Don't know how we woke up somehow thought we knew/exactly what we're supposed to do

As I mentioned in my review of The Abyss, I am horribly affected by pets being hurt, killed, or threatened in stories. Cat deaths are especially bad (see: Battle Royale, Rifter's Trilogy, and The Filth, all of which are about truly awful socities), but I got emotional watching the fish deaths in A Fish Called Wanda too. It's not so much a trigger as a place completely without armor.

I think part of what bothers me is that 1. pets are our responsibility and the trust us and 2. we (I) can't explain what is happening to the pets, which Peter Watts covered better than I ever could in this eulogy for his cat Banana:

He tried to run, you see. Something happened, inside; something broke, and he felt it but he had no way to parse it except that somehow there was a mortal threat and he wasn’t equipped to tell the difference between the things that kill you from the outside and those that kill you from within. All he knew was that his life was in danger, and he reacted the only way he knew how: he tried to run away.

. The fact that something I pledged to love and protect is suffering and I know what the stress chemicals are doing to it but I can't fix it- may even be causing it- tears me up every time.

I was discussing health care and end of life care with a friend today, and realized that this is really present in my feelings on dementia as well. One day you're an entity (or caring for an entity) that can think and plan and rationalize short term pain for long term benefit, and then you're not. And you're left with something that looks like a person but is missing one of the hallmarks of humanness, who is just aware enough to know they're missing something but not what or how to get it. I would be less afraid of Alzheimer's if it didn't make you so mean. Losing your mind is terrible, but senility led to Down's syndrome like behavior, it would bother me less, because you're happy and, while there's some burden of care on your loved ones, they're receiving love and kindness in return. Alzheimers, most other forms of old age senility and dementia, and most forms of mental retardation leave you just aware enough to get angry and hurt the people who love you the most. And I don't see why anyone wants to maintain that, much less force others to do so.

The places inside me that I find you

I am about a third of the way through Empire of the Summer Moon (hat tip: squid314), which is a history/sociology/anthropology of the Comanche Indians, from the time of Spanish contact through around 1900. It is very interesting in ways I so far don't have much to add to, but it does highlight just what is wrong with how American schools teach history.

Like everyone else, I learned history as one thing happening after another. You might have sort sort of causal chain (the classic example being Archduke Ferdinand's assassination leading to WW1), but there's no attempt to understand the system. This tendency to teach isolated facts is why I get actively angry in museums: I feel like I've been handed six pieces out of a 1000 piece puzzle and been told to place them correctly. Even if those are the most interesting pieces, six of them won't show me the larger picture, and with so few pieces "placed correctly" isn't even a meaningful concept. Empire is, more like getting a bunch of pieces from a subset of the puzzle: I may not have the whole thing, but I can at least see how this part works.

Which is useful for all kinds of reasons, some of which are that patterns repeat throughout history but you need to study them in depth at least once in order to recognize them again (ask me about my elves v. orcs theory of the transition from hunter/gatherering to agriculture). The way we teach history is pathologically incapable of providing this. For example, my education was good enough to mention economic uncertainty as a reason for 1930s Germany to turn on the Jews. What I didn't learn until I was 26, and only then because a Jewish friend told me, was that right up until that point Jews were extremely well integrated into German society. Some were more integrated than others and of course there were isolated problems, but their overall position was strikingly similar to, just to pick an example, Jews in America in 2010. Which has some pretty fucking important implications for how Jews, and other currently-embraced minority groups, view and interpret the current situation, and what constitutes an isolated incident versus a portent of terrible things to come.

It's not like history is unique in this. Science education seems to focus way more on teaching specific facts than an understanding of science, much less the scientific method. But we have *got* to do better on this.

Because Empire is focused on the Comanche side of things, it leaves open the question of why European settlers were so willing to move into what was essentially Reaver territory. Which is totally fine: no single book can do all things, especially not at the level of detail I want. And I knew enough history to have some guesses ("too many people in Europe"). But it is interesting that when I discussed this with a friend who knew a lot about European history, he was able to paint a picture of exactly why things were so bad, focusing mainly on the 30 years war. Which I immediately compared to Warhammer 40k ("..the grim nightmare of the far future, where there is only war"), a game I have never even played. And you'll notice my reference point for the raping and torturing done by the Comanches was from a short lived science fiction television show*. And my reaction to reading Nothing to Envy (about North Korea) was "that's post-apocalyptic dystopia bad." Speculative fiction has taught me more patterns than all of my history and humanities education combined. Which I guess is better than not getting those patterns anywhere, but I this is maybe exactly what social studies should have been covering?


*To be fair, the Reavers were almost certainly inspired by the Comanche, at least indirectly