The winter – minus any major snowstorm and bone-chilling temperatures – was a bust. This year, it lived just in anticipation. We foresaw it coming, but it never actually arrived, like Samuel Beckett’s Godot. De-icer salt, snow boots, snow shovels, ice scrapers and snow brushes for cars were sparingly used. The local tri-state areas (areas surrounding New York City and Philadelphia metropolitan areas) likely experienced one of the warmest January in a century, with snowfall ranging from meager to barely existent, especially around Philadelphia.
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| January 2022 |
In Washington, D.C., cherry trees in the Tidal Basin – much like daffodils and tulips in the front yard of my house – are confused by the climate change, blossoming much earlier than expected due to unusually warm winter. As temperatures hovered in the sixties in Fahrenheit one day and in the twenties and thirties the other day, the winter this year acted, in some ways, like a hormonal teenager. It will not do what it is supposed to do, and it surely has no idea what is going on despite there is a lot going on.
With wildfires, extreme heat, drought, atmospheric rivers flooding, windstorm and snowstorm all affecting the state within a span of a year, California needs a special mention while we talk about weather extremes and the impact of climate change and how it is rapidly accelerating and compounding. Being one of the most biologically diverse regions of the earth, California has the highest number of flora and fauna of all other states in the United States. Weather extremes and ensuing climate change will not only negatively impact plant and wildlife habitats but also the ability of the state's ecosystems to support wildlife, clean water, timber, fish and other goods and services essential for the well-being of the state’s residents.
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| Voorhees, NJ. Summer, 2022. |
Scientists and government agencies globally have suggested that the Earth is warming mainly due to human activity. Fossil fuels’ consumption has resulted in increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which, as a result, blocks heat from escaping into space. We may already be too late in reversing the worst effects of climate change, but studies by NASA emphasize that some of the worst effects of climate change may still be avoided or at least curtailed by responding with a two-tier approach: 1) mitigation (decreasing the flow of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere) and 2) adaptation (adapt to and learning to live with the climate change).
Itsy Bitsy Spider
If you are into Camus, there is no way the nursery rhyme Itsy Bitsy Spider does not remind you of the French philosopher’s essay Myth of Sisyphus. My daughter grew up listening to the nursery song – along with dozens of other rhymes, thanks to the highly addictive Cocomelon TV show – for around three years after being born, and her occasional humming of the song makes me wonder if whoever wrote the song wrote it as a response to Camus’s commentary on Sisyphus.
“The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout.
Down came the rain, and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain,
and the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.”
The spider’s adventure is a man’s journey, albeit Sisyphus’s. For Sisyphus, rolling the boulder for eternity, and for the spider crawling up the water spout, is a metaphor for our struggles – and the absurdity, in many ways – in our lives. Being the “wisest and most prudent of all mortals,” Sisyphus was also rebellious that led him to be condemned by the gods to an unending, hopeless, and futile task of rolling a large rock up a hill only to see it roll back down to the bottom of the hill after he reaches the top.
Camus concludes his essay, suggesting that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of this mountain full of night, alone forms a world. The struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Acknowledging and accepting our fate is the ultimate, absurd victory. For the spider, it is to see itself crawling up the water spout and being washed out by the rain over and over again. For Sisyphus, it is to relentlessly roll the boulder uphill only to see it later roll down and still concluding that everything is fine.
Baby Babble
Fall, 2022
Until a few weeks ago, many of her sentences used to start with “because.” “Because I want to watch my [TV] show.” “Because Karli is my best friend.” And “also” in a sentence will be “also too” to her, eg, “I love you also too,” “I want to go to Starbucks also too,” and “mommy is White. Daddy is Brown. I am Brown also too.”
Her new thing is joining a few sentences without a period, making them a funny, muddling mosaic of thoughts. “I don’t open the door when mommy and daddy don’t open the door to strangers I have to tell mommy and daddy there’s a stranger at the door.”
It is fascinating how kids – since the day they are born – are programmed to develop language and speech: from cooing, smile, laugh [and screams and cries, of course] and babbling to speaking their first word, putting a few words together, forming a sentence and later expressing their thoughts and feelings in relatively longer and complex conversations. The earliest five years are most crucial, while the language development continues well into adolescence.
Father's Day, 2022
Parenthood is uncharted territory, regardless of the parent’s age or the kid’s age. There are many questions, many answers, many styles of raising a child, many styles of not raising a child, many theories, many facts, many tittle-tattles. As an individual or as a couple or as a group raising a child, we gravitate toward ideas, values, and beliefs that resonate with who we are and what our fundamental beliefs about people and the society are.
COVID-19: The Way Ahead
There are a few known unknowns and a lot of unknown unknowns when it comes to knowing the origin of COVID-19 virus and how it remains a mystery four years into the pandemic. The questions and concerns linger about whether the virus originated in animals, or it was a result of a leak from a lab in China. Health analysts and experts say the exact origin of the virus may remain unknown for many years.
Father's Day, 2022
Parenthood is uncharted territory, regardless of the parent’s age or the kid’s age. There are many questions, many answers, many styles of raising a child, many styles of not raising a child, many theories, many facts, many tittle-tattles. As an individual or as a couple or as a group raising a child, we gravitate toward ideas, values, and beliefs that resonate with who we are and what our fundamental beliefs about people and the society are.
COVID-19: The Way Ahead
There are a few known unknowns and a lot of unknown unknowns when it comes to knowing the origin of COVID-19 virus and how it remains a mystery four years into the pandemic. The questions and concerns linger about whether the virus originated in animals, or it was a result of a leak from a lab in China. Health analysts and experts say the exact origin of the virus may remain unknown for many years.
Philadelphia. Fall, 2022.
Conditions of the ongoing global crisis existed even before the COVID-19 pandemic began four years ago, but governments in many countries failed to safeguard their populations, while in many others, most notably in Asia, they were able to curtail the spread of the virus only by imposing draconian social restrictions. Virtually, in every nook and corner of the world, the pandemic altered or transformed routine life, instituting an epidemiological view of everyday lives.
With millions of people succumbing to COVID-19-linked illnesses, a swathe of issues unfolded during the pandemic and should be examined meticulously: quarantine urbanism, technological refusal to accept empirical evidence, conspiracy theories, anti-mask sentiment, troubling state of healthcare systems, and, importantly, a lack of government accountability and transparency, particularly in non-Western countries such as India and China. While deaths and infections from COVID-19 are still occurring every day, the worst is likely over.
So, where do we go from here? Should the new normal be the new old normal? Are we – as a global society – prepared for the next global crisis of similar or a bigger magnitude? With nations and societies being fragmented, can nations govern themselves differently [and more efficiently] – when the next crisis strikes – from how they did or have been doing during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Connolly Park, Voorhees. Summer, 2022.
In his book The Revenge of the Real, Benjamin Bratton, an American sociological, media, and design theorist, argues that “instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.”
A didactic attempt to see the whole pandemic in a positive light would be to accept that an individual, a society, or a nation grows stronger through failures. In the United States, where “American Individualism” has been a defining feature of public life for a couple of centuries, there is a need to not allow these revered individual rights and beliefs in self-reliance to become self-destructive selfishness. We can honor and celebrate personal liberty, and at the same time we can nurture a resilient community that promotes individual and community social, behavioral, and physical health to strengthen us to face challenges like a pandemic.
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