This post is an antidote to answer the question asked last Friday Oct 20th – Has evil won? That post is too depressing. I’m not depressed. I have anxiety and I worry. The primary symptom of anxiety is worry. I worry about depressing depressed people. The primary symptom for depression is shutting down and tho I haven’t experienced depression on this level it’s my understanding that depression is painful. While, I don’t want to delete last Friday's blog post, I also don’t believe evil has won… completely.
Just FYI I’m no good at sarcasm, ask anyone, even those who only know me via chatting in social media. I’m actually literal. It’s easy for me to state that evil has NOT won on the scale of the global perspective or when data from all of human history is the foundation for contrast.
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| a "door" from the past, mine from 1994 |
Metaphor – Time is a hinge. Now is a door. It’s not a door with a window, and we don’t get to choose between door number one or door number two. Now is just here, now. We can’t see what is behind the door now, because behind the door, the hinge of time has swung, and beyond now is the future. We can only make a guess based on the past because, reality.
To understand now we must learn from the past. In the context of human history the voice of the people has come a long, long way. Democracy is like freedom, justice, and liberty for all in that if we take these for granted, all is lost.
After World War II, after the great depression, a significant effort was made in the US to end famine (a.k.a. The dust bowl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl). And the good news is they totally succeeded. They being the US government working with farmers. If you look back at both human and global history a state of abundance such that the poor are fat, has so rarely been achieved that I can’t find a record of it EVER. (Maybe in some historically remote village with a pork eating festival, but neighbors on the same continent were simultaneously starving, anyways).
The poor being fat was a contentious joke written in Shakespeare’s play about the history of democracy. In the play ‘Julius Caesar’ quote, saying to Brutus, "Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”
In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar is expressing that he believes fat and happy people are less likely to be dangerous, as they are more content with their lives.
Fat and happy. We did it! Look at any grocery store in America and tell me, has there ever been a civilization in human history with this abundance of food? Please fact check, triple check, it is spreading to other countries, this phenomenon of food abundance that leads to the poor being fat. Global hunger is decreasing in all nations within the reach of our century’s brand of free market capitalism. In the USA, this abundance seems to have peaked in the 1980s, with the oil age, peak oil in the 1970s. And now we take it all for granted and complain about our diets. Yeah sure, heart disease has been the number one leading cause of death in the USA since the 1950s. It’s impossible to mentally separate the word fat from the dank shadow of the number one leading cause of death. But, it’s equally impossible to quantify the joy food brings to people, or measure the lack of suffering. If you ask any American today if they have ever gone hungry for a single day, it’s significantly tough to find anyone who has gone hungry in America for long enough to starve.... except for those who fast on purpose. — THAT is GREAT! Like really, actually, in the scope of all human history in the entire world, impressive and great.
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| Art by Douglas Coupland |
Speaking of taking things for granted that are impressive and great – the internet. In the previous post the first line after the title. Has evil won? then the line …Has evil won the internet? And with the "interwebs" the whole wide world? Yeah, sarcasm fail. We talk about net neutrality. That’s really boring and I’ve already typed too many words so I will let someone good at sarcasm cover the topic. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality_(Last_Week_Tonight_with_John_Oliver)
I’m attempting to write a blog post about why we are great, and how evil hasn’t won, yet. Using my freedom of speech, and hinting at democracy has come a long way baby… in the context of world history, since the assassination of Julius Caesar by a group of Roman senators in Pompey during the Ides of March, 44 BC.
Don’t take for granted YOUR public library. In the United States, it is estimated that libraries purchase approximately 10-15% of all books sold. Public availability of literature of edited source checked published quality is the receiving end, the quarter-back, of freedom of speech.
According to the Association of American Publishers, total book sales in the United States in 2022 were $17.36 billion. This represents a 9.27% increase from 2021, and a 21.5% increase from 2019.
An important note, that dollar figure does not include all of the books that are purchased by libraries. Academic libraries and school libraries also purchase books, and these purchases are not included in the American Library Association's statistics.
Okay boring right? And we snooze over the news of the religious right banning books. And I complain about giant corporations sorting social media feeds by popularity, effectively silencing the voices of every day folks who only text one or two lines for public consumption into the post boxes on their platform of choice when they have some time in their busy work weeks. How laughable is that in the context of communication abundance and freedom of speech over human history or around the globe? Even today where entire nations of people are censored, via the internet we are information gluttons. And we are so great that we take our public library’s importance in our society and culture for granted, in much the same way we take for granted the food abundance of our grocery stores and restaurants.
The third way we in North America are great is another thing we take for granted – we the people value individual liberty and justice. This is a “pretty broad” statement, but you may be happily surprised to know that is it statistically measurable and that sociologist have been taking note of the actions of crowds that prove we care about and value the life and rights of other individual people. Since it’s science, they don’t prove we “care”, they measure how we gather (or not) in public spaces and if a society is individualistic or collectivistic. Sociologists measure walking pace from city to city, personal space nation by nation, greeting formality everywhere people greet one another, etc… But, when I was reading some books on the topic of crowd mentality, one aspect where Americans stood out was trampling injuries and deaths at sporting events. In America we gather at sporting events in significant numbers, but we plan for the event to be safe and we don’t trample each other to death as frequently as similar scale events around the world. Prevention is difficult to measure, so if this statistic is only due to stadium safety planning alone. All those maxim occupancy signs and emergency exits, they don’t just happen. We took actions to protect the lives of people in crowds, and businesses, because we care.
To be fair, the conditions of the worst trampling in recent history are tragic. Planners of large events are aware of the factors that increase crowd trampling risk. In the US guns, automobiles and alcohol have ruined an otherwise respectable level of event safety. And fear is the mind killer. When people feel safe we make better choices, even when in a hostile crowd mentality situation. When anyone falls in a sport event in America, athlete, bystander, coach or member of any production team, the action stops, because we care.
In another country (I have mentally blocked out where), a group of people were beating other people to death inside of a food shop, a fast food cafe. And no one helped them. People took out their cell phones and took video and just stood there. This happened more than once, I don’t know how many people they beat to death, or how many terror events with groups of passive observer bystanders there were. I don’t know if this was happening before cell phones or not. In America there are many examples of strangers standing up to and fighting off attackers, people they never met, people who just happened to be in the same place at the same time, defended and saved lives. People proved they cared with their actions, in many ways, from following maxim occupancy guidelines, or by helping others to an exit, to the extreme case of removing a gun from a shooter while other people tackled him. To the best of my understanding, if there are examples of people standing there taking video but otherwise doing nothing to help, in America it is because of a fear/power imbalance. Most commonly, this imbalance was caused because the attackers were police in uniform. And even in these cases, the bystanders are often yelling, some try to stop the police or they tell them, at the risk of harm to themselves, that they are taking a video of the attack. I believe we “care” about the lives of strangers and these actions of helping one another is part of what make us great. Fact check what I just type out in the above paragraphs. Even a chart with guns per capita (we have a lot of guns) and murders per capita, in nations all around the world, the statistics prove what I am trying to express. According to the UN report on crime. The US Homicide rate is 6.4 to 6.38 per 100,000 people, per year. To 120.5 guns per 100 Americans. Homicide rank in the world 55th/gun ownership #1. Those numbers are not great, but we are surviving, beating the odds in spite of them, in my opinion, because we care.
We are great. We just need to use what we do best to work together to save ourselves from those who seek to divide us, -- for. their. profit. What do we do best? Free market capitalism, see our food abundance and the carbon debt and health risk, and national surpluses, that we can only mitigate at the production level. Freedom of speech, we are communication gluttons, what repercussion to history will happen if we figure out via our great experiment with democracy how to hear everyone, not just the loudest voices. And we value human rights, life and liberty for every individual. It’s not a contradiction, it is a balance of power and an awareness of what we have to be thankful for, and what we have to lose.
