Thunder and silk seem, to me, the perfect pair. But just for a fraction of a snippet of a tiny piece of a miniscule moment. And, then, it’s all back to lightning and milk.
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Public transportation—whether through mass transit or with individual automobiles—requires support. Investments in infrastructure—like roads, bridges, traffic signals, parking areas, train tracks, commuter rail cars, and on and on—are necessary to develop, operate, and maintain transportation capabilities. Personally, I have always been more supportive of increasing investments in true “public” transportation than in subsidizing the use of private automobiles with new highways and the like. But investing in mass transit without considering (and reacting to) the consequences of both increases and decreases in demand has enormous risks. I doubt I would have said that a few years ago; I would have been adamant that society should invest very, very heavily in mass transit. The problems currently facing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in the San Francisco Bay area have caused me to reconsider the intensity and singularity of my support. The same problems, to a much lesser extent, are plaguing the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system. Capacity has increased in both systems over the years, dramatically. In recent years, especially since the pandemic, ridership has declined considerably. The ridership revenue expected to pay for operations and maintenance apparently is insufficient; taxpayers (in addition to system users) may be unwilling to make up the shortfall. In that event, systems may be dramatically reduced or discarded. Investments may be lost. Transitions back to individual transportation, when it occurs, may increase pollution, carbon emissions, etc. I still believe strongly in public transportation, but like so many solutions, the shrapnel from silver bullets can be dangerous and deadly. Public transportation should be addressed with both enthusiastic support and with honest assessments of all the possibilities associated with it.
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It did not take long for me to become an appreciative subscriber to The New York Times, once I finally gave in. When I finally took out an online subscription at a deeply discounted rate (designed, I am sure, to lure me in to the habit), I intended only to try it for a few months—it would be too expensive to justify continuing when the regular rates kicked in. But I now pay $30 per month for my online subscription—$360 per year—and I consider it a more-than-reasonable expense for what I get in return. The “news” is important, but the depth of its resources is far greater than just “news.” It is a source for extremely interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking content. I am not sure why I feel compelled to write a commercial for the NYT this morning. I guess I’m just extremely grateful I went beyond being an occasional consumer of its content to someone who relies on it daily to help keep me thinking, informed, and entertained.
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English is the most widespread spoken language, with roughly 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, including some 372 million native speakers, according to sources like Ethnologue and Babbel. But Mandarin Chinese, with its 1.2 billion speakers has the largest share of native speakers, at about 988 million native speakers. Languages reportedly rounding out the top five (total speakers) are Hindi, Spanish, and (nearly tied with Arabic) French). While English represents the largest number of speakers, a substantial portion of those speakers are non-native, i.e., English represents their second or subsequent language). Spanish is the second-most-common native language, just behind Mandarin Chinese and ahead of English. Whether humankind should expect social and cultural transformations powerful enough to radically change the existing landscape of language is anyone’s guess. Changes of that scope certainly are possible; the question is whether they will occur. Image a two-hundred year timeframe in which technology, commerce, political power, and an array of practical considerations propel linguistic changes toward a new structure of global language usage. Some languages might gather enormous strength and essentially universal use; others might die. Arabic could sprint forward in usage, or the “home” territories of Spanish could expand dramatically. Possibly more likely, though, Mandarin Chinese might see its huge advantage in numbers of native speakers expand to overtake English as the global lingua franca. Ultimately (from my perspective), though, there is nothing intrinsically good, nor bad, about which language(s) are spoken and by whom. It’s just a matter of curiosity. Of course, people tend to gravitate toward the familiar, so there may be linguistic conflicts along the way about what we say and how we say it.
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