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Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Humans only

I don’t know, but in retrospect, I’m thinking it may have something to do with the harrowing contrast that has been created this Monday, Jan. 20, both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the inauguration of Donald Trump. 

Over the weekend I’d asked my editors if I could submit this opus today, Monday, instead of Sunday, because this column was being, for some reason, extremely uncooperative, like a new dog fighting the leash. I mean it’s only 800 words, for crying out loud, but it would not settle down. Still, last night, it was two-thirds-ish done, so I sat down to finish it this morning and somehow, it’s escaped. It ain’t here —“no such file.” Who left the door open? Technology.

Ironically, that’s what this was supposed to be about, kind of a mini-screed about the tyranny of technology. I mean, like Rodney Dangerfield, humans get no respect. Have you noticed, for instance, that when you Google something now, the first answer that comes up is compliments of our new best friend, A.I.?  Try it. 

This cyber-slap-in-the-face joins the already-long list of cyber-sins, including the sucking dry of our grandkids’ brains by multiple devices and providing the coup de gras to the already endangered concept of “truth.”

Oh, yes, I was screed-ready, planning to call my column “AI, Ai, Ai.” 

However, I had the nagging notion that I might have used a similar title in a past column.  Turns out, the topic of that column was the same, but the title was “Me, Myself and AI,” written exactly a year ago in January 2024.  Whatever wild hair of masochism led me to check even further back, sure enough, I found a topic triplet entitled “Only Human” from January 2023.

I’d been repeating myself like a metronome every January since probably I began writing this column. It’s a sad fact that high on my personal list of “Commandments” is, “Thou shalt not repeat thyself ”so bad enough breaking it once, but three times? And not even realizing it?  And for what? No one seemed to be paying attention anyway.

Oh, I was done. For someone who prided herself on having an endless supply of new ideas, obviously I was the last to know I was running on empty.

Empty. That’s where I was this past Thursday. I half-heartedly added here and there to what I’d already written. I mean, after all, technology does present challenges, some of them dangerous, but maybe it’s not my job to defend the honor of the human race, right? But everything I wrote seemed as flat as an empty balloon. Empty again.  It started me thinking about “empty” and if it were the same as “nothing.” 

The Buddhists set great store by “emptiness,” I know. A famous Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, observes that, “Since all is empty, all is possible.” A confusing yet comforting notion, but I now realize that I’d been thinking about another kind of emptiness all last week.

About a week and a half ago, within a few days of one another, there were two memorial services celebrated at Our Lady of the Isle. The Island had lost two more beautiful humans, one through accident, the other through illness, yet though tears and palpable sorrow was all around, in each case, “celebration” characterized both gatherings.

So many people came to lay down so much love in memory of these two absent humans, both of them, each in their inimitable ways, loving, talented, warm, charismatic and yet just humans, after all. 

And in their absence, the fullness of the lives they had lived, and the love they had shared with so many others filled the huge chamber to bursting.

A species that can feel and express such laughter, tears, joy and pain all at once?  That’s some powerful species. I know that, we all know that, and yet we forget our species’ innate power, our potential for surviving and thriving, when we get distracted by the omnipresent razzle-dazzle of modern technology. No wonder some of us lose ourselves in what appears to be so infinite, so complex, so powerful, so mysterious.

We lose track of the fact that the technology so many revere has been created by just humans, after all. It is we humans who are the true mystery.

Whatever cyber-crack my original column fell into, I’m glad. It’s taken me this whole morning, but I finally get that what’s really artificial is the false competition I have perpetuated between technology and humanity in all of my redundant screeds. 

Sorry. Humans don’t need my defense, we need one another — to love more, to make better choices, to set more positive goals, and to use the extraordinary tools we fashion in service of the health and well-being of this extraordinary species.