Curious and Curiouser
Ours is a rather curious species, in many respects. I think about the chasm between the haves and the haven’ts. Not the gap between owners of Pentium IIs and Pentium IIIs, but computer owners, for example, and people who lack the essentials of survival. In some areas we have incredible extravagance, and in others, abject poverty, maybe only a few miles apart. It is said that every three months a SillyCon Valley secretary becomes a millionaire from the stock options in a start-up company. But there are sections of San Jose and East Palo Alto where children’s brains fail to develop because they don’t have enough to eat. Pennies worth of food.
Another curiosity is that so many Americans decide to invest a coupla of years or their whole lives to helping poor people in foreign lands. Not to disparage the needs of the foreign impoverished — they comprise a whole Third World of their own, after — but what is the necessity for travel if you want to help those less fortunate? Why do these angels of goodness not find work in the South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles?
I have unflagging respect for people who help others. It is probably an inherently human trait that we witness all too infrequently. Perhaps because we are so busy with our everyday lives that the very idea of expanding our social repertoire strains credulity. I also wonder if doing good is always doing the right thing. It’s not a question of semantics, but of population. We have to cut through the sentimentality that masquerades as intelligent moralism, and ask ourselves how we want to distribute those resources we have in order to assure the kind of future we think we might promise to our grandchildren and to theirs.
For all the loonies and low-brows want to disparage big gummint, as the inestimable Molly Ivins has so aptly named it, the fact is that we live in a society where if everything were working as it should would actually work quite well. The world is plagued with tragedies that couldn’t happen here. A ferry grossly over-loaded with Indonesian refugees sank in a storm last month; 500 people disappeared. A wall of garbage in a Manila dump got saturated and collapsed, killing over a hundred people who lived beneath it. And in Nigeria, hundreds more people who were filling up cans with gasoline from ruptured pipelines died in consequent explosions.
Indeed, if all of our laws and regulations were applied as they were meant -- rather than as they have been misinterpreted and corrupted by special interests -- most of us would have very few complaints. Some updating here, some tweaking there, and we’d have a lot more efficient society. Which would give us the time to noodle through the vision thing.
I think on a global basis we need to set higher standards than just eking out the next meal, and that means reducing the number of people competing for it. No, I’m not suggesting that we promote or allow wholesale slaughter, though we certainly have for the longest time, and most recently in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Rather, we approach the problem through attrition, and not intervene unnecessarily.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.