.
But seeing my country inaugurate a cruel, vulgar, self-obsessed, foul-mouthed, misogynistic, vindictive convicted felon and compulsive liar who values wealth and the trappings of wealth over decency and himself over his country — it was too difficult to watch in real-time. I’ll read about it in tomorrow’s newspapers.
This was not our shining hour.
So instead, I joined a few thousand of my friends to march in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr on the national holiday honoring him. We were in the San Francisco sunshine; other observances — prayer breakfasts, service projects, gatherings and marches — took place around the country where other thousands celebrated in cold and snow but with similar enthusiasm.
Dr. King was no saint, but he was a man of God. Our new president proclaims himself anointed by God. It felt far better, for this citizen, to be marching in celebration of the godly man than watching the self-congratulations of the man self-proclaimed to be saved by God so he could become leader of my country. I’m just not so sure about that.
Marchers came in all shapes and sizes (Author photo)
Here are the things we were marching for — in addition to the hope that justice will roll down:
Kindness. Compassion. A free press. Brotherhood. Morality. Decency. Respect. Equal protection under the law. Human rights.
And our endangered planet. It’s a little unnerving for the absolute sole authority to launch a nuclear war to be handed to a man known more for a vengeful temper than for thoughtfulness.
This is the only planet our grandchildren can inherit. No rational person could know of the floods and fires and weather events of the past year and still believe that climate change is a hoax. But the people with whom our new president surrounds himself are people who don’t believe in science and simply want to Drill Baby Drill. On his first day of shock & awe our president withdrew our country from the Paris Climate Accords. (And, inexplicably, the World Health Organization.)
First it was the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, then came rejection of a great editorial cartoon, then the departures of favorite writers and columnists . . .
I am struggling with all this. To be truthful, I thought that “Democracy dies in darkness” had been the Post mantra forever; only now am I learning it dates back just to the darkness of the pandemic. So it is hardly as archivally significant as the New York Times’ famous slogan,“All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which has been around for more than a century.
Riveting storytelling is great. Newspapers, though, used to be run (and written) by those who, above all else, sought the light of truth. Most of the writers and reporters I know, including some who have been with the Post, the Times and other still-surviving newspapers for years, simply want to find and report the truth. Without it, how does democracy live?
I’m not canceling my online Post subscription, or the print edition of my beloved New York Times. (Yes, I’m one of that dying breed of readers of old-fashioned newspapers.) But if accountability being thrown to the wind, misinformation going unchecked, lies and crimes going unpunished and oligarchs moving into the White House isn’t darkness, I don’t know what is.
Here’s to serious, edited and fact-checked journalism wherever light — and truth — can be found; may it live long and prosper.
And may democracy somehow manage not to die.
This first appeared on my new Substack page, The Optimistic Eye, https://franjohns.substack.com/ where I post every Friday, mostly mildly political observations & occasionally reposted here.
(This article may or may not appear on my new Substack page, where I’ve started posting mildly political observations every Friday. You are invited to subscribe (for free) to The Optimistic Eye and join the fun.)
. . .
From time to time I pause to visit my name, etched in brass on the entry wall of my favorite museum, San Francisco’s de Young — part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (which also include my second favorite, the Legion of Honor Museum.)
Actually, I have too many favorite museums to fit into one blog space: the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, New York’s Whitney, Atlanta’s High . . . but my name is on permanent display only at the de Young.
This is because, in the long years after salt air ate into the aging facade of a former building and the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 pretty much settled the issue, it became necessary to build an entirely new structure where several previous structures had held an ever-increasing collection of wonderful fine art. A lot of fund-raising went on.
And how better to raise the last chunk of necessary funds than a naming project? I don’t remember the exact amount — this was in the late 1990s during the long campaign to preserve and restructure and rebuild — but it was enough for mid-list donors to stop and think. Probably $5,000 or $10,000. My husband and I stopped and thought and opted in.
As you can see, there were several others.
I bring this up today, having had one more of such occasional photos taken on one of my frequent visits to the de Young, because of the sense of ownership one gets from naming rights. I mean, aside from the fact that I love its collections and its visiting exhibitions and its gift shop and the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture I was lucky enough to watch him create just before the opening of the new building in 2005 — I have a proprietary interest in the institution which I ferociously defend. You drop an orange peel within my sight at your peril, unless you immediately pick it up.
So.
Why don’t we find a stretch of space on the U.S. Capitol grounds for naming rights? For a $1 fee you simply sign a pledge to defend the three co-equal branches of government against all autocrats — and while you’re at it you might defend the free press against tyrants and bullies and spreaders of misinformation intent on desecrating this place you now own.
Think about that. I already regularly take selfies on Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington (which I will resist posting here) because, among other things, that indelibly named space declares a truth. Truth is getting to be iffy; a free press ferrets it out.
Think how many millions of Americans of all patriotic stripes would sign such a monument. Take selfies every time they visit our nation’s capitol, reflect on this imperfect union they now own and defend. I’ll bet I could find a few artists willing to donate their time and skills to etch names into something.
I don’t know his name. I’m not even sure of his instrument — although I think it’s a shakuhachi.
What I do know is when I’m walking through Peace Plaza in San Francisco’s Japantown, the notes float wistfully above street noises and conversations of passersby. Bringing peace indeed.
In those melodies is a cure for all weariness, anxiety or woe.
Sometimes instead of the flautist there is, across the street, an instrumentalist. He’s tried to tell me the name of his instrument. It’s not quite as peaceful as the flute, but close.
It’s easy to pass them by, these gentle buskers whose music is a universal language. Most people do.
But I keep a supply of dollar bills in my pocket for whenever one is there. Because if you stop, and listen for the sweetness?
(This essay appeared first on my new Substack page, The Optimistic Eye, where every Friday I’ll be highlighting individuals or nonprofits working to protect & advance truth, justice & the planet over the coming years. Some that aren’t too political will be copied here. Or, you’re invited to follow – &/or circulate to anyone you think might be interested – The Optimistic Eye. )
Sunrise over San Francisco Bay (Author photo)
Palm trees and alligators in the Arctic Circle? It could happen (again.)
Planet Earth has made its way through periods of melting glaciers and tropical forests throughout its history, which is generally thought to be about 4.5 billion years – give or take some 50 million. Our human descendants aren’t likely to be around to enjoy this much-revised scenery.
Today’s question is about what scenery our great-great-grandchildren might enjoy.
Preparing to leave office, President Biden recently announced new climate goals; he may have had an eye on what his own great-great-grandchildren will inherit. Those goals are aimed at limiting greenhouse gases and in other ways slowing our journey toward arctic palm trees. They are encapsulated in the Paris Agreement that went into effect in November, 2016, signed by 194 countries and the European Union.
President Trump immediately pulled the U.S. out of this legally binding agreement as soon as he took office – but it took him most of his first term to unravel everything, and President Biden then reinstated it.
The bad news is that Mr. Trump will quickly pull us out again – “drill, baby, drill” – but the good news is that it will take a while for the pro-arctic-palm-trees business to get underway.
There’s plenty of other good news. Individuals and organizations are at work on ways to protect Planet Earth – and stave off its warming trend – through trees and rainforests, kelp and other nature-based ways of carbon capture; through new technologies for carbon removal.
Mono Lake, an ancient and changing piece of Planet Earth (Author photo)
The warming trend and changing climate aren’t only carbon-related, but founder and co-host Greg Dalton of San Francisco-based Climate One points out that “the last time the atmospheric CO₂ amounts were as high as they are today was more than 3 million years ago.”
“It’s obvious,” Dalton says, “we need to stop emitting greenhouse gasses, but that won’t be enough to prevent adverse effects of climate disruption.” Thus the continuing work in other nature-based or technological directions.
Want to know more? Climate One podcasts, videos and programs are on the website, covering a wide variety of topics. And if you want to pitch in or learn more, the Climate Action Guide is a great way to start.
(The author exploring the Arctic Circle and its melting glaciers in 2019)
Six years ago I was lucky enough to join Dalton and other Climate One leaders for a trip to the Arctic Circle, an up close and personal look at melting glaciers and disappearing wildlife habitat. It was an eye-opening and not altogether encouraging look at what’s happening to our warming planet.
In the last six weeks Northern California has had tornado and tsunami warnings, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake and a winter storm that caused the collapse of a section of the historic Santa Cruz wharf.
However the political winds blow, there’s work underway to slow climate change and protect Mother Nature’s interests. Any of the nonprofits cited above are open to support.
It was the early days of Habitat for Humanity, still somewhat controversial in the 1980s south. I had signed up with a group building a couple of houses in Atlanta.
The second weekend of our project, here came Jimmy Carter, in overalls, with tool belt. (Rosalynn, uncharacteristically, wasn’t with him. She might have had a cold.) There must have been Secret Service people around; maybe they had to pitch in. I remember almost nothing about the day other than how hard we worked. Days started early and ended late, but we didn’t finish our house as had been the plan.
What I do remember was showing up the next day to finish the job. And turning around to see that Jimmy Carter was already at work.
