On Friday I traveled the length of the East Bay via Bart to the southernmost station at San Jose. All along the route I saw homeless encampments like those in the inner cities of the Bay Area.
The situation with homelessness has reached unprecedented proportions in this area. It's beyond the point where anyone can pretend that it isn't a crisis.
Because it is.
There have been so many attempts to explain this problem that they make my head spin. It's easier to write the whole thing off to mental illness, drug addiction and other pathologies than the uncomfortable possibility that homelessness may be the logical outcome of the American way of life.
Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, the competitive pressures are as severe as anywhere on the planet. You can see and feel it when you're around young people, even pre-high-school students in good families.
Already these kids are aware that there are billionaires in the neighborhood who live in mansions, drive cars every bit as expensive as mansions, and ride private rockets into space for fun.
As far as can be determined by the average 12-year-old, these guys (they are all guys) probably out-performed everyone else in school or anything else they tried. They probably got the best grades, the highest test scores, the strongest recommendation letters, and the most-favored-student status all along the way.
They probably never stumbled, screwed up, or made a mistake.
In other words they must have been supermen, close to perfect.
That these myths are far from the truth rarely penetrates the insular worlds of youth culture. Nor does the reality that even ending up as a billionaire hardly equates with happiness, satisfaction or inner peace.
That the children's lives are probably not going to turn out to be that extreme is one of the realizations you hope sinks in over time. You just hope that they don't end up at the other extreme either -- camped along the train tracks, eating out of a dented can and seeking their next unobtainable high.
What kind of social system could be established that avoids both extremes? That strives for balance instead. Because that's the society I'd like my grandchildren to inherit.
Not this one.
***
Speaking of balance in life for our youths, I'm dismayed by efforts by some school systems in this area to mandate vaccinations for children under the age of 12.
As strongly as I support vaccination for adults, it simply is too soon to be certain that these shots are safe for children.
After all, the vaccines are still in the process of obtaining full approval by the FDA for adults. And there is evidence that they may have long-term deleterious effects for some adults.
Children, whose bodies are still developing, tend to have very strong immune systems -- that's why they can fight off invasive infections like Covid better than older people.
That said, their immune systems are still developing as well, and if in the long term, these novel vaccinations turn out to weaken their bodies' inherent ability to fight off the infections of the future, we will regret rushing to vaccinate them prematurely should we mandate them now.
No it is time for reason to prevail. Hold off with vaccination mandates in the schools. We don't know that that is a wise idea -- not yet.
[NOTE: Thank you to my friend Susanna Camp for today's poem.]
***
THE HEADLINES:
* U.S. delegation to meet Taliban in first high-level talks since pullout (Reuters)
* The inconsistency of American Feminism in the Moslem World (New Yorker)
* Adele’s musical comeback celebrated in Vogue (Reuters)
* Giants Silence Dodgers in First Game of Historic Playoff (Reuters)
* Renowned Ornithologist Always Secretly Wanted To Be A Bird (The Onion)
***
"The Keeper of Sheep"
Poem #XLVIII
By Fernando Pessoa
From the highest window of my house
I wave farewell with a white handkerchief
To my poems going out to humanity.
And I'm neither happy nor sad.
That is the fate of the poems.
I wrote them and must show them to everyone
Because I cannot do otherwise,
Even as the flower can't hide its color,
Nor the river hide its flowing,
Nor the tree hide the fruit it bears.
There they go, already far away, as if in the stagecoach,
And I can't help but feel regret
Like a pain in my body.
Who knows who might read them?
Who knows into what hands they'll fall?
A flower, I was plucked by my fate to be seen.
A tree, my fruit was picked to be eaten.
A river, my water's fate was to flow out of me.
I submit and feel almost happy,
Almost happy like a man tired of being sad.
Go, go away from me!
The tree passes and is scattered throughout Nature.
The flower wilts and its dust lasts forever.
The river flows into the sea and its water is forever the water that was its own.
I pass and I remain, like the Universe.
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