Dec. 19, 1985
Ill again – although rare these days, lucky for me, when the
world appears primed for international disaster, diseases rampant, partly due
to poor nutrition.
Much of this has to do with the way food is marketed full of
sugar and stuff.
Too many people are starving even though they eat too much,
while others starve for lack of having enough.
Mine condition is just a simple head cold; though fear grows
with each degree drop in the temperature.
The cold snap arrives at noon and at my worst physical condition
and is expected to drop to zero by tomorrow.
Makes me wonder how humanity survived the ice age, living in
caves, huddled around fire, struggling to find food in the midst of storms and over
frozen landscape – in an environment clearly far worse than what we suffer
through today.
History books rarely go into enough detail about that aspect
of evolution, individual survival over the prospect of mass extinction – bodies
buried hours apart after each new apocalypse, disease rising out of the stench,
killing as many as the disaster did.
How did it feel to grow up in a cave, one child in a litter
of 20, sometimes the lone survivor?
To see bodies frozen in winter, buried later when the thaw
comes by mid-summer, old and decrepit by the age of 27, part of swiftly moving
generations that do not have time to contemplate history or even remember anything
more than yesterday, this generation dying in order to make room for the next
and the generation after that.
To think that here in the United States the quality and length
of life has massively improved from those days of mere survival, even back to
those days when we founded this nation, each generation stretching out its fingers
to cling to a few more years of life.
My grandmother just turned 86, one of a handful of souls
that has lived long enough to have seen one century turn into the next, as I
hope and expect to do when I get to her age, though as much out of luck than
out of intention.
Three weeks ago, my uncle Frank contracted pneumonia, still
fatal sometimes today, though a death sentence 50 years ago (Frank would pass
away after a series of lung, heart and other ailments in the year 2000 at the
age of 62).
We are making progress partly because we have become so
wealthy as a society, from the richest to the poorest – though in truth, in our
world, the richest and the poorest are the most often saved, wealth guaranteeing
those on top the best of care, the welfare state helping those most needy get
what they need – while in between, the bent backs of working people like my
uncle are left to fend for themselves.
Reagan tells us wealth trickles down – and it does -- we
have the wealthiest poor in the world – yet not fast enough for those who want to
see the rich foot the bill for the poor when for now working people pay the tab
at the end of the day, and still struggle to pay their own way, while paying
for poor they’ve never met.
We have tamed nature to a great extent, gas and oil to heat
our homes, expensive electric to give us light by night, with electric companies
like wolves waiting outside our doors to shut us off when we cease paying –
even though law gives us reprieve until spring so that nobody finds our frozen
bodies cave-man like. I often have to choose between heat/light or nourishment.
But it’s better than being dead.
I get annoyed hearing the radicals on the left telling me
how bad people have it, hating the progress that allowed us to drag ourselves
out of our caves, radicals who insist we save the planet at the expense of
saving ourselves, radicals who insist we need to “equalize” wealth in order to
make life fair for everybody, when we are far better off now than my family was
during the Great Depression when they had to live in the houses they built but
could not sell, forced to move when banks foreclosed.
Radicals would have us trade the gas and oil that heats our
homes for electricity few but the wealthiest can afford, even if we get the pay
raise, they insist the richest in our society owes us.
Yes, black kids still die at an unacceptable rate as do
people in other countries, some still a few steps behind the rest of us on our
evolutionary journey out of the caves. Yet, despite what the radicals say, we
do not abandon them, we carry them on our backs along with the rest of our
labors, knowing that life may be better for the next generation or the
generation after that, provided we are not forced to surrender the progress we’ve
already made.
Fortunately, this is still only December and I do not have
to pay the over-priced electric bill PSE&G sends me. Maybe I can wipe my
nose with it.
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