We All Might Ask Ourselves Why We

The Trails Are A Reminder Of Our Insignificance. We Come And Go, But Nature Is Forever. It Puts Us In Our Place, Underscoring That We Are Not Lords Of The Universe But Components Of It...so When The World Seems To Be Falling Apart, When We Humans Seem To Be Creating Messes Everywhere We Turn, Maybe It's Time To Rejuvenate In The Cathedral Of The Wilderness - And There, Away From Humanity, Rediscover Our Own Humanity.

When Anesthesia Was Developed, It Was For Many Decades Routinely Withheld From Women Giving Birth, Since Women Were "supposed" To Suffer. One Of The Few Societies To Take A Contrary View Was The Huichol Tribe In Mexico. The Huichol Believed That The Pain Of Childbirth Should Be Shared, So The Mother Would Hold On To A String Tied To Her Husband's Testicles. With Each Painful Contraction, She Would Give The String A Yank So That The Man Could Share The Burden. Surely If Such A Mechanism Were More Widespread, Injuries In Childbirth Would Garner More Attention.

Look, We'll Have To Confront The Pathologies Of Poverty At Some Point. We Can Deal With Them Cheaply At The Front End, In Infancy. Or We Can Wait And Jail A Troubled Adolescent At The Tail End. To Some Extent, We Face A Choice Between Investing In Preschools Or In Prisons.

One Thing The Humanitarian World Doesn't Do Well Is Marketing. As A Journalist, I Get Pitched Every Day By Companies That Have New Products. Meanwhile, You Have Issues Like Clean Water, Literacy For Girls, Female Empowerment. People Flinch At The Idea Of Marketing These Because Marketing Sounds Like Something Only Companies Do.

I Think It's Dangerous To Be Optimistic.