01-Feb-2008
Modern Times
Everyone lives in the most advanced of times. That’s more of a logical point than an insight, but it still suggests we see ourselves as living on the spearpoint of progress. Easy enough, then, to miss the gaps, those little holes of the primitive we occasionally fall into.
Living in a mechanistic time, a technological time where a significant part of our living is delivered through wires or the ether, it’s easy to forget how basic our needs our and how primitive are the means whereby we satisfy them.
Electricity, for example, surely the magic key to our space-age view of ourselves, powers our Vegas strips and our stainless steel kitchens, our state-of-the-art operating rooms and our Christmas tree lights. I’m always amazed, though, at how our electricity still comes to us on wires hanging on sticks that have been pounded into the ground. I’m also amazed at how starkly (and quickly) vulnerable we become when the power goes out.
We put seeds in the dirt and pull out food, stick pipes in the ground and pull out water, and in various ways end the lives of animals so that we might eat them. When all of that turns, as it must, to waste, we send it through secret pipes to a more unsavory part of town.
From the internet to television to cellphones to Blackberry’s to GPS Navigators to satellite radio we flatter ourselves that there is nothing that can be known that we can’t know in an instant. That knowing, however, is bathed in electromagnetic radiation, a phenomenon we know little about. Why do we suppose that a “thing” that can motivate the electrons in bits of steel and silver and gold and copper in a device in our hand has no effect on the far more volatile electrons in our human stuff? Frankly, I think all those gizmos are cool. I just hope we all don’t inexplicably disappear some day.
Medically, of course, we are a mish-mash. Elite peoples avoid old ailments (diphtheria) while allowing themselves to live long enough to confront new ones (cancer, Alzheimer’s). Less advanced peoples still succumb to such things as cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, and pneumonia. “Elite” and “less advanced,” of course, don’t always refer to a different country or culture. Sometimes they can mean the people next door. Still, it’s somewhat disheartening to think not only of the billions upon billions of dollars spent on medical research, but also the huge institutions that have been built for that research, and then to realize that we’ve only “cured” the tip of the iceberg of human ailments.
As an older adult, I find it somewhat amusing that my garbage is picked up today pretty much the same way as it was when I was a child. The trucks are bigger, and although I separate my trash into lawn waste, recyclables, and garbage, I still, like so many people, have the feeling that it all goes into the same hole in the ground.
Most of us still live in houses made of sticks fashioned from trees, or bricks made out of dirt. Most of us still heat our houses with variations of little fires. We have yet, as well, to build a house that won’t begin to deteriorate pretty much as soon as it’s built.
We still live, too, in a mode of individual warfare. We compete with each other for jobs (and promotions and raises), housing, the best schools for our kids, parking spaces, tollway lanes, Hannah Montana tickets, and appointment times (dental, medical, hair, car repair, plumber, cable guy). The physical or verbal set-to is still the conflict resolution of choice, largely because courts and lawyers tend to be expensive (and require hugely complicated appointments).
For as much as we can traverse the world in hours instead of days (barring the airport delays that infuriate us because we can’t move from Chicago to Los Angeles in a couple of hours), we do so by sealing ourselves in little tubes powered by petroleum explosions. Large expanses of concrete are needed for a running start on these ventures as well as a reliable conclusion. Our cars, too – steel/petrochemical boxes powered by alternating oil fires that zip us along on tires made from the ooze of a big plant. At least we don’t have to shoot them when they break down, but they’re nowhere near as elegant as we like to think.
More telling, perhaps, and a fitting conclusion, concerns our rendering of the dead. We either bury them in a hole in the ground or burn them up. As these little human packages of us – filled with valuable proteins, minerals, oils, fats, and assorted chemicals – begin to near six billion on the planet, we need to think more seriously about recycling. If you’ve never seen the movie “Soylent Green” I recommend it. It’s an oldie starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. It’ll make you think twice the next time you go out for fast food.
G. K. Wuori © 2008
Photoillustration by the author
