Incoherent

It’s the futility. It’s too much like banging heads against walls, screaming into a void. At best, talking over and past each other.

How can we be at such odds, so far apart? Is it like this in other countries, or is it more the peculiar nature of this American experiment? We’re the opposite of a coherent beam of light.

Back in the mid-80s to early 90s, I helped make high-powered CO2 lasers for a living, the best job I ever had. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation… Circulate CO2 gas and introduce high voltage under vacuum, in a tube equipped with highly reflective mirrors properly placed and aligned, and voila: stimulated emission, photons bouncing off those mirrors at a high rate of speed and eventually all traveling in the same direction, leading to intensely high energy levels.

The raw beam will burn a hole in a tree sixty feet away. It’ll blow a cinder block apart. Imagine what a focused beam can do. It can lase Jello, but works much better on hardened steel. That’s what happens when the beam’s component parts are all moving in the same direction and brought into focus.

I don’t see anything like this ever happening in America. There are too many moving parts, too many opinions, too many errant photons doing their own thing, bouncing all over the place. And maybe that’s as it should be? Anything approaching coherence would probably be viewed as anathema to the American ethos.

Most of us have been able to move beyond Covid-19 despite the initial incompetence and denial and scatterbrained effort, and also because a subset of enterprising and capable scientists had been on the same page in having developed the building blocks for a workable vaccine. The closest we’ve all come to being on the same page and focused on solutions in challenging times might be a war effort eighty years earlier.

Our current way of life isn’t being threatened much less than it was in the early 1940s, except now it’s mostly by forces from within, forces– including elected officials in “the party of Lincoln”– who are committed to doing their damnedest in making sure the mirrors are constantly misaligned.