Late one summer evening decades ago, at a family camp after the children were asleep, a dozen adult campers went skinny-dipping off the dock. Happier near water than in it, I sat on the dock, leaning against a post, drifting in and out, soaking up the voices and the warm night air. At peace with the world.

The next morning one of the swimmers accosted me. “How dare you sit in judgment on us? Who do you think you are, disapproval written all over your face?” Huh? What’s the self-defense for seeming to show an attitude so different from what you were feeling?

Humans have this precious, inborn capacity to perceive what other people are feeling. As with other skills, it’s on a spectrum. Along with being somewhat face blind, I suspect I’m below average on this. Others grasp friends’ unspoken thoughts with near-perfect empathy or see with confidence when someone is lying.

And still other people go overboard, reading more into a facial expression or a casual gesture than is actually there. Please, before you decide my blank face means I feel grumpy or resentful or bored, go ahead and ask. And please, have the courtesy to believe my answer.

Image: Wikipedia, “Faces.” What are these two thinking?

Building a climate-resilient polio-free world is a technical brief issued last month by the World Health Organization on behalf of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Having been involved with polio eradication for forty-odd years, I wondered what a public health perspective might add to the daily headlines of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms.

Case in point: Pakistan. In 2022, warming air and ocean set off a sequence of drought, record-breaking monsoon rains, and meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. Catastrophic floods from May to October displaced nearly eight million people. At the peak, almost a third of the country was under water. Roads, bridges, and entire villages were destroyed. In the health sector:

• Masses of people wading through wastewater spread cholera and polio.
• Nearly 1,500 health facilities were devastated and nonfunctional.
• Displaced health workers couldn’t get vaccines or medicines to their patients.
• Destruction of crops and livestock created a severe food shortage.

Globally, rising temperatures are expected to cause a quarter million deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue, and heat stress. Longer, hotter summers mean more disease-bearing mosquitoes, which kill more humans than does any other animal. I tend to think of health and climate as two important but mostly unrelated issues. Not so.

Image: Cattail Mosquito (Coquillettidia perturbans), widespread carrier of West Nile virus and other diseases. Photo by David McCorquodale.

Words shift meaning. Some, like Methodist and queer, start as slurs and later get adopted by the groups they concern. Some, such as silly, sink from positive to pejorative. By the time I heard woke as an adjective within the past decade, its senses had expanded from neutral to cautionary, admiring, mistakenly-would-be supportive, or insulting, depending on who’s saying it and why.

Woke has long been a literal form of awake in African American vernacular. By the 1930s, stay woke was also a metaphor for remaining vigilant and alert. Singer-songwriter Lead Belly used the term after recording a song about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black teens wrongly convicted of raping white women. You’ve got to be a little careful when you go down South, he told a radio interviewer. “Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”

Staying woke broadened to mean challenging systems of racial injustice. In 1940, after Black coal miners in West Virginia went on strike for pay equal to that of whites, a Black union leader said, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.” Not until decades later did I encounter woke in mainstream media. It burst into public awareness with the Black Lives Matter movement after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Merriam-Webster added woke to its dictionary in 2017 as U.S. slang for “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

Perhaps inevitably, some whites coopted woke for their own purposes, twisting its connotations in the process. Opponents may use it to attack progressive ideas in general or to issue a racist dog whistle. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, “We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.” Aspiring allies may mistakenly appropriate this adjective born of specifically Black experience. As a white woman, I have never felt truly threatened when pulling out my cell phone or stopped for speeding. When police questioned my kids for riding bikes after curfew, I never feared they wouldn’t come home alive. I’ll strive to honor woke but I’ll never claim it for myself.

​Images: (left) singer-songwriter Lead Belly; (right) then-Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, 2018.

“Unity” is right up there with “thoughts and prayers” in public discourse. I haven’t heard anyone praise today’s polarization, which defines anyone who differs from us as the enemy. We yearn to come together as ___ (Americans? members of a faith or party? humans?). A wish for unity seems the one point on which we all agree. Or do we?

Unity can mean suppressing or excluding anyone who thinks, looks, or acts differently from the norm. Then again, unity can mean making a tent big enough to welcome every speech or action, however dangerous to everyone else. Between the extremes, unity can mean broad inclusion within the limits of safety for the community as a whole. This last form holds great appeal till you ask how and where to draw those limits. Then rancor returns with a vengeance.

Medieval inquisitors burned heretics at the stake to thwart the danger of spreading their heresy, leading others to eternal damnation. England’s first Queen Elizabeth didn’t care what people believed so long as they followed the outward Anglican forms, as a bulwark against Spanish agents plotting to restore Catholicism by force. U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy raised fears of communist infiltration to a fever pitch in the 1950s, destroying some Americans’ lives and threatening others. One person’s freedom is another’s mortal danger.

How can we work toward greater unity without denying our values and experiences? How can we tone down the rhetoric without dismissing dangers we perceive as real? I don’t have the answers. A first step might be to reframe those with whom we disagree, however vehemently, as neighbors rather than enemies.

Image: Original broadside printing of the United States Constitution by Dunlap & Claypoole, 1787.