Geiger Counter

Happy in the dark   In Moscow, a dozen people are speared to death annually by falling icicles. In the Chandrapur district of India last year, leopards and tigers devoured 30 humans. If you want to go camping in Croatia, you might want to bring along an instructional booklet, which actually exists, called “How to avoid land mines and bears.”  In a book I’m currently reading, I met a man who was falsely accused of killing a young woman. He was tortured for a confession, then jumped out a window to escape the police, shattering his spine. When the murder “victim” reappeared unharmed, they let the man go, but he now has to crawl up and down several flights of stairs to get in and out of his apartment. There is no working elevator, and his wheelchair does not fit into the bathroom.  Life can be rough, but even that guy seemed significantly more upbeat than many of the people in Southern Wisconsin these days. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, whenever someone’s Prius tires need a little air or their organic cupcakes are slightly overbaked. Basically whenever they don’t get everything they have ever wanted immediately and perfectly.  The Midwest is not a particularly special place. At least, not in the traditional sense. Instead, it is the place all of us have decided to live and work and raise our children. The reason, at least in my case, was the desire to live in a land where people are generally nice. That’s not to say they don’t get upset when bad things happen, but rather, their default setting in pleasantness. The average Midwesterner on an average day is supposed to be much less hostile than the average New Yorker. While most places in the world brag about things for which they should take very little credit – “Look, we live next to a massive volcano!” – our calling card is something totally under our control. We don’t have the best cities or museums or paintings, but we more than make up for it with the fact that spending five minutes with us is not total agony. At least, that used to be the case.  I grew up on the East Coast. The food was better. The high culture was superior. The vast, dark, salty ocean is more magical than any cornfield (no offense; I love cornfields). But life here is better, purely because of the people who call this place home.  Perhaps it’s because of a certain globalization of spirit that has taken place recently thanks to our evil social media overlords, who make trillions of dollars simply by making people hate each other, but Midwesterners in the last few years have gotten a lot less pleasant. In fact, people in Wisconsin are starting to act a lot like people in Boston, New York or L.A. They are generally displeased and incredibly vocal about the fact.  I was at a local ice cream place, chatting with the owner. We were in a room filled with frozen sweets. I think there were more than 30 flavors, ranging from delicate fruit sherbets to black chocolate filled with gobs of fudge. There were old standards and flavors that seemed like the result of kitchen pantry explosions. She said they had recently been berated by a customer who was furious they didn’t have the exact, obscure flavor he was looking for.  “But what about all these flavors?” I asked.  “No, he didn’t want these,” explained. “He wanted one and he was pretty mad that we didn’t have it.” “So, a grown man threw a temper tantrum over ice cream?” “Yeah.” A couple weeks ago, the power briefly went out in the community where we live. I was delighted. Power outages are like snow days. They fill me with a sense of endless possibility and wonder. I remember the excitement I used to feel when the power went out during my childhood. It was as if we were being thrust back into some bygone age, the closest we would ever come to genuine time travel. Out came candles and board games and ghost stories. If it happened during the day, we were forced outside to rely only on our great celestial star for illumination. If it happened at night, we were plunged into darkness and even a trip to the bathroom became an exotic, exciting foray into the unknown.  When the power goes out here these days, people, and I’m using a philosophical term coined by Thomas Hobbes here, freak the %#&$*@! out, primarily on social media, because that is the corner people go to, to have temper tantrums. I don’t see them firsthand, because I look on social media about once a month, if that. The risk/reward balance is way off. The upside is that you get reminded it’s your high school bully’s birthday once a year, but the downside is that you get to see the unfettered emotional fits of millions of unhinged people whose votes count every bit as much as yours do. It’s depressing. You get to find the incorrect hours of a restaurant that has been review-bombed for political reasons that have nothing to do with food, but you also get to see everyone explaining to everyone else that they are Hitler. I am mystified by the fact that some adults still think this is a healthy way to spend their free time before they die.  Going on Facebook or Twitter is like playing the lottery, if the prize money were a bill for 35 cents, and every time you didn’t win you got kicked in the private parts.  As the great Dave Barry once put it, “Common criticism of the Internet is that it is dominated by the crude, the uninformed, the immature, the smug, the untalented, the repetitious, the pathetic, the hostile, the deluded, the self-righteous, and the shrill. This criticism overlooks the fact that the Internet also offers - for the savvy individual who knows where to look - the tasteless and borderline insane.” I used social media a lot when I was in my 20s. But, right around the time I started behaving like a grownup, sometimes buying healthy foods, and no longer actively seeking out T-shirts with words on them, I gradually began losing interest in it. It’s sort of like a terrible place that I had the good sense to move away from. And I should know a thing or two about that, because I used to live in New Jersey. And Florida, which is essentially what a society would look like if it were built from the ground up by Axe Body Spray’s Twitter account.  With all that said, I do sometimes enjoy it when my friends read to me some of the most egregiously self-centered rants on various social media platforms. I call these, “Meanwhile, on social media…” sessions. In the real world, right in front of you, people are helping change a stranger’s flat tire, or picking up trash on the shore of a local lake. Then, you see what the folks on Facebook – oops, I mean, “Meta” – are doing. People have an almost pathological desire to weigh in on things, and they are not particularly picky about how or where they do it. Conervative or liberal, young or old, they always have their facts 113 percent wrong.  One thing I still do for fun is go on Amazon.com and read the “Customer Questions and Answers.” It is an area under each product where people who are considering buying a tube of toothpaste, a set of winter tires, or a lots-of-assembly-required home sauna, can ask questions of people who already bought the item. Inevitably, the vast majority of answers come from people who have NOT purchased the item in question, and therefore do NOT have a useful answer. “Does this rowing machine have a Bluetooth connection?” asks one person.  “I don’t know. I got a pair of Birkenstock clogs instead,” reads the top answer.  “Will this parka keep me warm in the Alaskan wilderness?”  “I’m not sure. I live on the surface of the sun and don’t wear clothes,” reads another.  Valuing your own opinion is good, but there are moments in life, actually quite a lot of them, when we should all take a step back and ask ourselves whether it’s really the right time to weigh in on whether or not a total stranger should buy an air fryer. When someone asks on Amazon how long the battery on an electric mower lasts, you don’t necessarily need to log on and tell them that you aren’t sure, because your mower runs on gas and you live above the arctic tree line. You are allowed to sit this stuff out.  I wish I could reach these people and explain to them that the Q and A is actually not compulsory. Another person asked if a vacuum cleaner works well on dog hair, and someone actually took the time to login and leave this reply: “I don’t know; I don’t have any pets.” I recently saw a can of beans for sale, and the top questions was: “Would these be good to eat while watching Pixar’s Cars 2?” In any case, it seems like the global nature of the Internet has allowed unhappy coastal people to teach affable Midwesterners how to be awful. Being upset is incredibly fashionable these days, because people mistake it for righteousness. Like all fashion trends, it’s getting here, to the Midwest, a little late. I hope it is only a fad, because I love it here.  When I moved to Wisconsin, I did so with a hunger for kindness. One tacit deal everyone makes when they decide to come here, or stay here, is that they will trade some of the more urbane, cosmopolitan aspects of coastal living for a healthy generosity of spirit and gentle temperament. Sure, we don’t have as much access to culture, and middle-aged people here all wear clothing and haircuts that went out of fashion 20 years ago in other places, but at least in Wisconsin, people are supposed to smile at you when they walk by you on the street. There is something almost intentionally middling about the Midwest, where people have historically NOT felt they were particularly special or important. The cruelest, saddest people are always the ones who mistakenly think their lives are of great, singular importance. I once recorded a Public Radio piece about how much I love the intentionally understated gravestones people choose here; one hardly ever any bigger or flashier than any other. Just little, unassuming rocks that try not to be too showy. We are each one small stone among many.  We do not have mountains, or deserts, or even an ocean, which is something I will never get entirely used to. It’s beautiful here, but in an unspectacular kind of way. In Wisconsin, you tend to look at the landscape and think, “That’s pleasant,” rather than gasping in awe the way you do at a summit that reaches into the clouds or a Nor’easter that whips up the vast green sea and sends sailors to their salty graves. But the deal we all made, at least until recently, is that we will live in unspectacular kindness with one another. In other places, the landscape is active trying to kill you, and the people are doing their best to tear down your self-esteem. We don’t have any of the wonders of the world here. But we do, for now, have people who are good, and in truth, that’s harder to find than Stonehenge of the Great Sphinx.  When the power went out due to an incredibly unfortunate squirrel the other day, people absolutely lost their minds. Friends relayed the manic tirades to me. People were beyond despair because the lights went out, during the middle of a sunny day. Their live were, apparently, ruined because they couldn’t use a hair dryer or plug in their robotic vacuum cleaners.  One person threatened a class action lawsuit.  The irony, of course, is that ALL of those people still had access to electricity and power. They were using up the precious battery lives of their phones and laptops to rant and rave on Twitter or Facebook about what was, at worst, a minor inconvenience. The only one with any right to complain was the squirrel, but he was essentially just a piece of burnt toast and couldn’t say anything. At best, a brief power outage is a gift that allows us to travel to exotic distant places, like the past or even just the park, playground or forest down the street. Complaining that you have no electricity on Facebook is an act that uses up some of the electricity that you currently have stored in your phone. It’s like whining that you are hungry, with your mouth full.  The truth is, if the power goes out, even for an hour or two, you get to find out a lot about yourself. Are you emotionally brittle? Are you something who believes a few minutes or hours alone, or with your family, with no electricity, is a punishment that violates the rules of the Geneva Convention? Or do you have the skills to cope? Is it actually a gift? I know, as one among 8 billion people on a planet full of mortals, that we all will face real tragedy. I also know that small inconveniences do not need to ruin our days or our lives. Happiness is not always a choice. Yet sometimes, it is. When real suffering shows up, in one of its many forms, we will recognize it. We do not need to go searching for it while we wait. It will come to us. A missing ice cream flavor or a quick power outage are not it. We can be happy in the dark, from time to time, while enjoying our second favorite type of ice cream.  Perhaps, someday, we will be impaled by a falling icicle. Maybe devoured by a bear. Or we will just slip away, then lose consciousness and never come back, alone in a kitchen or hospital bed or in the middle of a festival. It is the good things, which remain abundant but often a little harder to spot than death and trauma, that we should be searching for, and making note of, while we are here.