I had never seen a Walrus Stampede until the most recent David Attenborough film, "A Life on our Planet". He does not shrink from the disastrous, but I had not expected to see these huge, seemingly invincible, animals forcing each other over a cliff. They sure ain’t lemmings. More like bison being pushed over a piskun in the early days of the Plains tribes.
(Watch the whole movie. It’s worth it. The walruses going over a cliff into the sea are close to the end, just before Attenborough switches from loss over to sources of salvation that might save us from ending the Holocene era with another end of life as it exists.)
If you don’t have time for a whole movie and must save it for later, here’s a vid of a news report. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna22260892#.V8xbLJgrIcA
Wikipedia says:
“A stampede is uncontrolled concerted running as an act of mass impulse among herd animals or a crowd of people in which the group collectively begins running, often in an attempt to escape a perceived threat. Non-human species associated with stampede behavior include zebras, cattle, elephants, blue wildebeests, walruses, wild horses, and rhinoceroses."
Most recent stampedes among humans that involved fatalities have been related to religion, sports, or disasters, which are just various aspects of politics, which is the name for people struggling to come to terms with the resources in their ecology. The policy version of a stampede is a political idea that actually damages or destroys the very thing it is meant to protect, like the goofy idea of “herd immunity” or the suppression of unwanted real science.
I didn’t know about “crushes”. This the reason I do so much research — to learn about such subtleties. Our urban populations are at crush levels. So are immigrant camps across the world and the crowds waiting at the national borders. Many die.
“Crushes are very often referred to as stampedes but, unlike true stampedes, they can cause many deaths. Crowd density is more important than size. A density of four people per square meter begins to be dangerous, even if the crowd is not very large.”
Experts helpfully advise us how to know we are in a “crush.”Most reported "stampedes" are better understood as "progressive crowd collapses": beginning at densities of about six or seven people per square meter, individuals are pressed so closely against each other they are unable to move as individuals, and shockwaves can travel through a crowd which, at such densities, behaves somewhat like a fluid. If a single person falls, or other people reach down to help, waves of bodies can be involuntarily precipitated forward into the open space."
What can you do? ”Get out of the crowd if possible, [if you feel you are] being touched on all four sides. A later, more serious, warning is when one feels shock waves travelling through the crowd, due to people at the back pushing forward against people at the front with nowhere to go.”
“Keith Still of the Fire Safety Engineering Group, University of Greenwich, said "Be aware of your surroundings. Look ahead. Listen to the crowd noise. If you start finding yourself in a crowd surge, wait for the surge to come, go with it, and move sideways. Keep moving with it and sideways, with it and sideways.” This sounds a lot like the advice for escaping quicksand by lying horizontally and “swimming.” But fire may be at your back and at your sides as well.
I’m using this as a metaphor for the Covid pandemic. The best advice for surviving a “crush” is to always be aware of what’s going on, knowing what’s pushing from the back, knowing what’s blocking the way forward. Former advice included getting up on a platform to look or mounting a horse. Today a pocket cell phone can provide an overview. A lanyard holder might be good to keep from losing this connection in a crowd. Hope that someone is filming from a drone you can access.
Managing one’s mental horizon becomes more possible with a cell phone. Most people think of the Covid precautions as local: the neighborhood bar or café, the kids’ school, the hair salon But much of the danger comes from delivery systems, international shipping, crippled manufacturing, world-wide strategy. This is planetary.
Dr. Fauci -- who needn’t worry about being fired anymore since he already is, without any loss of gravity and wisdom -- is suggesting that a mandate for masks needs to be national. Maybe intercontinental. States and counties can be irrational, making a scrap of fabric into a religious position, mostly one of dissenting, opposing, and resisting — trying to “nuke the whirlwind”. Go back, go back, they cry like Luddites, trying to recover the identities they once had.
A pandemic is a mental “crush” fed by stampedes of herd thinking. It’s a phenomenon as old as mammals. Lizards don’t stampede. They freeze and hide, like politicans losing power. We could name them; we can still see their tails sticking out from under the rocks.
Whole cultures in the past have insisted on masks, and not long ago we reacted to that by forbidding them, so clearly masks are connected to politics, which wants to know everyone’s identity, much the same as everyone being required to be numbered. “What’s your Sosh?” demand the smart alec clerks in offices, the ones too young to have seen anyone with their number tattooed on their arm.
On the other hand, they say that if you are in danger of a disaster, it’s a good idea to use a felt tip to write a friend or family phone number on your arm to help with the identification of your body. When the government uses CCTV cameras to identify people by face recognition, they do not reckon on masks, but almost instantly they were invented as distortions of appearance.
Being unknown is a kind of power but it can be lost in a crowd. It is also a source of unaccountability, so even as we force cops to wear body-cams, they learn how to cover their names with tape. The individual human being who used to support law and order is now a ninja in an all-black uniform that covers the face and hangs weapons on belts around bullet-proof vests. Indistinguishable from each other, a created species meant to cause stampedes, they duck-run in unison around our houses.
Death in a crush is caused by “Compressive asphyxia (also called chest compression) which is mechanically limiting expansion of the lungs by compressing the torso, hence interfering with breathing.” It’s like kneeling on a lot of necks at once. Stampedes in hopes of crush are imposed on enemies and are criminally organized. The WH response to Covid is exactly that. We speak of crimes of omission, which usually involve lies of omission.
The person writing in Wikipedia says that stampedes and crushes are often attributed to the brutishness or ignorance of the people involved, too dumb or wrong-headed to know better. Trailer trash so dumb they vote for Trump and refuse masks. Surely intelligence and planning, even simple awareness, can help prevent tragedy in this pandemic.
Walruses who don't have enough safe places to rest because the ice has melted are as vulnerable as we are in this pandemic. "Herd immunity" saves the few but forces all the rest to fall over the cliff. There is no advantage. No one can eat that many walruses. Not even a polar bear.
No comments:
Post a Comment