Words

This column is supposed to be about Syria.  It is supposed to be about how a man who won a presidential election based in large part because he was not George W. Bush has become a less aggressive, more articulate version of George W. Bush.  This column is supposed to be about how parts of Syria have become hell on earth, and about how throwing bombs into hell probably won’t help much in the long run.


This column, though, is not about Syria, because not all terrible things happen in the Middle East.  Sometimes terrible things happen where you live.

Our modern life is saturated by words. As an English teacher, words fill the textbooks I use in class and the papers that I grade.  Words are spoken by colleagues and students, read through e-mails and heard over intercoms.  Hours are spent every two weeks writing words to fill this column.  As a parent, I have spent hours reading words from books about trucks and princesses and hours listening to words from cartoons.

Very recently, though, all the words seemed to vanish, at least momentarily, because sometimes the right words don’t even seem to exist.

Words vanished when the search party ended.

Words disappeared when the suspect was arrested.

Words failed when I was asked from the backseat of our car.  “Did they find Willow, daddy?”  Despite all the words at my disposal, I could not mutter a single sound.

Humans make meaning out of their lives and try to make sense out of this world through language.  Words are used and often invented to help us comprehend life on a planet that can be both terribly destructive and breathtakingly beautiful, often on the same day.  Thus, it makes sense that language falters in times like this, and instead of offering us answers we are just left with barely audible questions.

How?

Why?

Here?

Effingham is home to what is considered the largest cross on the planet. Although not everyone who sees it agrees with what they believe it represents or whether or not it should have even been built in the first place, I do think it is fitting to consider that cross in such a time as this.

For many the cross symbolizes sacrifice, which the community has displayed in droves.  People who had never met the victim or her family, many of them from far away, sacrificed their time, energy and resources during the early days of the tragedy and beyond.

The cross can also symbolize mercy, however, and healing.  It can symbolize love amongst neighbors, and even love between enemies.

Many words have been spoken in the last two weeks, in face to face conversations, through social media, in newspapers, and on television.  As we continue to try to understand and make sense out of an act so terrible, we might remember that words are not only useful for understanding or making sense. 

Fortunately, words can also help to heal.

God knows what kind of words we need right now.

Wait for it...

Halloween is not next week.  I know this because the calendar on my refrigerator says Halloween is a good six weeks away.  I also know it is nowhere near Halloween because it’s warm outside, most of the leaves are still green and there is a slight mathematical chance St. Louis will not make the playoffs.  Halloween is on October 31^st, and has been for centuries.  Apparently Wal-Mart flunked history.

Wal-Mart has been selling children’s Halloween pajamas since at least August 25^th which is disgusting.  At that moment in time, people were still purchasing back-to-school items and thinking very seriously about the numerous Labor Day-themed snack choices fighting for their attention.  Sunscreen, beach towels and swimsuits still enjoyed prime merchandise real estate, yet still those pajamas hung. 

Those pajamas hung defiant, crafty, orange and eager.  They hung eager to be purchased by grandmothers who were in turn eager to see their progeny, cute as buttons, don them on All Hallows Eve as they prepared themselves for yet another glorious season of occult-themed sugar binging.

                

 That is the price, though, of living in the middle of the largest market economy in history.  Big box stores are great when you need to do your monthly shopping within an hour, but once you enter into one of these behemoths your chronological frame of reference starts to get skewed.  Is it Super bowl Sunday or Valentine’s Day?  Memorial Day or the Fourth of July?  Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s Eve?

                

 Seriously, what day is it?  Big box stores are like very boring casinos where the house really does always win, determined to disorient you to the point where you have no idea what time of year it is.  Should I buy the heart shaped box of chocolate or the shamrock shaped box of candy?  But wait.  Didn’t we just make some kind of New Year’s resolution about not eating sugar?  Maybe instead I should just buy the Mardi Gras hat on clearance.  Clearance, though?  Does that mean it’s already Lent?  Is Mardi Gras over?  I should go buy some fish, then, shouldn’t I?  But we’re not even Catholic.  Does that mean I can’t eat fish on Friday?  Because I thought I saw salmon on sale and that would help me lose weight before spring break, which, based on that rack full of swimsuits, started yesterday.

                

 Besides being disoriented, the ability to purchase items months before they are needed is unsettling in and of itself.  Conventional wisdom suggests that this so-called privilege might be liberating.  “Hey, I have all my Christmas shopping done and it’s only Veteran’s Day.”  On the surface, that sounds nice, but now you have more than a month to wait before the big day, which is plenty of time to second guess yourself into at least two or three more rounds of “last minute” gift buying.  Thus, when the January credit card statement finds its way to your mailbox, the blessed yuletide spirit you thought you had settled accounts with in November has returned, and instead of saving time and money you’ve purchased more cordial cherries than any reasonable person would consume in a year. 

                

 We cannot blame marketing geniuses for merely doing their job, though.  If people are willing to buy Halloween pajamas in August, the warm kind with the feet in them that eventually smell like goats, then those pajamas will be on display.  The only way those pajamas will ever not be on display two full months before their due date is if large groups of people boycott such ploys in the first place.  As Gandhi purportedly said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”  Granted, he was probably referring to world peace, but his point is still well taken in our modern scenario.  If we ever want to go into a Wal-Mart and only be offered seasonally themed merchandise when it is actually in season, we must first pledge to stop buying it.

Thus, I pledge to wait.  I pledge to wait for October to buy Halloween candy, even if it’s a few pennies more expensive.  I pledge to wait until November before I buy pumpkin pie mix.  I know pumpkin pie mix has a long shelf life.  I know that!  I know that there is even a slight logic in buying pumpkin pie mix before November to avoid the unlikely chance of a pumpkin pie mix shortage.  That, however, is the risk I am willing to take.  I pledge to wait.

I pledge to wait until February before I buy a Valentine’s Day card.  What if they run out?  I will make my own card, because I pledge to wait.

I pledge to wait until March before I buy Oreo cookies filled with green frosting.   I pledge to wait until after those cookies are all gone before I buy Cadbury eggs filled with whatever that stuff is.  And yes, those eggs must be totally consumed before I even think about buying anyone a Mother’s Day card.  Harsh?  Perhaps, but I pledge to wait.

Our collective journey around the sun used to be highlighted with events much larger than ourselves:  solstices, equinoxes, and the cycles of the moon; religious observances and the remembrance of brave deeds and people.  If we aren’t careful, we risk these days blending into a sugary glob of food coloring and credit card statements. 

Let the pajamas hang.  They’ll still be there in October.

The Lettuce Bot

Salad eaters have yet another reason to celebrate.  Lettuce, a food so popular it is often decorated with tiny pieces of bacon, will soon be groomed by robots.  According to a recent Associated Press article out of Salinas, California, the Lettuce Bot is “a machine that can thin a field of lettuce in the time it takes about twenty workers to do the job by hand.”  (To thin a field means to remove the small leaves of lettuce that look like trouble so the good leaves can grow up to be eaten.) Using visual sensors, robotic arms and basic GPS technology, the Lettuce Bot is expected to help alleviate an apparent labor shortage.  Over time the machine is also supposed to decrease costs and increasing food quality. 

According to Blue River Technology, the company that created the machine, the Lettuce Bot will reduce the amount of herbicides used for this type of food.  The article goes on to claim that the Lettuce Bot will “target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization,” by safely harvesting fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market. 

                  

Not everyone is on board, of course.  As with nearly any new technology, a number of voices have sounded off on the contraption.   Some critics warn that despite Blue River’s insistence that their machine will decrease the use of chemicals, it could very well increase the use of fertilizers by accelerating the trend toward larger and larger fields.  Labor advocates, obviously, are not keen on the idea of machines replacing human employment, whereas smaller farm operations argue that because the technology is so advanced and therefore so expensive to purchase and maintain, it will further hinder their ability to compete economically with the larger corporate farming operations.          

The real problem with the Lettuce Bot, however, besides the probability that it will eventually overthrow its handlers and wreak havoc, is that its name is dumb.  Blue River spent millions of dollars over the course of many years creating this machine.  They invested some of their best talent toward a project they hoped would make the world a better place while also making them money.  With all of the effort put into Lettuce Bot, one would think that at the very least they would have spent more than seventeen seconds naming it. 

They could have given it a docile-sounding acronym, such as LEFTy, the Lettuce Emancipating Friendly Thinner.  Regardless, all robot makers need to stop calling their inventions robots.  It’s unsettling.  Calling a robot a robot was thrilling in 1962, the same year President Kennedy told us we would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade.  Back then many people in the United States were infatuated with all things technological and believed wholeheartedly in the promise of a robotically enhanced future. 

That was a half-century ago, though.  We live in a post-Terminator era.  In much of the public imagination, robots are no longer cool.  They are murderers.  They displace human workers at best and engineer the violent destruction of humanity at worst.  The suffix “bot,” which used to conjure up pleasant images of Rosie from The Jetsons cartoon rolling around with a vacuum hose protruding from her torso, has now been replaced with very negative connotations. 

One of the simplest ways to agitate people, in fact, is to attach those three letters to the end of a word.  Take the word cupcake, for example.  Everyone loves cupcakes.  They are cakes that fit into a cup.  Perfect.  Now add the suffix “bot” to that word.  “Cupcakebot.”  Hungry?  No, you are terrified, because the birthday party you were remembering has just been hijacked by an evil metal monster shooting people with very hard sprinkles.

All kidding aside, now that robots are much more science and less fiction, it seems our attitude toward them has evolved.  Robots certainly do make many people’s lives much easier, particularly those who make them.  Robots save lives by performing dangerous tasks and will continue to do so as they become more sophisticated.   It is evident, however, by the contention raised by the Lettuce Bot and other similar “labor saving devices,” that the rise of these machines is still not a concept with which we have yet made peace.