She Died in 2008

She died in 2008. The years are passing, and at some point she will be forgotten. And what connection could she possibly have for me? A little Mexican girl I never met. I very much doubt she was a saint. She was probably just as worldly and selfish as any other human being. Why, then, does her story bring tears to my eyes?

Josseline Janiletha Hernandez Quinteros was fifteen years old when she joined a group of her fellow Mexicans to cross the border illegally into Arizona. All she wanted was to find her mother, who was in Los Angeles. She sustained an injury, and the mercenary group leader decided to leave her behind in the desert. When the group got out of the desert, her brother asked volunteers for help in finding her. They found her. The first thing they saw was her bright green tennis shoes. The next thing they saw, and smelled, was her rotting corpse.

I realize that there are many issues connected with illegal immigration. These people are breaking the law. Yes. These people may consume resources that are already in short supply for Americans, including legal immigrants. Yes, although one look at a fast food dumpster makes the supply argument look pretty vacuous. I dispute none of these things. But what bothers me is the zeal of moral rectitude that some people take against the illegal immigrants, a zeal that has gotten the federal government to spend millions of dollars. First, the federal government has spent enormous amounts of money to build a high-tech fence to prevent border crossings. A portion of Interstate 8 comes close to it outside of Yuma. Last summer I saw this fence. It reminded me of a Stalag confinement or the Berlin Wall. And it stretched into the distance. Millions of dollars to keep illegal immigrants out. But the zeal has gone further. It is illegal to provide food or water to these immigrants, as activist Daniel Millis found out in 2010. If you see one of them dying in the desert, you have to break the law to help them to survive. At this point I will ask the obvious question: What would Jesus do?

Why do some people like to hate illegal immigrants so much? The Old Testament prophets, from the early Amos to the later Jeremiah, criticized one king after another because they did not do justice and provide for the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the aliens (also called sojourners). The least we can do, to avoid God’s wrath (if there is a God with wrath) is to not hate the illegal aliens. Is that too much to ask? We may have to arrest them and send them back, but at least we can avoid hating them. I assume most Border Patrol officers are professionals and do their jobs without showing disrespect to the people whom they must arrest. I am thinking more about the civilian activists who make illegal immigration sound like the Black Death and illegal immigrants like rats.

And like any government, our federal government exults in its own power. The Border Patrol points to the fact that, since the big fence has been in operation, there have been far fewer desert crossings by illegals. The credit, they believe, goes to our technology and to the fact that the Border Patrol has been kicking Mexican butts. But as a scientist I have learned to recognize the difference between correlation and causation. During the time that illegal border crossings have declined, there has also been a recession. (I know, the recession is officially over; have you noticed?) Many poor Mexicans have weighed the danger of a desert crossing, plus the declining prospects of employment, against the danger of staying home and putting up with drug cartels. Many of them have decided that, at this time, a border crossing is not worth the risks and expense (the mercenary group leaders demand steep payment).

Like anyone else driving through California, I have had to wait in the long lines on the freeways as Border Patrol officers screen each car. They have signs up telling how many pounds of illegal drugs they have confiscated during these searches. I concede this point, and appreciate it. But something is wrong if it is a crime to help a little girl dying in the desert.

This topic is not one to which I have given much attention. So why am I writing this? Just look in Janiletha’s eyes, and you will know.



Why I Gave Nothing to the Beggar at the Corner

I always feel guilty passing up the beggars on the street corners. Don’t you? My inclination is to jump out of my car, cause a traffic jam or crash, and run over and give the guy a wad of money. But I never do, and it is only partly because I do not want to cause a traffic snarl. It is partly because I wonder how many of them are actually homeless and poor. I saw one using a SmartPhone. I have not allowed myself the expense of getting one of these. But that is not an important reason either.

My major reason is that I am the steward of limited resources for a few years on Earth. As circumstances have turned out, I have two houses: one in the town where we raised my daughter and my wife works, the other in the town where I work, 160 miles away. That’s a lot of bi-weekly commuting. I drive a small car. I also take trips, largely at my own expense, to scientific meetings to share my research results and learn from other scientists. My wife works half time. Keeping up two houses on 1 ½ incomes is not easy. My daughter’s college education, to the repayment of which she is contributing, was also expensive (and well used). To pay down debts and mortgages, I deny myself many pleasures that most people consider ordinary. We hardly ever eat out. I am extremely frugal. When my air conditioning went out, I chose to swelter in 105 degree heat (91 inside my house) rather than to immediately get a new unit. My wife and I are the kind of people who are not helping the economic recovery very much: our idea of a good time is to stay home and read library books or watch library videos. While we are not suffering the way homeless people are, I can in good conscience say that I am living as frugally as my circumstances reasonably permit. You probably are too (if you are the kind of person who would even bother to read this essay). My lifestyle frugally (did I say that already?) supports my writing as well as my academic work, and to cut back would hamper my writing, on which I spend most of my spare time. I think I owe my talents to the world. I am not spending very much on my own pleasure. And I am trying to save up a little bit in case our rich rulers turn America into a nation of a few very rich and a massive underclass, of which I will be a part.

So, sorry, guy, my money is spoken for, after very careful consideration. Maybe later.

The Giant Cross

On the very last day of my summer trip, described in preceding entries, I stopped along the interstate in Groom, Texas to see the world’s largest cross. It was built by the Catholic Church and is a frame covered with what appears to be fiberglass siding. It was big, all right, but the surrounding prairie, and the mass of air in the fierce wind, was much larger.

This is not the Precious Moments Chapel in Missouri. This is a courtyard with metal statues that depict the last moments of Jesus in graphic detail. Whatever else may or may not be true about Christianity, Jesus was certainly a lover of humankind and certainly suffered intensely for it. Even an atheist would be moved by it. And the statues depicted some defiantly altruistic things that Jesus did. In one statue, he is encouraging his female followers to remain courageous, even as he is dying—women whom he may have considered his equals. In another statue an obviously black Simon of Cyrene (also known in scripture as Niger) helps him carry his cross. You cannot sanitize or trivialize a story like this. If you cannot handle brutal human reality, don’t stop here—go on to the Precious Moments Chapel instead.

Inside the gift shop, it was a different story. It wasn’t quite Precious Moments, but it told quite a different story than the statues outside. Decorations were for sale that celebrated patriotism (implying the United States is God’s nation). You can buy a reproduction of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. The connection with Jesus is not immediately evident. So while the gift shop has the same flag-waving consumerism as does most of conservative Christianity today, the statues outside confront us with the story of a man so good that history has been unable to explain him.

The photographs show Simon Niger helping Jesus with his cross, and Pontius Pilate trying to evade his role in the messy and religion-drenched political history of the ancient Near East.

Races of the Human Species: A Visit to Manzanar

During my trip to California, I visited a place that has special significance to people who are interested in the religious ethics of race relations. This essay also appears on my evolution blog.

Owens Valley, just east of the central Sierra Nevada, is a place of open, windswept desert scrub. The desert is formed by the rain shadow of the highest of the Sierras, which tower immediately above it. Because there is little rain, and because what little bit of water there is has been mostly claimed by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power since the early twentieth century, there is little development. The desert sweeps up from the valley to the peaks with hardly any interruption. The beauty is almost heartbreaking. To the east, another range of tall mountains (dominated by White Mountain) rises almost as high as the Sierras.

The slopes of Owens Valley look almost the same today as they did in 1942. This was that year that the United States government, at war with the Empire of Japan, established the War Relocation Administration. Its directive was to relocate all people of Japanese origin from their homes into internment camps. Because they all had to sell their homes at once, the bottom fell out of the market, and they received a pittance for their property. They had to leave everything behind and live in barracks at the internment camps, spread widely over the American west. The thin-walled barracks were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. One of these camps was Manzanar, located near the present day town of Lone Pine. When the war ended in 1945, the Japanese were released, after being given $25 each.

The injustice of this action is well known. The internees were all Japanese Americans, most of them issei (first-generation immigrants) or their nisei (second-generation) children. They were American citizens who lost everything without due process of law. The issei had come to America to become Americans. Hardly any of them had any loyalty to Japan. Whole families were relocated. Because no such action was taken against German or Italian immigrants or their families, the Japanese internment is widely and correctly considered an example of racism. Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans were related to the people of enemy nations, but only the Japanese were not white.

The Japanese, and the white American soldiers who supervised them, made the best of it. The internees had an amazingly positive attitude. They founded their own newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press. In the first issue of this paper, April 11, 1942, the headline read, “Manzanar Booms into Valley’s Biggest Town.” A small section on the front page read thus: “The citizens of Manzanar wish to express in public their sincere appreciation to General John L. DeWitt and his Chiefs of Staff…for the expedient way in which they have handled the Manzanar situation. The evacuees now located at Manzanar are greatly satisfied with the excellent comforts the general and his staff have provided for them. ‘Can’t be better,’ is the general feeling of the Manzanar citizen. ‘Thank you, General.’” Manzanar was an internment camp, not a concentration camp. Despite the inherent unfairness of the situation, the white rulers appeared to have done their best to keep the internees safe, clean, comfortable, and happy. The mother of a childhood friend graduated from high school in Manzanar. She said that they did not suffer.

What does this have to do with evolution? Quite simply, it is that when altruism evolved in the human species, it facilitated cooperation and friendship within groups but was often fed by antagonism toward other groups, especially if those other groups looked different. Racism is part of the flip side of altruism. And yet, antagonism toward outsiders is something that we can unlearn. Children who are raised in multi-ethnic neighborhoods have no problem forming altruistic bonds with members of other races. One of the biggest transformations in the human species during the past century has been the gradual, uneven, and partially-successful dissolution of racism.

During World War 2, the federal government was reeling with confusion, fighting a war on two fronts, trying to accomplish massive tasks in incredibly short spaces of time. And they got some things wrong. The War Relocation was one of them. They may not have even recognized the racism behind it. They got other things wrong too, such as the firestorms that incinerated thousands of civilians in Germany and Japan, and, of course, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Altruism is instinctual, but the way we use it is determined by culture and by collective decision. The best we can hope for is that we learn from the mistakes of the past.

One of the lessons of Manzanar is that, when sudden social or political disruption occurs, altruism can be one of the first things lost. It can get trampled by confusion and wrath right at the time we need it the most. This is what happened in the former Yugoslavia when the Soviet regime collapsed, and in Rwanda when resources became scarce. I wonder if it could happen in American society today, where many outspoken people, most often of the extreme conservative persuasion, talk as if people who disagree with them are not their fellow citizens or not even worthy of human rights. Are they just talking, or should we believe that when they stockpile weapons they might actually have a use planned for them? All I can do is to preach the gospel of altruism and hope that as many people as possible believe it, so that those who would take extreme measures in a time of crisis will be as few as possible.

I posted a similar entry on my evolution blog.

Feeling Small

Most people want to go to places that make them feel big, places where they can experience the thrill of using technological enhancements of their power (e.g. motorboats or ORVs) or the feeding of their self-esteem (meditative retreats). But whenever I am in California in the summer, I make a pilgrimage to a place that makes me feel small: Sequoia National Park. That is what I did during my recent trip, which is described in greater detail on my evolution blog. This essay appears on that blog also.

On June 12, I hiked part of the High Sierra Trail. Just eleven miles of it. What I mainly wanted to see was the High Sierra mountains, the easternmost range of the complex of mountains known as the Sierra Nevada. The tallest mountain in the lower 48, Mt. Whitney, is easily visible from this trail. I hiked at about 7,500 feet elevation, watching the 14,000 foot Mt. Whitney flanked by peaks almost as tall. It was not just the Sierras that made me feel small. It was the thought of the massive mountain-building that created them in the last few dozen million years. The earth, utterly still most of the time, can shudder into life and raise mountains, a few inches or feet at a time. Not only I but my life span seemed insignificant. When I reached Mehrten Creek, I took off my boots and soaked my feet in bubbling cool water in a little pool that overlooked Mineral King, the high mountains to the south. It was like the best resort one could imagine, but I enjoyed it all the more for having undertaken a difficult hike to get to it.

On June 13, resting up from the hike, I wandered around the giant sequoias of Crescent Meadow and the vicinity of the General Sherman tree. Giant sequoia trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) begin their lives as little seedlings after a fire, and they grow somewhat rapidly. After just a few hundred years, they have reached their full height, about 350 feet, seven times as tall as the tallest trees in the part of Oklahoma where I live. Then they spend the next 1,500 years filling out their trunks. The largest sequoias, such as General Sherman (a tree named after a Civil War general famous for cutting down lots of trees), have trunks that are almost as thick three hundred feet above the ground as they are at ground level. The Sherman tree has 52,000 cubic feet of timber inside its trunk. These trees can also make a reflective soul feel very small and very young. This fact was lost on most of the visitors, such as the loud-mouthed biker who complained loudly about having to walk a half mile to see the tree, and then hardly looked at it, instead being interested only in having his photograph taken kissing his bikeress at the base of the tree. To him, everything around him was just backdrop to his own life. I had come for a different purpose.

I wanted to feel awe, but was usually distracted by mild pain or random thoughts. I forced myself to be contemplative. Wisdom came to me from my subconscious mind once I had permitted it. Goodness and altruism are like sequoia trees. When an opportunity for goodness becomes available, we have to germinate the altruism and grow it as fast as possible before evil fills the space. But having done so, the goodness needs to persist and grow for as close to forever as we can make it. I realize this is not a scientific insight, but a scientist is only one of the things I am.

Jesus, who was a quiet observer of nature (unlike many of his modern followers), said (according to oral tradition), “Consider the lilies of the field, that grow today but tomorrow wither away in the heat. Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” The Middle East, like California, has lots of spring wildflowers, which dry up and shed their seeds in summer. Even a single one of these flowers is more beautiful than anything that human industry can produce—as true today as in Jesus’ day. Even one. All around Sequoia Park, especially on granite outcrops, there were hundreds of thousands of Linanthus montanus plants, a type of phlox that is very small but produces perhaps the most beautiful flower in the world. There were more of them, and were more beautiful, than any human or any pollinator could appreciate. This experience humbled me as much as did the mountains and the trees.

People wanted to know if I had a good time in Sequoia Park. How do you answer a question like that? I didn’t go there to have a good time. I went as a pilgrimage to experience the vastness and the beauty of nature.