Money, Energy & Medicine
I've got a jumble forming in my head that I want to capture for a moment.
I was at a hippie conference yesterday where someone was earnestly explaining that we can all live happily in a post-peak-oil world without excess energy. We're supposed to enjoy the new balance of our mind body spirit and some other thing I don't recall. We're supposed to be rooted in place, ostensibly working the land or something. Anyway, as he talked about the happiness we get when we free ourselves from dependence on excess energy, I asked him how he reconciles that with our deep yearning for Big Medicine.
People spoke up and immediately denied that anyone needs Big Medicine. That "preventative medicine" would work (I wonder how many of THEM flossed their teeth today?) or that we were just being made sicker by the evil pharmaceuticals selling us poison. I replied that my three year old survived peritonitis and my 83 year old can walk after his fourth hip surgery and I'm not dead from suicide because of the drugs I pop each day. Big medicine not only WORKS, it works AMAZINGLY WELL and we all DEEPLY want it and it is inexorably linked to having excess energy inputs over and above what we can as humans expect from a life well-lived.
So, how do we handle our urge not to have our toddlers die? Our menopausal women die of curable illnesses? Our elders enter a spiral of destruction as a hip injury leads to total incapacitation? Because a life in balance with the earth and the community means that we die for lack of what money (that we get from exploiting excess energy inputs) can buy us.
Everyone got quiet.
I asked how many of them were planning on taking care of their elders in their old age. More quiet. I discussed the benefits of not keeping two homes heated and cooled and having preventative care for the elders (catch them before they fall!) and the ability to work at lower energy-input jobs if you have child-care available. People explained that THEIR personal parents were so awful or so inclined to live in no-snow environments that it wouldn't work in THEIR specific case.
The workshop leader had earlier brought out a quote from Confucius: "There is a chief way for the production of wealth, namely that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few, that the artisan mass be energetic and the consumers temperate." He meant this to illustrate that there ought not to be rich people eating meat. I pointed out that "mere consumers" referred to the infants and elderly and infirm.
No one in that workshop spoke to me for the rest of the day, except for the leader to stiltingly express his appreciation of me showing him some interesting criticism of his work. I appreciated that gesture.
It's time to call my three living fathers, all of whom are aging far from me while consuming vast amounts of Big Medicine.
There's stuff in my head that should not be there when I make these calls.
I was at a hippie conference yesterday where someone was earnestly explaining that we can all live happily in a post-peak-oil world without excess energy. We're supposed to enjoy the new balance of our mind body spirit and some other thing I don't recall. We're supposed to be rooted in place, ostensibly working the land or something. Anyway, as he talked about the happiness we get when we free ourselves from dependence on excess energy, I asked him how he reconciles that with our deep yearning for Big Medicine.
People spoke up and immediately denied that anyone needs Big Medicine. That "preventative medicine" would work (I wonder how many of THEM flossed their teeth today?) or that we were just being made sicker by the evil pharmaceuticals selling us poison. I replied that my three year old survived peritonitis and my 83 year old can walk after his fourth hip surgery and I'm not dead from suicide because of the drugs I pop each day. Big medicine not only WORKS, it works AMAZINGLY WELL and we all DEEPLY want it and it is inexorably linked to having excess energy inputs over and above what we can as humans expect from a life well-lived.
So, how do we handle our urge not to have our toddlers die? Our menopausal women die of curable illnesses? Our elders enter a spiral of destruction as a hip injury leads to total incapacitation? Because a life in balance with the earth and the community means that we die for lack of what money (that we get from exploiting excess energy inputs) can buy us.
Everyone got quiet.
I asked how many of them were planning on taking care of their elders in their old age. More quiet. I discussed the benefits of not keeping two homes heated and cooled and having preventative care for the elders (catch them before they fall!) and the ability to work at lower energy-input jobs if you have child-care available. People explained that THEIR personal parents were so awful or so inclined to live in no-snow environments that it wouldn't work in THEIR specific case.
The workshop leader had earlier brought out a quote from Confucius: "There is a chief way for the production of wealth, namely that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few, that the artisan mass be energetic and the consumers temperate." He meant this to illustrate that there ought not to be rich people eating meat. I pointed out that "mere consumers" referred to the infants and elderly and infirm.
No one in that workshop spoke to me for the rest of the day, except for the leader to stiltingly express his appreciation of me showing him some interesting criticism of his work. I appreciated that gesture.
It's time to call my three living fathers, all of whom are aging far from me while consuming vast amounts of Big Medicine.
There's stuff in my head that should not be there when I make these calls.