Oh look, there are clouds outside the plane. There are endless plains made out of cloud outside the plane. There are nine bacteria for every human cell in your body, I just read. In my body. In the bacteria's body. Let's call it our body. And water. Most of it is water, right? Most of us. Just like the clouds, the plains of clouds. I can't tell you how comforting I find these facts. The bacteria and I cannot tell you. We are too busy, too distracted. We have too many thoughts, the bacteria and I. Most of them unutterable. Only some of them obscene. Our thoughts also are mainly water, mainly cloud. The boundaries are hazy. Water being water. The screens on the seaths inside the plane are showing images of the tornado cloud and of the post-tornado cloud. The tornado cloud is made of water but also of wind, which is air, only faster. It is made also of debris picked up along the way. Debris like cars and trees and hospitals. Debris like persons. An unmeasurable but surely significant percentage of the tornado cloud is therefore a clever swirl of water and bacteria and the occasional human cell. Just like the rest of us. On the screens on the seats inside the plane persons who have avoided becoming debris survey the post-tornado cloud debris. They hug their neighbors and greet their pets with tears. They plant flags in their debris. I am fairly agile (we are) as far as thinking goes, but this is hard to understand. What percentage of America is debris and what percentage is bacteria? Can debris's loyalties be known? And bacteria's? If they cannot, can ours? And what about the clouds, tornado clouds included? Why have we put no flags on them? By excluding them from this great polity, do we not exclude ourselves?