RePost: An American Story

Editor's Note: Arthur and Alex are in the midst of a busy time and haven't had the time to write much new.  This post was origonally published over a year ago, but it seemed particularly relevant to what is going on right now.  Until next week, Omnia Vincit Amor.

On April 24, 1876, 21 year old Felix Vincent stepped off of a ship named the Switzerland in a new land, leaving behind a homeland with basic customs and language he had known all his life, all in hopes that a better life was to be had in the United States.  He would be one of five million Germans who would make their way to the new world between 1850 and 1930, not the least insignificant to our story would be a Franz and a Maria Hildebrand, who in 1883 left Epterode Germany for the Midwest.  To our knowledge these two groups of people never met, yet through the wide lens history allows we can see providence playing out in their separate lives.

It was not an easy trip and in a real sense their presence represented a nation's struggle with the best and worst in itself.  Hard as it is to imagine, there was racism to overcome.  Benjamin Franklin, writing about immigrants in his own day, wrote:

"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion."

The complexion seemed to me the most strange, but Franklin in a lengthy quote goes on to explain the German "swarthy complexion" was in great contrast to that of the Anglicans.

Along with racism, concerns about religion (yes, blood was shed between different Christian groups in this period), loss of jobs, and freeloading all was part of a nativist rhetoric meant to keep America from changing too drastically.

It was into that political backdrop our heroes set their feet in time.  It is likely that they did not adapt to the new culture quickly and easily; Franz would become a member of a church that spoke German in their services until the world wars made the practice too taboo.  There are Mennonite churches in the area who to this day speak German in special services.

Despite this, I think it would be hard to claim their presence negatively impacted their new country.  They worked hard, and the commerce they produced brought needed goods and services to their communities.  Their voices became sources of valued council, they contributed to public works and served in various capacities in their churches.  With time, children would come (Franz and Maria in particular had 11), children who, like their parents, would go on to do great things for their communities.  They would fight their country's wars, help their neighbors, and continue providing the goods and services that helped bring forth the most flourishing economy the world has ever seen.

More like them would come.  By 1910, 14.7% of the people living in the United States were born some place else.  Immigrants like Enrico Fermi, Werner von Braun, Nikolai Tesla, Albert Einstein, and the Oppenheimer brothers (who, full disclosure, were merely the children of immigrants) would make America the most technologically advanced country in the world.  Andrew Carnegie became an important captain of industry, Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright would serve as important diplomats, and Arnold Schwarzenegger made awesome action moves.  Where would America be without Irving Berlin's White Christmas, or "God Bless America"?  Many of the people listed left their countries fleeing for their lives in the face of extreme tyranny. 

Immigration is a pretty hot topic at the moment, particularly what should be done with refugees.  In the midst of some of the things said about immigrants and what they will do to our country, it might behoove us to remember that in a not-too-distant past, the very same things were said about each of our ancestors (the exception being, of course, our loyal readership from the Native American community, and their was plenty of nasty things said about them).  Eastern Europeans in particular were accused of being anarchists and communists who posed a grave threat to national security, and embarrassing atrocities were committed in the noble name of defense.

Whatever else is said, Felix and Franz need not worry.  The branches of their family tree now incorporate people of even more diverse nationalities, including Korean, Chinese, Ethiopian, South African, Irish, English, and many others.  The great great great grandson of Felix would eventually fall in love with the great great great granddaughter of Franz and Maria, and together they hope to add to the contributions begun by the immigrants who started it all.  Omnia Vincit Amore.

Backflow

I work with environmental regulations at work, and it has opened all sorts of new worlds to me.  This week’s topic: backflow prevention.  

Fascinating stuff, right?  If you didn’t know (though I suspect many of our more practically minded readers are very well versed in the topic) backflow is a scenario where negative pressure in a city’s water line causes water from residential or commercials properties to be sucked back into the public water supply.  If that water has been exposed to some sort of chemical or contaminant, this can turn into a big deal in a hurry.  

This knowledge in mind, you start noticing a lot of things really fast.  I’m willing to bet that your dishwasher is set up so that fresh water is coming in from above instead of below; this means that in the case of backflow, that water line is sucking air rather than your dishwater.  Same goes for your washing machine.  After a quick examination, I can now with deep relief confirm that your toilet’s water inlet was designed with this same consideration.  

This principle is worked into the design of most water consuming appliances, but sometimes this air gap cannot be provided.  Changes in elevation can mean that a failure of a valve at a local swimming pool gives residents downhill some funky tasting tap water.  Fire sprinkler systems hold stagnant water for years, allowing bacteria to grow unhindered.  If drawn into the main supply, the health consequences can be dire.  Carbolic acid from soda fountains sucked back into copper pipes start degrading the metal. And if all these seem unlikely, you should Google “backflow incidents.”  A particularly disturbing story is a mother who found nematodes, a type of parasitic roundworm, wriggling around in her bathtub because of standing water sucked up from her neighbor’s lawn sprinkler system.

Engineering controls do a ton to mitigate this risk.  Special backflow prevention valves, fully functional, make it near impossible for a backflow incident to occur.  Unfortunately, stuff degrades over time, so many local ordinances mandate that homeowners or businesses with systems at risk of backflow (lawn sprinkler systems being the most common) have these special valves inspected annually, which costs the owner something in the $30 range.  

Anyway, the unseen world of civil engineering, all those systems we take for granted on which our very lives depend, is fascinating to me, and work has led me into an investigation of these issues.  It also was timely in another way: I have been thinking a lot about the idea of social responsibility.

Personal responsibility, the idea that an individual needs to bear the consequences of their actions and, as a corollary, that a society that shields the individual from those consequences will ultimately loose its moral integrity, has been a common theme I’ve heard expressed through recent conversations.  Personal responsibility is indeed essential to a society, but so often what I hear missing in people’s rhetoric is any concept of social responsibility, the idea that members of a society inherently impact each other and that a society that does not recognize and enforce social responsibility, either through social pressure or law, will ultimately succumb to moral decay as well.

There is a lot quibbling over how far a society should go in enforcing responsibility, both personal and social, or even where one ends and the other begins.  I am surprised at how comfortable people are with enforcing what I’d consider personal responsibility (opposing marijuana legalization, abolishing or strongly regulating pornography, etc. (two stances I agree with, by the way)) while opposing what I would consider social responsibility (EPA and OSHA regulations, backflow inspections, etc.)  There seems to be a fairly common mental model that both society and government is out to corrupt us; us being individuals, or the church, or whatever, and to protect against these corrupting forces we need laws to make society look more like us, or in the very least inhibit its largest excesses, and gets the government out of our darn business.  This mental model is at least partly right, but it is also incredibly convenient; our norms get placed on the society and involves little to no sacrifice on our part.

Surely, this mental models needs to be supplemented.  If I am benefiting from some activity that harms my neighbor without properly compensating him, I am in essence stealing from him.  No one thinks it would be right if I took someone’s couch, sold it, and kept all the money.  If only all cases were that straightforward.  What about activity that converts my neighbor’s security into risk? Neglecting my backflow prevention valves might be an example of this.  This mental model forces some sacrifice on our part; no wonder people hate the EPA.

So where’s the line and how should a society enforce its norms?  That is a hard question, and it requires us to view reality as close to what it really is as possible.  If the first model is not sufficiently close to reality, than its adherents, with the best intentions in the world, will actively promote policies that harm their fellow man.   As people called to love our neighbor, let us be sure than in our thinking, Omnia Vincit Amor.

Food

There is one topic that has been put off far too long on our blog: food.  We’ve had so many adventures with food over the course of 2016, its lack of coverage on this blog is nothing short of derelict.  Sure, our faithful readers know that we domesticated some wild yeasts to make sourdough bread and some bacteria to make yogurt.  We have spoken only in the most indirect of terms regarding our motivations and thoughts inspiring these activities. 

Our Netflix subscription had a tremendous impact on us.  Over the past year, “Cooked”, “The Chef’s Table”, “For Grace”, and other documentaries opened a previously unknown world to us.  In our sterilized world, the idea that humans have utilized microscopic organisms for millennia, organisms we had didn’t even know existed until about 300 years ago, for food preparation and preservation is simply astonishing.  

Food says so much about a region.  Colder climate dwellers had to figure out how to preserve food to last beyond the growing season; here comes sauerkraut, kimchi, and lutefisk.   Regions with ample grazing grounds developed techniques for open fire cooking and preserving milk; now we have cheese and yogurt.  Areas without the rich grazing where their animals were held on to much longer utilized brazing and pot cooking.  Warmer climates with food was available year round rely less on microbes for food preservation; they are more like to incorporate spicier mixes to help kill microbes.

So much from this year fascinated me.  Fivethirtyeight, a news/statistics website I frequent, had a series of stories regarding the growing science of probiotics.  The symbiotic relationship thriving between myself and the bacteria wriggling around in my gut just fascinates me, and inspires me to eat differently.  While I still drink far too much soda, the destruction such food perpetrates on my microbiome is the most effective mental image I have to quell the urge.  Understanding the microbes that make certain foods sour has expanded my palate; I now enjoy pickles on my hamburger and sauerkraut with corned beef. 

I was always an adventurous eater, at least relative to the rest of my family; these documentaries have only made me more inquisitive.  Alex and I have gone to a sushi bar before but neither of us were adventurous enough to try the actual raw fish.  That changed this past year; the spicy red snapper was particularly delicious.  I look forward to trying some of the more interesting restaurants and dishes going into the future.

Food brings with it many political, economic, and moral considerations.  As a citizen of a state where agriculture is the major driving force of the economy, what will be the outcome of the legal, cultural, and market driven forces all determining what, where, and how our food will be grown in the future?  How do we best distribute food to a world where so we have such easy access and others starve?  May our love for our fellow man compel us to find just solutions, so that in this world it may be said, that Omnai Vincit Amor.