Sometimes, one hears a phrase so goddamn terrifying that you freeze up, your mind reels imagining the sick consequences, and you fight the urge to drive your car into the bridge abutment coming at you at 82 miles per hour. Wouldn't it be funny if I didn't hear something like that at all and I just start talking about ice cream or something? Well, here's what I heard:
"The victims of Hurricane Sandy are starting to get back those necessities they did without for two weeks."
Now you, dear reader, might not have had the same reaction that I had so let me explain. Working as I do, I've been in a number of situations where some group that performed some specific function complained up the ladder that they didn't have the resources to do their job. This complaint kicked of a discussion that didn't try to find more resources, but tried to see if that job itself had to be done. Very often, it didn't. Now that's very often a good thing in business because that's how business delivers goods cheaper and the customer gets a better price. Consider the language that happens in that discussion, though, and you can see why I considered wrecking my car with me in it…
Person A: "I do this service that the company NEEDS and I don’t have the resources to do it."
Person B: "If you don't have the resources, you're not doing the job now, so we obviously don't NEED it."
Definitions can be very important. Often, very basic words like "need" are defined differently depending on ideology. In the admittedly vague workplace example, this thing probably wasn't a "need" as much as a way to make the overall goal easier at some certain cost. Or, alternately, maybe it was a redundant quality control check that 999,999 times turned up nothing, but caught that one in a million issue that would kill half a dozen consumers. Was that check "needed"?
I say no. Of course not. Here's what is needed: air, water, food, shelter. That's pretty much it. And that's totally okay because on the spectrum that runs between "need" and "hot tub full of champagne and hookers" right next to "need" is "wise". Wise is where it's at.
So back to the Hurricane Sandy quote. Did those people survive without those precious "necessities" that included, I'm sure, medicine, heat, electricity and personal security? Most did. Probably better than 999,999 out of a million did. But today, the whole government is starting to face the Fiscal-holy-god-almighty-Cliff that will bring down the Economy (remember, I'm terrified of the Economy… it's everywhere... watching…). When they start debating what the role of government is and what isn't, I'm sure every one of them will start talking about needs versus wants.
Let me digress to tell you about my upcoming failed novel that I haven't started to write yet. It's a post-apocalyptic story set at this impossible time where older people remember clearly the 1990's and younger people have known pretty much nothing but hard times. The ice caps have melted, raising sea levels to the point where NYC is no longer there. This also changed the currents in the ocean, which changed the wind patterns, so all of the weather good for growing crops is now over desert waste lands and the Canadian oil sands, where no crops can be grown. Or not enough, anyway. It hasn't rained in the middle of America in a decade. You'd think, "We can eat seafood! There's so much more sea now!" I thought of that too. The human-engineered kelp that one keeps in an aquarium (the bright green kind) is super robust and completely inedible. Thus, as it has been let loose into the oceans, it out-competed all the natural sea weed, starved the fish, and the oceans are now dead. Also, in a race to create corn and rice that would grow in the new harsh climates, a hybrid was created with a dominant gene that makes all fruit infertile, thus requiring farmers to buy new seed every year. Random cross pollination here and there and a few years into it, all corn and rice on earth is gone forever as any wild type has been pollinated by this hybrid, making infertile zygotes, and dooming us all. I tell you all of this for the kicker of an ending, which is all I really have…
Our hero that had some long story that I don't have yet and his drifter friend that turned up in the second chapter are at some sort of tent revival thing somewhere deep in the wasteland. A guy is selling miracle seed off to one side. He's quite old. Anyway, as he's selling, he says some key phrase that reminds someone in the crowd of an advertisement he heard as a young man. He says something and reminds someone else about something until it all comes out that this guy selling miracle seed was the CEO of the company that created the killer corn AND the killer kelp AND did so much to cause global warming. As hysteria begins to grow, he reasons with the crowd: "We're all still here! It wasn't the end of the world!"
Our hero, then, has a monologue (which is one of the many reasons this novel is already failed) where he says he dreams of parks, green grass, small bugs (in any post-apocalyptic world, insects get huge fast) and fresh food. He says that he watched his parents die trying to feed him and his sister and then watched his sister die in childbirth, the product of a brutal rape. Then he says something clever like "The earth didn't explode and people aren't extinct, but that world has ended damnit and it's us that let it happen." His rage ebbs to sorrow as he hadn't thought of his sister in a long time, and his drifter friend kills the seed salesman with a shovel, which has been his shtick throughout the story, and then it ends somehow.
We don't have doctors because we need them. We have them because we've chosen to put effort into making sure kids grow old and have kids of their own. We have doctors because once we have grandkids, thus completing one cycle, we don't just want to roll over and die. We have electricity and television and beer because they make life a hell of a lot more fun. Do we need them? Not like clean water and fresh air, but without these things, our world ends.
1 year ago
