Everything in everywhere.
It's hard to google the phrase "everything is everywhere," since there was an Oscar winning (and fantastic movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. But I read "Everything is everywhere” in a book about plants and fungi and bacteria. Every culture has its own version of probiotic food -- pickles, kimchi, yogurt, sauerkraut. They do the job of feeding your gut a crop of new healthy bacteria.
But what bacteria, in particular? Penicilin's one specific type of bacteria that's very useful, so are whatever rennet we use to make one cheese different from another cheese. One scientist said the rule of thumb with bacterial life is "everything is everywhere." Meaning we are surrounded by an infinite variety of teeny tiny lifeforms, in unclassifiable quantities and unclassifiable qualities. And so long as you're eating one of the fermented foods -- miso or cheese or kombucha—from a microbiology persepctive you're eating all of them.
Everything is everywhere.
I was in Washington DC last weekend. I wanted to do some small thing to help out in the current situation. Nothing I do will do much of anything, but I didn't want to do nothing, so maybe anything will do. (You’ve maybe been thinking variants of the same stream of superlatives thoughts.) So I decided to make a sign saying I'd give a free book out to any fired federal worker; I called it the Beltway special.
Large groups of people have their own personality, their own rhythm. You can easily suss out why crowds act the way they do, why they’re slow and sluggish in the morning and anxious to move onto other things in the afternoon, why they go to the food court at lunchtime and come back afterwards. It's not rocket science.
I've been at the convention center before: the wifi never gave out. You'd need a huge crowd of people to knock out the wifi, tens and tens of thousands. And convention centers are designed for these sorts of crowds, so it usually only happens in smaller cities like Hartford.
Washington DC has a metro area of 6 million people; it shouldn’t happen in DC.
But it did, last Saturday. At a time when hardly anyone is in their office.
And it happened when the convention crowd was actually receding: there were fewer people than expected, not more. So why was the wifi dying?
You probably saw the reason why on the news. 20,000 people were in DC alone, in front of the Washington Monument, for the Hands Off rally. Many of them were people who attended the convention a few blocks away, and left the "con" to go be an American and use their first Amendment right of protest, and freedom of expression. (A different sort of freedom of expression from dressing up like Velma from Scooby Doo.)
That would do it, an extra 20,000 people on a Saturday afternoon on top of 50,000 at the convention. Certainly it screwed up traffic patterns and clogged the Metro for hours. And it briefly took down the wifi, everyone texting and livestreaming in two very close locations on a day when the city is usually empty.
Everything is everywhere, though. So what happened in DC didn't just happen in DC. There were over 1200 protests last Saturday afternoon, all across the country. The final tally of protesters was in the millions, in every home town in America.
And that's why, despite my sign up all weekend, I only met one fired fed. Thousand of people streamed through the booth. More than a few people complimented me on the nice gesture, but it turned out to be an (almost completely) empty gesture. Still, it was something.
Every day there are stories about 4000 or 8000 or 1200 people from different federal agencies who were "RIFed" -- that’s “reduction in force.” Many are being rehired because this is not how to reduce headcount in the real world, and turns out those agencies are critical and needed. But there's an assumption that the 800 fired employees of agency X are 800 people from the DC area.
They're not. Everything is everywhere, and these fired people are everywhere. I may have met more of them if I had this sign up a few weeks ago in Cleveland. Fired feds are everywhere, not just DC. They're doing work in all 50 states, often technical bureaucratic stuff whose value we'll only know when they stop doing it.
So that's what I learned from trying and failing to give away any books. I went to DC to learn the lesson, the lesson that I could have stayed home and helped just as much.
PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK
Miniature week!
SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK
MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK
SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
