The Thinking, Walking Biped, part nine. Other famous walks, of varying quality

Other writers, besides those described in earlier essays, have taken extensive nature walks for a variety of creative purposes. Here are just a few examples.

• Estwick Evans was a New Hampshire lawyer who started a four thousand mile journey in 1818 which took him to Detroit, which was at the time on the deep frontier. Most of this journey was on foot. His purpose was not primarily to learn about the natural, but about the human, world. He visited many Native and white American settlements. He saw what he expected to see: that the westward expansion of America was, by and large, a good thing for everyone.
• Philip Freneau was an American poet who did a lot of walking in nature, though not, as far as I can tell, any one single long journey. His principal motivation was to see the Native viewpoint on the natural world.
• Graham Greene was a British novelist who took a 350-mile trip through Liberia in the early twentieth century, as described in Journey without Maps. But he was not primarily observing Africa. He brought a whole cavalcade of prejudices with him. He had 25 porters, six boxes of food, beds, chairs, and a bathtub. His journey can best be described as imposing itself on Africa. His motivation, he said, was H. Rider Haggard’s She, which was a novel about an almost vanished white African civilization. Greene took an American map that labeled this part of Africa simply as “cannibals.” He wanted to see evidence of white supremacy in Africa, and this is what he saw.

The usual situation, in these journeys, was that the white traveler came with expectations of what he would see, and gathered observations that reinforced them.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 3. Flow of Blood

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Light Apparel (reviewed earlier), Flow of Blood (reviewed here), Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Flow of Blood, the science is not impossible, as was the case with the two previous stories. It is about a viral fever killing people in Africa, including graduate students trying to stop it. As I write these words, the ebola virus is spreading almost uncontrolled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Perhaps the most important plot component of this story is racism. The white male grad student was raised to be a racist, until he meets and loves a black female grad student from Africa. He goes with her to study and fight the disease in her birth village. He becomes ill, and she goes back to Kansas to be with him. His family at first rejects her, thinking that Africa is where all viral diseases come from. But they have just suffered another loss: another son has died of a viral fever, but this time it was the American hantavirus. This shared experience of death brings them together.

Medical science is not just about germs and medicine, but about the struggles and perils of real people. And sometimes it takes a medical tragedy to bridge the gulf of racism.

More People Die Each Year of Malaria than Will Die in the Covid-19 Pandemic

You read that right. According to UNICEF, a million people a year die of malaria, over 90 percent of them children n sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, the total number of coronavirus deaths as of today is 1,414,165, with 81, 217 deaths. The link should update daily.

I do not deny the importance of stopping the coronavirus pandemic. But the reason everyone is freaking out about 81,000 deaths is that they are mostly in the white world. The million people who die each year of malaria live almost exclusively in countries that Donald Trump referred to as “shithole countries.”

This can only mean one thing. Many people, including most of the people who worship Donald Trump and believe He is the man whom God has raised up to lead the world at this time, think that the deaths of little African children is not really very important. Only the deaths of white people get their attention.

We Are All Minorities

On a recent NPR interview, I heard an old survivor of the 1960s civil rights struggles say that we are all minorities. Since the recent election, we have heard a lot about the reassertion of dominance by the white Christian majority. But this “majority” is actually a coalition of minorities. There are many different “white” ethnic groups. White ethnicity is a fiction created by the desire of many white minorities to band together to repress people of color.

Of course it is not just the “whites” that do this. “Africans” do this also. There is no single African race. The people of north Africa, the Bantu people of west Africa, the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest, the Ethiopians and Somalis, and the San of south Africa are all different races. You will find African-Americans from all of these different racial backgrounds. “White” racism has forced all “Africans” into a coalition.

The same is true of Native Americans. Today, all of the tribes are in the same boat and act as if they are one people. You can go to any pow-wow you like across the country—and some people apparently spend their summer vacation doing this—and it is pretty much the same. The Cherokee pow-wows of my tribe in Oklahoma look and sound almost identical to the Lakota pow-wows I attended when I lived in Minnesota. My tribe, the Cherokee tribe, used to fight against the Creeks for access to hunting grounds. But the overwhelming force of “white” genocide and land-grabbing (by Americans of English, Irish, Scottish, German, etc., descent) has forced all 500 tribes into a coalition.

But there is an insight that comes from thinking of ourselves as minorities, even those of you in the “white majority.” We are all minorities and have to work together for the survival of the world. If any of you think of the Trump victory as a victory of whites, you are contributing to a mindset that endangers the future of the world.