Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-19

Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-19

Jeff Gill

 

Alarming times, quiet days

___

 

The dog days of summer have lived up to their billing as hot and steamy. They hearken back to a clever guess by ancient astronomers that the Dog Star, Sirius, was adding emphasis to the sun's rays at this time of year.

 

In fact, during the daytime the constellations of Orion the hunter and his faithful canine companion, Canis Major or "the big dog" are overhead, invisible with the greater light of the nearby star we call Sol. Just as sometimes you can catch a glimpse of the moon during the daylight hours if you know where to look, you can even sight a star or two well before sunset or after sunrise, but not at noontime.

 

Yet they are there, and the astronomers who figured this out thought that the brighter Sirius might just be adding some scorching heat to the solar output. It made a certain sort of sense, and is a good reminder of the old "correlation is not causation" adage. Just because something happens when something else shows up doesn't mean the one thing causes another. What seems obvious isn't always.

 

As school begins, it's good to remember that schools are in general safer than they've been in decades; incidents in and around school buildings have been steadily going down in number – violent events, weapons or not – since the 1990s. There have been tragic major events that catch our attention and wring our hearts, but the overall situation is that your child or your friend or neighbor's child is probably safer at school than almost anywhere else.

 

It's like plane crashes and auto travel: an airplane goes down and people worry for years, but the overall numbers are clear that you're safer flying a plane to New Orleans than driving there. My problem is that you have to drive, then fly, then drive again, and repeat the process going home, so there's still plenty of risk traveliong even if the takeoffs didn't make me nervous.

 

And we're going through what I think of as the worst of heavy weather; August and September seem to be the most popular time for storms to rumble through and now for our phones to chime. The outdoor emergency alert sirens almost seem to be an antique method of notification, as the TV channels drop everything for hours with a line of thunderstorms, and if you are on the Granville, Denison, and county alert systems, your phone just about hops across the room with all the alerts, plus a few from weather apps I forgot I'd downloaded.

 

In the news, with the battle for the top few spots in the primaries heating up, it feels like there are alarms being rung for any number of social concerns. The economy, the climate, the atmosphere of racial animus the White House seems to be willing to roil just in order to keep on top of the news cycle. I wonder if the candidates are not running the same risk of the phone alerts: to try ringing our chimes with every ripple in the social fabric, and keeping them in a clamor, might just cause more people to tune out than to focus in.

 

I don't know about you, but I can't worry about everything. I've tried it. What we all need is a little triage, and some prioritization, to help us pace ourselves through the dog days of summer, the elections, and into a cooler and more thoughtful autumn.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's ready to just sit and watch some clouds for a while. Tell him how you'd prioritize our common worries at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.