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The Noble Savages

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By Andrew Sharp

“It’s miserable,” the knight said. This seemed logical. It was about noon, 85 degrees or so with no breeze, and he was completely encased in steel armor that must have felt like a frying pan after hours in the sun. He was trying to chew on a greasy leg of lamb, but his visor kept slipping down. Sweat rolled down his face and disappeared down somewhere inside the armor, where it was free to go wherever it wanted.

“Hot as hell,” the knight said.

“What is hell?” I asked.

“Where bad English go after they die,” he said. “Fire. They burn up I think. I’m a little hazy on it myself. You’ll have to ask one of the elders. Anyway, it can’t be any worse than this.”
His costume looked authentically English, and he had the characteristic low cheekbones and pale skin of his race. The effect was so genuine that he looked perfectly capable of getting on a horse and using his long sword — currently leaning up against the water fountain — had an Army company come sweeping in just then.

I asked him how he got into doing the knight act, and he said he was born on the reservation. He got a college degree and worked in a city a few hours away but he liked to come back and reconnect with his heritage and catch up with his friends.

At that point Emerald came back and dragged me off to look at some displays.

I’m not sure why I went to the English fair in the first place. Mostly because of Emerald, who is a little weird but balances that out with being very good looking and fun to be around. One of her many interests is a fascination with English culture, which complements her enthusiasm for weird Eastern religious ideas. She feels they are simple and noble.

I’m not interested in the simple and noble religion but I like history too, especially in the right company. I had never thought much about the indigenous people here in New Mexico — there aren’t many of them left anyway. Nobody in my family ever went to a fair. I only remember my dad talking about the natives once, after a riot way up in the mountains on one of the smaller reservations. He scoffed at their outburst and said they should move on, quit trying to hang onto their dying culture, quit being alcoholics and join the modern world, that it’s not 1490 any more. My dad isn’t very politically correct but I guess most people would agree with him, although probably with more tact. What happened, happened, and feeling guilty isn’t going to bring the old times back.

I wished the knight luck surviving the heat, and Emerald and I wandered through the display stalls. There were rolls of old-fashioned linen and wool cloth, and weaving displays, and pottery stands, and a man with an impressive collection of antique iron tools.

Most of the stalls weren’t selling traditional items at all but cheap miniature replicas, little sword toothpicks and miniature knight statues like the ones you see guarding the entrance to people’s driveways, and shirts with coats of arms on them, and chess sets, and keychains with crosses.

We had to push through the crowds of tourists, who were kicking up a lot of dust and all seemed to be shouting to each other. It was very slow going. There were a few people covered from head to toe in flowing gowns, and these were supposedly the natives, although some of them had suspiciously dark skin. The English style seemed to have been built heavily around the gown theme. It was either a robe that covered every inch of skin and then some, or, bizarrely, men wearing close-fitting tights that left little to the imagination.

You had to talk loudly to be heard, because it wasn’t just the people shouting; they were having a livestock sale of some kind with native English animals like pigs and sheep, and they were bleating and squealing like there was a riot going on. The dust they were contributing to the cloud had too many overtones of feces for my taste. I hate to say it, but I see where the old stereotype of the English being dirty and undisciplined comes from. They seemed completely unbothered by all the chaos and sweat and manure.

The smell of the English animals once they reached the cooking stage was much more pleasant, and, I thought, refreshingly more quiet. We bought a leg of lamb to split and it was good, if a little basic. Just a hunk of meat on a bone, without a lot of spices added. Emerald bought a dense pudding of some kind that I tried one bite of. One bite was enough. She ate it all and pretended to enjoy it.

Judging from the available fare the English had a mostly bland and simple diet back then, with some basic meats and smoked cod and lots of heavy, grain-based foods. Now, like everyone else, they’ve adapted their cooking to foods the settlers brought, like potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate.

Emerald had the connoisseur’s scorn of the baubles on sale for the tourists, but was absorbed with the genuine displays and delighted by the acrobats and jugglers who set up in more spacious areas.

I was interested too when we stopped to watch the archers. According to their legends, which Emerald shared with me in detail, the English archers of old could shoot 100 yards or more, so accurately, it seems, that they would routinely shoot one arrow and then split it in half with their next one. Their skill seemed to have fallen off somewhat in modern times, and their first arrows had nothing to fear from later arrivals. But I was impressed with the strength it obviously took for the archers to pull back bows that were as tall as the archers themselves, and the power of the arrows as they buzzed off to the distant targets demanded attention. I would not have liked to have been in the suit of chain mail one archer was shooting at. Maybe their technology was more sophisticated than we realize now.

We were also both intrigued by the display case we found when we moved on from the archery exhibition, which had a few scraps of manuscripts and books. The woman in charge of the display, not an English herself but a professor from a local university, told us the scraps were extremely valuable and rare. Most of them were copies of the originals, she said, made by a few visionary priests who had tried to preserve some of the history and lore even as the rest of the conquerors and settlers had burned all they could find.

“But why did they burn them?” Emerald demanded, shocked.
The professor shook her head. “They saw them as dangerous lies, religious heresy. Also, they wanted to destroy the culture of the natives so they would be easier to enslave. It was a tragedy.”

“They thought they were so much better,” Emerald said. “Unbelievable.”

Emerald seemed to be forgetting that she was one of the conquerors herself. I could see why an archeologist or a professor might get upset about some ancient books being lost, but there were a lot of scrolls burned in the sack of Mexico City, too. These things happened before our more enlightened modern times. The world would keep on turning without some old English folk tales. I refrained from pointing this out to Emerald because I didn’t want to get into a long argument or be called a racist.

I dragged Emerald away from her mutual indignation fest with the professor to go see an exhibition of medieval farming. She was still grouchy when we got there, but she cheered up quickly as we watched a poor man dressed in rags trying to break up packed soil with a “plow” pulled by a team of oxen. The plow was more of a pointed stick with an iron point. The man looked like he was working about as hard as the oxen, and he didn’t have a great view while he did it, either.

Emerald explained to me how simple and environmentally friendly it was, without any artificial fertilizers, and how the peasants only grew what they needed to live in simple, small plots of land, which they farmed together. This built strong communities, she said, not like our disjointed society today with its industrial agriculture.
I was getting tired of this constant knocking of modern Western culture by now and I said it was no wonder they only grew what they needed, with that kind of brutal labor required to scratch up a little loose dirt, and they probably lived miserable lives and died young.

Emerald looked at me with sympathy. She explained that they weren’t afraid of hard work, they loved it, and they got strong and healthy from the exercise. I looked dubiously at the man struggling with the plow. He did not look like a man who was loving what he did and getting healthier doing it. He looked like a man who needed a tractor.

Before we left Emerald wanted to see one of their religious rituals. She dragged me over to the ruined temple, where, the program informed us, there would be a genuine religious ceremony held by indigenous practitioners who still “practiced a simple and beautiful faith, in harmony with god and their environment.” This was just the kind of mystical stuff that Emerald loved. For her, a religious idea only had to be Eastern in origin and it was profound.
The crumbling walls and pillars of the temple cut sharp shadows out of the afternoon sun across the lawn where a large crowd of tourists was gathered around a few natives and their priest and a collection of idols.

The priest, dressed in the obligatory flowing robe, this one of appropriate religious soberness, began chanting in a language that the program informed me was not English, but a more ancient sacred language used for religious rites. It was a little like our veneration of the Toltecs, I thought.

The priest sprinkled some water and read out of a book, and then said some more sacred words, and then several of the natives started singing a wild, pagan kind of music. I might have been unimpressed anywhere else but standing there among the old stones the music had an ancient weight, an almost dangerous power as if we could hear the voice of the English god, mourning. I glanced at Emerald and her eyes were partly closed and she was swaying a little. I realized I had let myself get sucked into the mood and scolded myself for my superstition.

After the music the proceedings went on with a lot of prayers and incantations and burning of incense. The priest did a little ceremony with some bread and wine and hand waving, which I had trouble following. At this point, for the benefit of us outsiders, he explained in Mexican that the supreme deity was now physically present in the bread and wine. From what I could understand, the natives were going to partake in his power by eating the deity. I almost laughed at the absurdity. They combine all the gods into one supergod, and then, they put him in a piece of bread and eat him. They must think they were turning into little mini-gods themselves. But after I thought about it, it struck me that the ceremony had its similarities with the ritual cannibalism we used to do centuries ago, and was even more like our ritual eating of meat as a stand-in for the human sacrifice now. Just different ways of trying to access the power and keep the universe balanced.

They wrapped it up with another song and then the crowd got noisy again and went off to buy some keychains.

I had to admit that it had been an interesting day, probably good for me. It almost seemed like a shame that this culture had been reduced to little pockets of survivors stuck between the past and the modern world, on tiny reservations. Despite the burst of cultural color in the re-enactments, it’s mostly all gone, boiled down into souvenirs, stories about bows and arrows, and old ax heads that turn up when they plow the fields.

We were back in England City by evening. I dropped Emerald off at her house, drove to my building and took the elevator up to my 11th floor apartment. I had a wonderful hot shower and relaxed on a soft couch with a bottle of pulque, with the air conditioning helping me forget the summer heat. Out my window I could see the busy downtown with trains running through and headlights making square patterns through the streets, and the Great Pyramid looming up over everything.
Despite the mistakes, I couldn’t wish that New Mexico had never existed or that we lived in some kind of primitive natural state.

The progress of history is inevitable.

A Belfry Tale

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A retelling by Ruthie Voth

Friars are not materialistic people; they live solely on the charity of others. It’s not an easy life, and only a humble man will stick with it for many years. This is the story of friars Gabe and Francis. They joined the order of the Carmelites at a young age, wanting to get away from the fast pace of the world. They wanted time to contemplate life and eternity, so together the two friends joined this community of peaceful men.

They lived for many pleasant years, sharing nightly thoughtful discussions with equally poor friends. And they spent countless hours in silence. But time, as it always will, brings changes, poverty, quietude and old age proved too much for many of their companions. So at the ages of 62 and 63, Friar Gabe and Friar Francis found themselves alone in their friary.

Their small house seemed cavernous now that it was shared by only two men. Eventually they moved their sleeping rolls to the little room on the north side of the chapel.

The friars shared a love for two things: their gardens and the chapel. When they weren’t bound to their religious duties, these were the places that Gabe and Francis were most likely to be found. But even to the peaceful, trouble is bound to come … eventually.

For Francis and Gabe, trouble came in the form of their crumbling belfry. Every time one of them pulled the bell rope, calling people to prayer, he said a fervent prayer himself, hoping that the bell would not come crashing down on his head. Obviously something had to be done. In the old days, when the place was swarming with men, it wouldn’t have been such a problem. Now, there were just the two of them, starting to get up in years, and with barely enough money for materials, not to mention hiring skilled laborers. The two friars did their best to let people in the town know of their plight. They set up collection boxes and managed to raise a small amount to put toward a new belfry. But it wasn’t enough.

Finally, they realized that the time had come for them to give up their mendicant way of living. For the first time in almost four decades, they were going to have to look for work. And so they tried. And tried. And tired of trying.

Over the years, they had come to realize that the two of them had complementary talents. Friar Gabe excelled at producing the most beautiful flowers in town, and Friar Francis had the gift of making lovely arrangements that the brothers would deliver to the sick and suffering. When the job search proved futile, they decided to put their gifts to work — they opened a florist shop.

From day one, the business was a hit. Townspeople who had admired the thriving gardens at the friary and faked illness in order to get a sympathy arrangement could now purchase their own bouquets on the slightest whim. Business boomed — possibly due to the fact that these men had lived their entire lives without making financial success a priority. Old habits die hard. The Lord provided the flowers free of charge; why should they jack up the price to make a profit? People in the town loved to come and do business with these kind friars and their miniscule prices.

But there was one person in town who was not so excited about this new florist shop. That, naturally, was the owner of the previously existing florist shop — the one so creatively named “Pete’s Flowers.”

Now Pete was not a bad man. He was a decent guy with a family to support. He did his job and did it well, but it didn’t take him long to notice that his customers were coming in less and less frequently. He lowered prices. He offered special deals. He posted advertising flyers around town. He lowered prices again. But it wasn’t enough.

He paid a visit to the friars and pled with them to raise their prices, so he could make enough money to support his family. But Francis and Gabe couldn’t come to terms with putting high prices on something that had cost them nothing. They refused.

Pete sent his wife, surrounded by their six young children, to beg the friars to have mercy on her family. They felt pity for the family, and gave them some of their hard-earned money.
It wasn’t what Pete had in mind.

He asked his next door neighbor, who had once spent a year at the friary, to go and have a talk with Gabe and Francis. Surely he could talk them into shutting down their business and going back to their normal way of life. But they had come to love selling flowers. They liked the interaction with the people, they said.

Pete went back again and again, trying to talk sense into these foolish men with no business sense who were ruining his life. He sent others to talk to them — anyone who might have a chance of getting the point across. They just didn’t get it. The poor guy tried every line, every angle, every trick he could think of, and nothing worked. He was losing money fast, and feeling desperate.

You know what desperate times call for … desperate measures. Pete finally went out and looked up the one man he’d spent most of his life avoiding: Hugh. Hugh was the biggest, the baddest, the meanest thug imaginable. He’d step on your new puppy and then throw it in your sweet grandma’s face without ever batting an eye. He was too mean even to have a sidekick. Nobody wanted to hang around with Hugh.

If you wanted to hire someone to shut down a business, Hugh was your man. Pete spent the last of his dwindling cash fund on this one final attempt.

No one knows what happened at the friary the evening Hugh stopped by for a visit. The details of that night will be carried quietly to three graves. But the next morning, Francis and Gabe set all their cut flowers on a table outside the door with a sign announcing “FREE” and hung a “CLOSED” sign on the door. They never sold another flower. The following summer their gardens were not so lush. Several years later, the greenery around the monastery was practically nonexistent. Eventually, the town forgot that there ever were two such talented lovers of flowers in its midst.

Pete’s business, however, flourished with the competition gone. As his sons grew into men, he was able to expand and stock shops in several neighboring towns.
The friars never rebuilt the belfry. It eventually crumbled completely. Francis was injured only slightly when the bell fell.

This tale has been long, sad and full of woe, but it comes with a cheery little moral. And that is: “Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.”

The Window That Looks Back

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By Matt Swartz

In my lifetime, only two tech-related companies have become so ubiquitous that their proper names have become commonly-recognized verbs. And they couldn’t be more different. Xerox, the older of the two, is now inextricably linked with a fundamentally simple process.

Xerox (verb) means what Xerox (noun) made its billions doing: to produce, with a scanner and a printer, an exact copy of a sheet of paper. The process is simple; on older machines it leaves no record of what has been done. It’s a camera and a printer wired together, and while there are additional features available on newer models, the fundamentals remain unchanged: Any piece of paper one puts under that lid and exposes to that scrolling bright light will emerge beneath with its contents reproduced. The task completes with complete indifference to the original contents of the paper.

The schematic of a stealth bomber reproduces just as nicely (and just as discreetly, except on newer models with internal hard drives), as Nana’s raisin bread recipe. The machine Xerox is utterly indifferent to the contents Xeroxed.

With google (verb), the act of using Google (noun’s) website, to search the Internet, on the other hand, matters could hardly be more opposite; the way the former works is utterly dependent on the caprices of decision-makers employed by the latter, in a way that’s poorly understood. To make matters worse, according to Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, in a June 17, 2013 article in the Washington Post, the whole process leaves a permanent record, both in Google’s servers and in a backdoor pipeline that runs into a National Security Agency intelligence-gathering program called PRISM.

Tech enthusiasts who skew utopian praise the new era of transparency that digitization of information online offers, and they’re not wrong to do so. This afternoon, without leaving my desk, I can access millions of government documents for free, the abstracts of innumerable academic journal articles, as well as most public-domain books. In a sense, it’s like having the best library in history at my disposal.

Except it’s not American library; American librarians are bound by a code of conduct that precludes their revealing the contents of patron checkouts and inquiries, except when subpoenaed. And in fact, there’s more anonymity even than that; one doesn’t have to give his or her name to browse a library’s stacks or databases. As long as you’re quiet and conscientious, you can do whatever you want in American library from its opening to its close, and never have to explain your purposes to any government employee.
I’ve had the distinct pleasure of photocopying and uploading an entire rare book to my Internet cloud service. No questions were asked, no explanations were given. I walked away with a rare treatise about the Kennedy assassination in my pocket.

The Internet offers no similar experience. Google keeps a record of every search made, and they’re catalogued by IP address. That means that they know where the searches originate from, at what time, and it’s a small step between that and knowing by whom.

One of my friends was visited by Secret Service agents and asked to explain the specifics of some of the searches he was making. The burden of proof was on him to prove that they were innocuous, not, as one would expect from our English Common Law roots, on the government to prove that they were not. His answers were judged satisfactory, and he was ultimately left alone, but being visited by armed federal agents is bad for one’s blood pressure, and of course records of that visit are never going away.

Not only are Web searches catalogued forever by Google, as noted by Tom Foremski in a 2010 article in his Silicon Valley Watcher, but they are subject to scrutiny by forces that, while not exactly hidden, are less than transparent. They’re also not necessarily an accurate representation of all available information about a given subject.

When I Xerox a page, I get two pages exactly alike, assuming I’ve got the paper lined up correctly. Every square micrometer of page, every scintilla of printed data, is reproduced from one page to the other. When I google a subject, on the other hand, I have no certainty that I’m getting results that correspond perfectly with what Google has in its databases, nor that they’re ranked in a mathematically transparent way.

We don’t know what Google’s search algorithms are, because that’s a trade secret, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. We also don’t know how they differ depending on what’s searched for. The ability to rank what one sees when googling, for example, political candidates, is a power more total than that of any single mass media outlet, and yet far less frequently discussed.

It’s common knowledge in the search-engine optimization community that only a tiny percentage of searchers click through to the second and third pages of results. After reading the listed summaries for the first 10 articles, and perhaps clicking one or two links, they likely move onto the next subject or person feeling informed, as if they’ve done their due diligence. If they’re under 40, they’ll congratulate themselves on Going Directly To The Source, rather than relying on what’s broadcast to them. If they’re under 30, they’ll call people who get their news from the newspapers and TV more often than from Google sheeple (a portmanteau of sheep and people) for their credulity. Google as a source, as a potential font of bias, goes widely unconsidered.

In that vein, imagine a close election; moderate voters turn to the Web search for answers. And then one candidate’s name auto-completes to add “racist” or “irritable bowel syndrome” after his name. And we know of this one instance, we don’t know what we don’t know. Google’s algorithms are a trade secret.

What can we take away from this? What courses of action are necessary/possible? Your poor correspondent could hardly be less qualified to answer (perhaps he’d be less qualified if he didn’t view it as a problem, but that’s about it). But imagine if Web search were open source, with the algorithms used to filter and rank search results subject to perusal in real time.
We could also lobby our federal government to stop monitoring those parts of the Internet, like search, that could reasonably be described as private, under the older constitutional understanding that warrantless search is forbidden, and that individuals have an inherent right to privacy (barring extenuating circumstances, which by definition, cannot exist categorically). Federal antitrust mechanisms might help us by breaking Google up, as they did Bell Telecom in the 1980s and Standard Oil in the early 1900s, but these are distant goals.

Search isn’t going to be like photocopying in our lifetime, and perhaps the best we can do is be aware of the differences and the power patterns they create. In that sense, you, by reading to the end of this piece, by perusing more than the first few pages of my authorial results, might have struck a small blow for government and corporate transparency and personal anonymity, merely by familiarizing yourself with the unprecedented changes that have taken place and musing about whether or not they strike you as problematic.

Reporter Catches Lucky Break

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By Andrew Sharp

Without that fire, I never would have won that award for my arson coverage.

I would still be stuck in Wootensburg, Ohio, covering city council meetings about which street to pave next, and fire company parades with Little Miss Fire Queen and other mind-numbing junk.

It was a beauty. I couldn’t have asked for better. I just happened to be driving by on my way to press-release editing duty (I hate to think about it even now). There on Center Street, just before the turn onto East Vine, a townhouse had turned into a torch, the roof crumbling down in and a vast orange fireball rushing upward past it, eating it as it fell. It wasn’t much of a house, but the people standing on the lawn were screaming and crying like it was some huge loss.

As my shutter clicked over and over, I couldn’t help thinking how perfect it was. The grief. The energy of the fire. The fire company actually doing something besides a parade.
The editor had never let me cover any real news, not that there was much in a railroad town of 15,000 people in the rolling farm country in the foothills of the Appalachians. She was making me earn my stripes. Well, this should speed up that process, I thought.

She was very impressed with the photos. So was the town, judging by the fact there were no papers on the racks by 10 a.m. the next morning. Our website hits exploded. The Midwest Rural Newspaper Association was also impressed, and awarded me top prize in the “Best Breaking News Coverage” category at the annual banquet.

“I just did my best in the circumstances I found myself in,” I wrote in my new column the next day. “I’m honored, but also humbled as I think of the pain of this family who lost two children in a fire. That is nothing to celebrate. It’s the dilemma of newspapers — our service to the community is telling the bad news along with the good, the tragic with the heartwarming. We only want to do our best in all cases.”

Not a bad tone to strike. People ate it up. I threw myself into the coverage of the investigation into the arson, and people started to talk about my work. I managed to hit just the right homespun wisdom tone with my weekly column. I had a real knack for crime coverage, I discovered. I have to admit that much of it was luck, being in the right place at the right time, but when I got there I made the most of it. Fires, vandalism, a terrible wreck at a light that had stopped working. They all made it onto my resume and that helped me get out of that little dead-end, stuck-in-the-Great-Depression village.

Indianapolis isn’t the top of the ladder. Oh, no. Even this place is sort of a cow town. This isn’t my last stop. With a little luck, I’ll be moving on soon.

They never did catch that arsonist.

The Back Page: Optimistic About Pessimism

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Empty glass

By Ben Herr

Speaking only for myself, but expecting others to relate, pessimists are largely a misunderstood, misrepresented group of individuals. Pessimism is viewed as a character flaw at worst, and a bad mood at best. But is it really? Should it be completely written off without often giving it a second thought? Because I believe in pessimism. I believe it is a valuable mindset to society, and has things to offer the individual.

First, the most common, and most quickly dismissed, argument in favor of pessimism: A pessimist’s approach to life is actually more optimistic than an optimist’s. You’ve almost certainly heard this explained in an overly simplistic way.

For example, an optimist and a pessimist start cleaning out the garage at 10 a.m. The optimist says, “If we work hard, we can get done by noon!” The pessimist says, “I doubt it, we will probably finish by 2.” While it may seem like the pessimist has a gloomy approach now, how about when they finish? If done by 12, the optimist’s expectations will merely have been met, while the pessimist will have been wonderfully surprised. Whereas if finished at 2, the optimist will be disappointed, but the pessimist’s expectations will merely have been met. Win-win for the pessimist.

This scenario is, on paper, in favor of the pessimist. Discuss it with a group of people, however, and it depends on the individual as to how beneficial that kind of pessimistic mindset is. Since people are wired differently, they will have different responses to the idea.

The pessimist’s perspective is more, however, than estimating cleaning time. It becomes more strongly optimistic the deeper you go. To me, pessimism is a powerful indicator of hope. Because the moment I stop being pessimistic about the world will be the moment I have given up hope in it. The moment I stop expecting poor performances is the moment I have stopped having standards that I hope to see met. The moment I stop lambasting the flaws of the governmental system is the moment I have given up hope that they might ever be corrected. The moment I stop being pessimistic is the moment I will have given up on optimism, because pessimism is really nothing more than a dirty term for how some people strive to be optimistic.

In this way, pessimism is an indicator of the desire for improvement. Take harsh movie critics. They are typically viewed by the moviegoing public as cranky, unappreciative people who simply love tearing films down. As a fairly harsh movie viewer myself, however, I can vouch that the opposite is often true. I critique because I see wasted potential, because I see ways that things could have easily been improved. Ultimately, when pessimists depict something in a negative light, it is because they want, or expect, it to be done better. Their criticism is an expression of hope that it can be done better in the future.

Finally, pessimists are more likely to give you an honest and frank opinion. They are less concerned with putting things in terms that seem appealing and optimistic, and more concerned with saying things how they see them. If I ever needed dependable input on how a system was working, I would ask a pessimist. Not only for the honesty, but if something is going wrong in a less than obvious way, it will likely be a pessimist who notices it first. That is a kind of feedback that I think is incredibly valuable.

These are just a few reasons to view pessimistic thought in a more positive light. Yet, to try to convert to pessimism if it is not how you are wired would likely be counterproductive. After all, someone could write a piece like this showing the value in optimistic thought.

What I hope to have accomplished is for the word “pessimism” to have become a little less dirty. I hope that people start recognizing the pessimist’s way as an alternative option, rather than an inferior one. I hope that more people will see pessimists as desiring, seeking, and striving for improvement. And most of all, that more people will see these as foundational things that pessimists and optimists alike will agree on.

Ben Herr lives in Lancaster, Pa., where he works as a dorm adviser for international high school students.  He writes short stories, humor, and opinion pieces about whatever current ideas and projects interest him.