Arguing with God

I respect math. It’s not my strongest suit, but I have a great appreciation for the reliability. For example, I know that if I measure the length of my wall, walk into a store and order a couch that fits those measurements; when the “white glove” delivery service arrives with my couch in 3 to 5 business days, everything will fit as it should. Math provides a certainty someone like myself can really benefit from.

A few years ago when the fear mongering hate against immigrants was more wholesome (“they” were threatening only our jobs back then), I could feel the collective cultural border panic reaching me all the way in my northeastern state. I knew I was being affected by the rhetoric and I didn’t like it. So I did what any rational person would do. I got high and I did some math.¹

Using numbers I gathered from what I believed to be credible internet sources, I calculated how our country’s population would change if every single person living in Latin America and South America immigrated into the U.S. and compared those numbers to the populations of China (most populated) and India (most densely populated). In the end, I concluded if everyone from the lower Americas migrated north, we’d only have about two million more people than China across more land, and we’d all be living at a third of India’s population density. If the rate of migration stayed constant with the rate at the time, it would take 100 years to get there. Good enough for me. I put my immigration anxiety to bed.

Maybe that’s why humans developed mathematical thinking. As a way to steady themselves. Before she died, an elderly neighbor would sit with his wife on their porch and as I walked by with my family we’d say hello to each other. Next to a statue of the blessed mother, Mr. Ray, my neighbor who is well into his nineties now, planted a vine of moon flowers under a small trellis. If you’ve never seen a moon flower, they are pretty neat. They only bloom at night and the broad white blossoms seem to glow like the moon in the low light. On nights in late summer, Mr. Ray would proudly call out to me how many blooms he had that evening. 15!… 16!… 19 moon flowers tonight! That’s 4 more than the peak last year! I politely marveled at the blooms with Ray and made the same joke about my black thumb each time he offered me a clipping to start my own vine. He always laughed. It struck me that he kept count year after year. Quantity was Mr. Ray’s marker for a successful moon flower season. I wondered if a low yield changed his opinion on the beauty of the flower? I couldn’t ask Mr. Ray a question like that though. Mr. Ray is the kind of guy who talks about the value of the chicken portion at the firehouse banquet, not the essence of beauty. It’s important to know your audience.

Of course, math is easy when you are talking about chicken dinner prices or counting blossoms on a trellis. The numbers are tangible when you can literally pick each flower as you count it. When numbers start to get Mr.-Rays-across-the-country complicated, I lose the thread and the squirrel in my brain starts building something out of pipe cleaners. I guess all those finance people are helping me when they make ratio formulas for understanding the economy and business, like profits over earnings, and cost benefit analysis. They are helpful concepts when deriving meaning from large numbers. Is there a profit benefit analysis, I wonder? It wouldn’t make sense to keep earning if you could no longer improve your own benefit. How many flowers is optimal?

I think a lot of our world’s questions can be addressed first with mathematics. Math gives us a reality to hold on to while we work out our guesses about the essence of things. Surely, Mr. Ray would agree that there is a number that qualifies as too many flowers in a season? What about a hundred? One thousand? He and his wife would be covered in them. Imagine the pollen! Too few and Mr. Ray can’t get a pretty little thing like myself *bats eyelashes* to stop and giggle with him after dark. So the optimal bloom count falls somewhere in the range of enough to be impressive at a county fair but not so many they suffocate the neighborhood. We can negotiate the exact number, but my guess is it’s closer to 30 than it is to a thousand. It’s simple math, really. Mr. Ray is a reasonable man. With only 19, he understood he had enough to give them away.

When I am able to shift to numbers as ideas, I can stay with the math. A few days ago I learned from PBS Newshour that children in low-income households who received food benefits from Women, Infants, and Children and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program were four times more likely to be food secure as young adults. That math makes sense to me. Pay for someones food in childhood and they’ll have the freedom to spend on food for themselves when they are grown. That’s a good return on investment.

Or when the meteorologist predicted a 20 foot storm surge in the southern US last week–I can imagine a 20 foot wave and what that might do to a shoreline. Mathematics were of great help to the people in the path of the hurricane. Mathematicians most certainly saved lives with the predictions derived from weather data. Isn’t it amazing how the storm hits land exactly when and where they say it will? A storm we know is coming because we design, launch, and communicate with satellites to monitor our skies using more math! I don’t know much about satellite technology but I’m grateful for the math that keeps them orbiting.

And of course, Mathematics brought us this beautiful monstrosity we call the internet. I can’t deny the enormity of the role it has played in my life. Where would I be without the ability to send my kids the dog video they saw 3 weeks ago?

Mr. Ray’s health has been failing. The vine isn’t what she used to be.

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1. I know this doesn’t sound like a good combo, but I’m going to ask you to trust me. I am more mathematical on cannabis than I am off of it. We can run a study if you want. ↩︎