Your Pessimism Is Ridiculously Inaccurate
Excerpt: The real measure of our prosperity is in what, for us, is mundane: running drinkable water over a wide range of temperatures, hard roofs and floors, refrigeration, artificial lighting, inexpensive garments and bedding made with machine-woven cloth that withstands being cleaned with powerful inexpensive detergents in powerful affordable machines, widespread literacy, mastery at using the electromagnetic spectrum, liability insurance for drivers and for homeowners, well-stocked supermarkets, fresh blueberries in New York in January, ice cream in New Orleans in July, air travel, automobiles, air-conditioning, aspirin, antibiotics…. You, Mr. or Ms. Reader, will have no trouble extending this list for pages. Each and every one of these seemingly humdrum features of our everyday lives will inspire you to exclaim “Wow”... Accustomed to constant access to an abundance of such marvels, we fail to recognize them for the marvels that they are. Instead, we focus only on the failure of this marvelous reality of ours to be even more marvelous. With our glass 99 percent full – and with this fullness seemingly produced and guaranteed by some mysterious laws of nature – many of us are apoplectic both that the “distribution” of this bounty isn’t as ideal as we can imagine, and that our glass has yet to be filled even further. [In 1967, I was sent to Vietnam. On my arrival, one of my surprises was that our unit headquarters had a “cleaning lady,” a local Vietnamese woman who dumped the wastebaskets, did minor cleaning and mopped the floors daily. She had to hand-carry a mop bucket’s worth of water up a flight of stairs to do that. By custom, whoever of the Marines in our headquarters happened to be on the lower level and had a free hand, would carry that bucket up the stairs for her. I’ve forgotten her name, but she looked MUCH older than my then-mid-50s grandmother; she weighed no more than 100 pounds and had no teeth. That bucket had to have had more than 20 pounds (2.5 gallons) of water in it. When she left our employ, I happened to see her personnel file; she was 29 years old. I seem to recall we were paying her about $8 (around 9,000 piastres). Per month. Not weekly, daily, or hourly, but per month. Guess why she left the job. She had earned enough in the almost two years she’d been doing that job to move to Thailand and buy a large farm with its livestock. She was “rich,” and could now afford to leave the war zone. Life in most of the world was like that, then, and it still is today in more places than you think. Simply being an American makes you richer than half the people in the world. And, yes, every word of this is true. Ron P.]
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