Pad­dling my kayak along the gran­ite shore of the lake where I cur­rent­ly reside, I came upon a small group of young mer­ganser ducks. They may, or may not, have been sib­lings. Mer­gansers have a char­ac­ter­is­tic that is com­mon among humans who have the least to share and sad­ly, often rare among those who have more than enough.

Lost mer­ganser chicks instinc­tive­ly fol­low any female who looks like their moth­er. The hens hap­pi­ly raise any and all who tag along, which helps ensure the sur­vival of their line and by exten­sion, the species.

Com­pare that to META.
The tech world’s ulti­mate moth­er duck is con­stant­ly striv­ing  to increase the size of its Face­book and Insta­gram broods by alleged­ly fol­low­ing founder Mark Zuckerberg’s lat­est “mis­sion state­ment”: “Give peo­ple the pow­er to build com­mu­ni­ty and bring the world clos­er togeth­er”. That doesn’t, how­ev­er,  include exer­cis­ing social respon­si­bil­i­ty if it cuts into prof­it, even in the short term.
META began block­ing news links for users in Cana­da in protest at a law which allows news orga­ni­za­tions to nego­ti­ate pay­ment for arti­cles shared on social media platforms.
The long-term valid­i­ty of that will be decid­ed by lawyers. In the short and fraught term, the con­glom­er­ate could have but refused, to lift the ban when wild­fires roared across Canada’s North­west Ter­ri­to­ries, an area big­ger than France, Spain and Por­tu­gal combined.
That’s despite the fact that social media is con­sid­ered key to dis­sem­i­nat­ing news to some 41,000 of the remote region’s 46,000 inhab­i­tants, who fol­low the CBC North­west Ter­ri­to­ries (part of Canada’s nation­al broad­cast­ing net­work), on Facebook.
Cather­ine Tait, the pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of CBC and Radio-Cana­da accused META of “sur­gi­cal­ly with­hold­ing news and crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion because of a busi­ness decision.”
To put that in per­spec­tive, META post­ed rev­enues of $32 bil­lion for its sec­ond quar­ter of 2023, 11% high­er than last year.
My last­ing and deep­est impres­sions from every nat­ur­al dis­as­ter I report­ed on, are the extra­or­di­nary exam­ples of how peo­ple rise above the worst moments of their lives to save and offer suc­cour to strangers. Those with the least are, as often as not, the ones who share what­ev­er they have, with­out ques­tion or hesitation.
In the dev­as­ta­tion wrought by the tsuna­mi that struck Sri Lan­ka in 2004, we pho­tographed a dis­con­so­late man in a tra­di­tion­al sarong and a tee shirt, wan­der­ing aim­less­ly through the debris that had been his vil­lage, cradling his small daugh­ter.  Anoth­er  man stand­ing near­by explained that all the two had left in the world were the clothes they were wear­ing, and each oth­er. “But it will be alright,”  he said. “Only half of my house was destroyed. They will stay with me and my family.”

                              ON THE OTHER HAND  

Jux­ta­pose that with the coun­try that can afford any­thing mon­ey can buy. 
In spite of its self-anoint­ment as “Cus­to­di­an of the Two Mosques” (Mec­ca and Med­i­na), Islam’s holi­est shrines, Sau­di Arabia’s lead­er­ship has been a dis­taste­ful­ly miss­ing in action when it comes to host­ing Syr­i­an, Afghan and oth­er refugees and asy­lum seek­ers from Moslem countries.
But some­how the regime is spend­ing bil­lions (lit­er­al­ly) of its petrodol­lars to entice greedy golfers to legit­imise it, and the world’s best soc­cer stars to play for the Sau­di league’s oth­er­wise mid­dle-rank­ing at best clubs.
It’s called “sports­wash­ing”, a prac­tice akin to mon­ey-laun­der­ing, that on a cyn­i­cal lev­el s a bet­ter return on invest­ment than offer­ing a help­ing hand to the helpless.
Five years after he was declared (sort of) a pari­ah for order­ing the mur­der and dis­mem­ber­ment of Jamal Khashog­gi, a Sau­di jour­nal­ist who dared crit­i­cise him, de fac­to Sau­di ruler Mohammed bin Salman (a.k.a. MBS) recent­ly spent near­ly a week in Paris meet­ing with French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron.
A chill­ing report from Human Rights Watch doc­u­ment­ed that: “Sau­di bor­der guards have killed at least hun­dreds of Ethiopi­an migrants and asy­lum seek­ers who tried to cross the Yemen-Sau­di bor­der between March 2022 and June 2023.”
MBS has been invit­ed to make an offi­cial vis­it to London.
In the many recent inun­da­tions gen­er­at­ed by cli­mate change, ordi­nary peo­ple who were them­selves vic­tims used canoes, row­boats and even wad­ed in water up to their chests to find and help others.
That’s what being part of a com­mu­ni­ty means. Those who ignore the con­cept in favour of prof­it could rea­son­ably argue that as long as it’s legal, it’s their right to choose how they make and spend mon­ey their money.
Equal­ly, it is the right of oth­ers to apply the choice of mon­ey over the milk of human kind­ness as a mark­er on the scale of human­i­ty, and then apply the abduc­tive rea­son­ing: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it just may be a duck”.

On that scale, sure­ly the  best one to emu­late is a merganser.
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