I was thinking about gates, doors, and walls as I went walking with Sadie on a sunny Thursday morning. We typically walk along the sides of streets. I let her wander onto the edges, but not onto other people’s yards or very far down their driveways. Often there are gates, much like our own gate. If the gate is closed and isn’t too far from the road, I often let her walk up to the gate. The gates are there both to prevent us from entering someone else’s property and to signal us not enter the property. I could, if my life depending on it, scale many of the gates, but that’s clearly asking for trouble. The gate is meant to keep people out, not as a challenge to overcome. Sadie generally couldn’t get through the bars of the gates. Of course, a gate is no barrier at all to birds, rabbits, mice, rats, lizards, snakes, raccoons, butterflies, or bees.
A door seems to me to offer more security than does a gate. While a gate may prevent me from entering, it’s quite easy to see through or around most gates, to hear the noise from the other side and to smell what’s on the other side. It’s true that one may listen through a door but the sound is typically muffled. Loud music or yelling creeps through to the outside but a conversation normally stays private.
A door also helps the inside stay warmer or cooler than the outside air. A gate has no such function.
Among places dogs leave olfactory messages for each other, boundaries are high on the list. This includes hedges, curbs, and gates. Sadie “controls herself” well now, but when she was younger, she would often pee at the boundary of a social event. Specifically, when someone—especially someone new or someone she already liked but hadn’t seen for awhile, she’d pee. She also seems to understand what I mean when I say, “Sadie, we’re going for a ride in the car. You should go pee first and then we can get in the car.” I don’t think she “parses” the sentence and accesses the meanings of all the individual words. Nonetheless, she quickly pees and then goes over to get in the car.
A wall is a kind of transition as well. A gate is much more permeable than a wall and a door may be opened or closed or ajar. Often walls, such as castle walls have one or more gates or doors. People on one side of a wall almost always want to get to the other side, at least occasionally. At the very least, they want to be able to move information and goods from inside to outside and vice versa.
Why walls? The walls of a house keep you in a more easily controlled environment. A wall can provide a level of protection. That’s mainly what castle walls are for. Of course, they often fail as well. Invaders climb the walls or tear down the walls or burrow under the walls until the wall collapses. Of course, castles were also subject to sieges. Eventually, the defenders inside would run out of food. Primitive machines were constructed to hurl firebrands and large rocks in to wreak havoc and kill defenders.
The Greeks were unable to defeat the Trojans by destroying their castle. Instead, they famously made a large wooden horse as a “tribute” to the courage and tenacity of the Trojans. Overjoyed that the long siege was over, they opened the gates and led in the giant wooden horse and began to celebrate. Once everyone was drunk or sleeping, the soldiers hidden inside the horse snuck out and opened the gates to the much larger Greek army waiting outside.
Today’s technology is much more sophisticated of course, but walls, gates, and doors still exist. The defensive capabilities now include guided missiles, aircraft, submarines, and aircraft carriers as well as the threat of nuclear retaliation. During the so-called “Cold War” America and the USSR engaged in an “arms race” to develop the best weapons and more of them. Looking back on all the wasted energy and time on both sides, I think, “Imagine what could have been done if we had instead spent all that resource on preventing climate change, curing disease, and sponsoring science and education.
Of course, it’s not an easy problem. One side in a standoff can only stand down unilaterally if they trust the other side. Meanwhile, none of the amazing and exorbitantly expensive weapons, walls, doors, and gates we’ve developed are worth anything at all if we accept the modern Trojan Horse.
Social media, the press, the television, and nearly half of the political candidates spew misinformation on a daily, even hourly basis. We’re locked in a political race and one of the two candidates for President is himself a Trojan Horse. Like the ancient Trojans, all our walls and armaments will be useless.
The threat to America is, in many ways, worse than the threat to ancient Troy. The Trojan Horse that endangers us? It’s a steady steam of lies designed to induce Americans to kill each other.
No number of fighter jets; no cache of assault rifles; no armada of submarines; no hordes of fighters will save us from the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse is armored with something far more powerful than iron, steel, or depleted uranium. The Trojan Horse’s armor is your own mind.
Only courage will work to save you. It is not the courage to face an army. It is the courage to admit that you’ve been conned; that you were wrong; that you have been led down a garden path that leads nowhere near where you ever wanted to go.
Did you ever read “Travels with Charley” by Steinbeck? “Charley” is the name of Steinbeck’s dog who travels with him on a car trip across America, or at least the first 48 states thereof. My wife and I—and our dog Sadie— recently met up with my cousin-in-law (is that a word? I guess it is now). Cousin-in-law Timm loves dogs too and suggested I should do a similar journal called “Travels with Sadie” and this is, indeed, the first chapter of “Travels with Charley.”
I chose this topic while reflecting, as I often do, on what the world is like for Sadie and her kin. Sadie, like most, is thrilled to meet other dogs. If she can’t meet them in person, the next best thing is to sniff the spots where they peed. Although she hasn’t yet reached estrous, in the last few months, she’s been behaving differently with respect to the pee residue of female dogs on the ground and male dogs, which are on bushes, trees, lampposts, sign poles, and fire hydrants.
It seems that the males inordinately prefer lampposts, sign poles, and fire hydrants over trees. That, to me, at first seemed curious. After all, trees have been in the picture for dogs and their ancestors for millions of years. These manufactured artifacts are brand new.
Here’s my hypothesis. In the long-ago days of dogs, some dogs took it upon themselves to signal their presence by peeing on manufactured posts while others preferred trees. A post has fewer distractions—visual, aural, and most importantly, the olfactory sense. Thus, the post-preferring peers had a more impressive social presence resulting in more mating and more envy—higher ranking in the pack. Over time, the post-preferring peers proliferated and prospered.
Over time, and perhaps even initially, the individual dog itself could “learn” that it had left a more salient and more lasting impression. How? Because they go back to the spot they themselves peed in, often repeatedly. Thus, they would learn that make a splash in the dog world, you’re better off with a human artifact. The fact that it smells like a human when it is first put into place may well “seed” the site as a place to exchange messages—perhaps a kind of canine Facebook—only not really the face.
It also turns out that lampposts, sign poles, and fire hydrants signify three essential functions of a society. Lampposts are to shine light on reality. Medical research, science research, education, public service announcements, and books. To some extent, our laws are also a kind of lamppost. “Look people, we’ve learned the hard way, that it’s not good to steal. Don’t do it.”
Well, if that’s not clear enough, fine, we’ll write 100,000 pages of clarification.
Sign posts include, to me, norms and customs, as well as directions of various sorts. There’s often a tension between lampposts and sign poles. The sign poles take work to design, manufacture, transport, and erect. That stop sign down the street didn’t just fall off the coconut tree. Similarly, customs, for instance, separating the work of men and women so that all nurses were women and all men were doctors, take work to implement and to enforce. People will not always stop at a stop sign and especially if they are never ticketed. Similarly, there will be individual women who desire to become a doctor and men who want to be nurses. There will always be tension in such customs between the norm and the individual desires.
Imagine after a lot of work has gone into putting up the stop sign, the lamppost function of government sponsors a study that shows it would be much better to put in a traffic circle (roundabout) rather than the four stop signs. More traffic gets through faster and there are fewer accidents. You can easily imagine some resistance. The people who profit from making the stop signs, for instance, and the police officers who ticket those who only come to a “rolling stop.” The drivers may also object. Many of them aren’t used to traffic circles. Some initial awkwardness is predictable.
To me, the fire hydrant represents the protective aspects of government. There are many! There are agencies, like the FDA, that ensure the cleanliness of our food and water. (Believe it or not, there are some providers who are so greedy, that they would actually sell you tainted food or drink if it would make them richer.) There are the Armed Forces, the Fire Departments, the Police Forces. In a way, Social Security and Medicare also fall into this region. It is a protective function of government.
Sadie, meanwhile, is sacked out on the couch across from me. She’s had an active day; two long walks, zoomies, swimming, and ball playing. Our dog, like many, is very loving. She’s wary of anything new. But soon, she’ll be head over heels in love with another person.
The very greedy people who would have you kowtow to them while they steal the fruits of your labor love to use the rationalization that it’s a “Dog eat dog world out there.” It isn’t actually. Neither humans (for the most part) nor dogs (for the most part) are out there eating others of their own species. We are both pack animals. We both love and protect our families. Is there competition? Sure. But it’s all done in the scope of a cooperative society.
The natural tension between conservatives and liberals has a lot to do with how quickly one wants to see lamppost findings supplant existing psychic and physical infrastructure. And it is a very legitimate debate to have. Most do not want the extreme that every new finding in, say, medical research should instantaneously turn traditions and practices on their heads. Also, most do not want to ignore all new science and discovery and keep everything static forever.
What is not a legitimate debate is for one side, like a spoiled toddler, to insist that if they don’t get their way, they’ll burn our civilization to the ground. Sadie wouldn’t do that. Nor would I. Nor would most Americans.
“I never took a test. There’s been a mistake. I’m a supporter.”
“Shut up or I’ll break every finger. Capiche?”
The guard grinned a moon of bloody teeth and pushed his nightstick against Bob’s lips. Hard.
Bob grunted but said nothing; decided he’d bide his time for now. This will all get sorted later.
It didn’t get sorted. Why would it? Along with tens of thousands of other “supporters” the only thing Bob got for his support? A free one-way ticked to the burn pits. He’d been beaten enough that when his time came, he jumped of his own accord.
One of the things that the “winning side” of a war loses is the opportunity to spend those resources spent on war instead spent on making life better for its citizens. Even if the “winners” have a very quick and lopsided victory, they will have contributed to world-wide pollution and global climate change that will negatively impact nearly everyone on the planet including most of the people on the “winning” side and their descendants. Many of the soldiers will have died, but in almost every single case, many more innocent people will have died. In some cases, those will be minimal for the “winning” side, but not always. Meanwhile, soldiers who returned to society, even if they are not physically impacted permanently are surely impacted psychologically. Among other things, if they were successful, they killed other human beings. Some of those human beings were almost certainly innocents, but even the other soldiers were mainly people forced into fighting.
In a way, they will be carrying seeds of some very bad experiences and some of those seeds will undoubtedly leak out into that person’s environment impacting, his friends and family, as well as random strangers. But the war mentality is not limited to serious effects on fighting soldiers. To some small extent, everyone is damaged. There is more stress for everyone. There is always the threat of reprisal or that someone you care deeply about will be maimed or killed. Not only are people’s sense of fear heightened; typically, so is their hatred and anger. For many, this will be directed far beyond those actually most responsible for starting a war.
During a war, people will be asked, or ask themselves, to view the killing of a whole bunch of their fellow humans as the best course of action. Some will embrace that with relish and a side order of over-generalization. Others will embrace the killing with reluctance. Few will object outright. So, after your victory, you will be living in a society that rationalizes killing others more often and more easily than they did before. Of course, it’s generally even worse for the “losing” society. Both sides lose. The “losing side” loses more and that keeps the war fueled as long as possible. But make no mistake. Both sides lose.
Democracies have often gone to war against each other. But far more often in modern times, war has been instigated by dictators. They rule by hate and fear. Having an enemy is an entry fee and a talking point. If there’s no-one else around, they’ll simply pick on the vulnerable within their own society. Through constant repetition about extremely rare cases or even just outright lies, people can actually be made to hate people who have, in reality, done them zero harm.
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