I Just Don’t Understand Humans
We Are End-Stage Homo sapiens
I was watching an episode of The Pitt the other night (yes, I am late to this show, but it is really great TV) where a pregnant woman is on the table, in agony, and yet she refuses all care and insists that she wants a “natural birth” with no medical intervention. She refuses everything, even as they try to explain to her that she and her child are in grave danger of death. The viewer wonders why she came to the emergency room at all (hey, continuity people, where were you?) and didn’t choose to die on her couch at home, her convictions and sense of superiority over modern medicine intact. But here she is in the Pitt emergency room, and she has eclampsia, a life-threatening issue. Of course, this is fiction, and so the doctors save her and the baby by doing what they need to do. We never know if she is grateful or furious after she wakes up.
But this fictional character is not so fictional. There are hordes of Americans now who refuse medical care, including vaccines, because they think some internet person knows more than scientists who develop these medicines or the doctors who deliver them.
I just don’t understand this, and so many other things these days. Here are a mere 10 of them:
1) I don’t understand the anti-science thing. Have these people never walked through a Victorian graveyard and seen all the young women who died in childbirth because medicine didn’t have a clue how to get women through delivery without bleeding to death or dying from infection? The same graveyards are also full children dead before the age of five because there were no antibiotics. Here also lie oh so many the victims of flu, colds, tuberculosis, polio, asthma, measles—your name it— because we did not yet understand bacterial and viral infection and had nothing on hand to stop them. Didn’t these clueless people lose grandparents or great-grandparents to the Spanish flu, have heard of relatives who spent time in an iron lung, or have a family member who carried tuberculosis? Have they never heard of sickness and death? How full of yourself do you have to be to think you are better at treating your health than people who have spent years studying the human body, inventing medications that help cure things, and reading endlessly to inform themselves about the state of various diseases and conditions? Just because you once had a cold and either starved or fed your fever and voilà, it went away, does not make you an expert on the cold virus. Dying of an infectious disease when there is a vaccine right in front of your face does, however, make you a complete idiot.
2) I don’t understand why some people with white skin think they are smarter than people with brown or black skin. Skin, really, skin? That layer of cells covering a body? What does that have to do with smartness? These racists also assume intellect is genetic, and of course, they have the “superior” genes. Intellect is not genetic, as has been shown endlessly across the globe. There is this little thing called education that can make just about anyone informed and intelligent. And there is another type of education, called experience, that makes a person smarter. Buring your head into a look-alike crowd teaches you nothing.
3) I don’t understand why people in Western culture also assume their culture is “better” than other cultures. Funny thing is that these people never really say what makes their culture “the best.” “Best” to them seems to include the right to pollute and destroy the planet with manufacturing, mining, and carbon emissions so we can travel around alone in a car rather than taking a train or bus, get wherever we are going faster, read at night, and stay warm in winter by means other than putting on a sweater. As the Earth dies, they might or might not have time to rethink their assumed cultural superiority.
4) I don’t understand people who think Westerners, in particular, are smarter than people in other cultures. (Here we move from skin to this vague thing called culture.) If I hear one more American male visiting me in Venice lean over and tell me how Venetians could make their topographically complex city function better, I am going to hit him over the head with a gondola oar. As I tell them, “Venetians have already thought of everything you are thinking. This place has been here for 1600 years, and I guarantee you that they have tried whatever you are offering, and it didn’t work.” This retort has little effect because Western men think they are the smartest people on the planet. One said he could not believe Venetians weren’t using electric carts to haul goods around. I pointed out that such carts would have batteries and be heavy, and what about getting them over the 400 bridges? In this case, hand-pushed carts are better. Here’s a test for this kind of know-it-all-better-than-you-do Westerner: Try to figure out the five types of marriage among the Tiwi people of Melvin and Bathurst Islands in Northern Australia. Get back to me if you can, because it will mean you are a genius. Or how about going across a savannah looking for food that is ripe and not poisonous or tracking an antelope for a few days. Industrialization does not make a sophisticated, intelligent, culture. It makes a dirty, polluting, and socially isolated one.
5) I just don’t understand people who believe an anecdote delivered by the internet over real live clinical trials. These are fearful and suspicious people because they know nothing. For example, if they hear that someone’s friend of a friend was cured of COVID-19 by taking ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug, they take it because they don’t know that a parasite and a virus are different. For them, medical care is a “belief system,” and you base your care on what you, who know nothing about biology, let alone treatment, believe. Trusting a belief system, an emotion-based view, over scientific testing, which has been developed over centuries to remove any emotional bias, is, well, crazy. They’d rather make decisions according to what happened to their Aunt Sally’s friend rather than what happened to masses of people recruited into a double-blind clinical trial. But then sticking to a belief system is a feature of the kind of tribal mind that some cultures encourage—we the people—who think of themselves in a collective that they have decided is better and more informed than others.
6) I just don’t understand people who don’t read books. I love movies, TV series, and staring at You Tube. But I also read books, all kinds of books. But these people don’t seem to know that reading a book is a whole different experience from staring at a screen. From Harry Potter to Charlotte Bronte to John LeCarre there is a universe of entertainment that is more engrossing, emotionally stirring, and effective than simply staring. And you can do both in your long life.
7) I just don’t understand people who have no curiosity. I recently met a woman who owns an antique store in New York City. She sells expensive antiques from Europe, but she has never been there and has no interest in going. No interest at all. When I answered that I travel to meet and talk with people who live a different life and see the history of their culture, her eyes went dead. I guess seeing the pyramids, a Tibetan temple, Balinese dancers, or the Eiffel Tower is not on her bucket list. Good, I thought to myself before turning to talk to a more interesting person, because that means one less tourist will get in my way as I leap on the next plane.
8) I don’t understand people with no sense of humor. I’ve met them, and I haven’t impressed them. In fact, I judge people based on their sense of humor—if they make me laugh or I make them laugh. This might not be the best way to evaluate people, as my record of failed relationships might suggest, but if someone “gets” my jokes, they can be a friend for life, even if they are a serial murderer. My daughter recently said to me, “Most people don’t choose their doctors as we do, by their sense of humor.” She was referring to our dermatologist, who is the funniest doctor on Earth. I once told him how my parents looked good in their old age because they took a walk every night. He said, “I should do something like that. Instead, I DoorDash water.” He recently changed practices, and we now must commute a long way in New York City to see him. When he came into the room at my next appointment, I began to sing “I will follow him where he may goooo!!” We both laughed (oh, and he’s also a great dermatologist.)
9) I don’t understand people who drop their trash on the sidewalk and street or toss it out their car windows. Several days a week, I walk my neighborhood in Brooklyn with a grabber stick and a big plastic bag and pick up trash. I am pleased to say, no syringes yet. But I have picked up a ton of empty, half-full, and full bottles of water, juice, and soda. And lost and lots of liquor bottles (especially those tiny ones from the airplane), as well as a mountain of empty candy, cookie, and chip packets. Paper napkins litter the landscape like big flakes of snow. I don’t pick up full dog poop bags (What’s with these people? They responsibly scoop it up and then leave the gross bag of poop for others to walk it to the corner garbage can. Talk about half-assed community service.) I do this even though I know it will make no difference. The next day, there is another layer of crap spread everywhere as if there were no garbage cans anywhere in the city, and yet they are everywhere. My favorite spots on my route are the half-empty garbage cans circled by garbage on the ground. The three or four inches of required reach is just too much for many people, I guess. So far, I’ve also picked up fifty cents, so it’s been worth it, eh?
10) I don’t understand people who love to eat fish. I hate the taste and the smell. I know, too judgy….crickets.
