Salty Slaves

Because I have failed countlessly to get rid of these crying spells, I have decided to write through them.

I can’t find the root cause either even though I have tried to analyze them. I have ruled out PMS because of its jarring inconsistencies.

I have ruled out many other things because crying spells do not usually accompany an inability to write, stay still, think or breathe.

This is a failed attempt to pick myself up so I have decided to write with the hope that if nothing saves me, maybe these words will.

I am surrounded by different things that ignite hope even in unlikely places.

For example, I accidentally stumbled on a phrase while reading the foreword of Blinkards, a satirical drama by Kobina Sekyi that I know I won’t read.

In the foreword, the author is described as someone preoccupied with the art of the possible and it warms my heart.

I ponder on that phrase, indulging my broken self without remorse.

I know that even though my soul has betrayed me by lying shattered on the floor, it didn’t matter because that simple phrase strung hope together.

The art of the possible. It shows that even if I can’t figure everything out or find the root cause of things, there will always be a possibility.

It is truly difficult to write about oneself fully and authentically because there are parts that are hard to confront.

Parts that seem unreal, but they are there staring at you in their unique monstrosity still begging to be embraced.

I am obsessed with finding root causes of problems because that’s the right way to solve problems even though they’re difficult to name and face.

Most people like proximate causes so we treat symptoms so I’m trying not to be like that.

To say that I am trying will be a lie, I am just hoping not to be like that and that’s okay.

Hope finds you in unlikely places and it must be the same way Roland Freya, an economist at Harvard stumbled on the illustration when he was trying to figure out why whites outlive blacks by several years.

Heart disease was the biggest killer in both races but was far more common among blacks.

Then he stumbled upon an old illustration.

The illustration showed an Englishman tasting the sweat of an African.

He was licking the slave’s face and one of the suggestions that this act ignited was that he was testing the saltiness of selves.

The ocean journey of a slave from Africa to America was long and difficult and many slaves died on the journey because dehydration was a major cause.

In that case, Fryer wondered who was less likely to suffer from dehydration and realized that it was someone with a high degree of salt sensitivity.

If you can retain more salt, you can retain more water and you’ll be less likely to die along the journey.

Maybe the slave trader wanted to find saltier slaves in order to ensure his investment was a good one.

However, salt sensitivity is heritable and it means that the descendants, black Americans would stand a good chance of having cardiovascular disease and being hypertensive.

It is the selection mechanism of the slave trade that became a likely root cause of African Americans’ higher mortality rates.

No one knows if this is conclusive but this is an example of what it means to find root causes.

They may be difficult, unsettling, prone to arguments or even wrong but at least they are plausible causes.

Like the peak in crime rates around the 1960s and 1980s not being solved by tighter gun laws or more capital punishment because even if they were logical, they were unrelated to the root cause.

Crime stayed high for many years until the early 1990s when it began to fall.

Now even factors that helped in reducing crime rates like more police officers and more people in prison didn’t account for the entire reduction in crime rates. Why? Because they were unrelated to the root cause.

There was a missing factor: the legalization of abortion in the 1970s which meant fewer unwanted children were being born, and fewer children were growing up in the sort of circumstance that increased the likelihood of criminality but even that wasn’t related to the root cause.

The root cause was that too many children being brought up in terrible environments led them to crime and so as the post-abortion generation came of age, it included fewer children raised in such environments.

This search for root causes reminds me of the art of the possible. It seems that everything is possible, even finding answers.

So until I figure out whatever is happening, I will try first.