Happy Belated New Year

Some Good News for 2022

What’s the good news?

The good news is that no matter what happens, short of nuclear winter, 2022 won’t be the worst year in human history.

Um, yay?

I was listening to a “Radiolab” podcast yesterday in which they discuss 536 A.D., the actual worst year in human history, reminding themselves that 2021 and 2020 weren’t actually all that bad. Honestly I could have told them that these last two years haven’t even registered on the scale of bad years for humans, but then they wouldn’t have had a radio show.

We (the royal We) take absolutely everything about our modern life for granted. Cars. Flight. Pre-packaged food. Freezers. Plumbing. Vaccines. The almost complete absence of apex-predators with a taste for human flesh. Did I mention the Plague? Need I? Covid-19, as bad as it’s been, and it’s been nasty, is not the Black Death by any stretch of the imagination. The Black Death and other unstoppable pestilences swept across Eurasia dozens of times, killing millions each time. Those were bleak years. Wars were also an almost constant threat. If it wasn’t any one of several steppe people banding together to thump the Eurasian continent, it was Europeans thumping each other. Or deciding to go thump whomever was living in “The Holy Land.” Or the Persians thumping the Hindus in India, etc. etc. and on and on. The citizens of Paris were so scared of uprisings and invading armies that those who could afford to literally build fortified castles within the fortified city walls to protect themselves.

If you don’t have much time, you can listen to the Radiolab episode here. I also recommend A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, which should really put our latte loving lifestyles in perspective. But putting things in perspective is hard. If my Pumpkin Spiced Granola Pecan Milkacino isn’t available right now, well, am I really that different than a 13th century peasant, covered in seeping pustules, being chased by marauding Mongol hordes across my allotted desiccated patch of earth that I’m only allowed to till by an inbred princeling overlord who takes 3/4 of my harvest to supply troops in order to go thump “The Holy Land?”

No. It’s the same thing. And I’m going to be calling customer service to tell them so.

So here’s to 2022 and all that it will be and all that it won’t be. One great meter of whether or not this is an annus horribilis is this: can you still buy or make yourself a frothy hot latte* literally whenever you want it. If the answer is yes, enjoy your warm drink. If the answer is no, consider going to find someone to thump on before they thump you.

*Observant readers will note that the humble latte seems to reappear frequently as my sign of a decadent society above all others. If this seems flippant or offends your morning drink of choice, take a moment to consider what has to happen to put that latte in your hand. Coffee, discovered by domesticated sheep in Ethiopia, needs to be grown and harvested in an equatorial country, then shipped across several international borders. That coffee is then roasted in giant ovens and distributed widely to stores, restaurants and cafes. A very specialized machine, usually made in Italy or China, and which is attached somehow to a municipal electrical grid, is needed to heat water (itself a valuable and under-appreciated resource in civilized times) and pass it through the grounds of this exotic bean. The same machine, usually, is used to froth milk, or a milk-like substance, which has been unnaturally extracted from either a cow, or a legume of some kind. Either way, a complex process of animal or vegetable husbandry was required to raise that cow or legume to milking stage. The resulting froth and coffee flavored water is combined and handed to you in exchange for a sum of money that could put one child through school for many months in most of the developing world. If all of this process can still happen without anyone thinking all that much about it, then we are in fact still in a functioning modern society with lots of room for improvement.