By DEXTER DUGGAN
Might it be said that humans are programmed for danger and stress because that’s how most generations of them lived — since caves for shelter and fires for light and heat.
Even by the time of large ancient Biblical cities that took a few days to walk through — unless you were a noble or soldier with a fast chariot — no one would suggest that urban life was easy and comfortable except for those high up in society, and not always for them.
And even kings and queens of a few hundred years ago lacked the diversions and connections that are available to low-income people today. Even 100 servants couldn’t provide a historic king with the entertainment on a television now.
The banquet hall long ago was about the best entertainment available, where uncommonly abundant food and talented musicians supplied what usually was lacking.
Cathedrals were able to offer pageantry to worship God, but a cathedral before electricity generally lacked intimate involvement in the ceremonies for those beyond, say, the tenth row.
Altar bells weren’t just to sound pretty but to notify the more distant laymen of where the service had progressed. A powerful preacher wasn’t simply a priest with compelling imagery but a loud voice.
Only when architecture advanced beyond the point of load-bearing walls were cathedrals able to offer those big windows that made the interiors at least appreciably naturally illuminated.
Life had no central heating or cooling, telephones, cameras, radios, televisions, movies, Internet, home delivery, automobiles, trains, planes, certainly no social media.
Whether it was dangers including natural disaster, disease, famine, drought, flooding, crop failure, bandits, betrayal or invading armies, people down through the centuries didn’t think life was a vacation. Although these banes had moderated as Western civilization advanced.
The idea that you could use a key to drive in your own personal horseless machine to a store where a worker hands you bags of food, and then you go home to be entertained by large, moving colored images that you can call up instantly from anywhere in the world, is without precedent.
The first part, about driving off for fast food, became possible in the mid-twentieth century. But the second part that completes the dream, about your personal access at home to real-time colored visuals worldwide, is only within more-current lifetimes.
For that matter, thanks to webcams, you’re able from home, if you’re really interested, to watch the animal cages at the San Diego Zoo, the waves at Huntington Beach, Calif., the quiet post-midnight streets of Paris or Moscow, or who knows what else. Some would say this kind of visual access is about like watching the grass grow.
Still, as I write this on the evening of June 11, I just now typed “webcams Tokyo airport” and instantly got “Tokyo — Haneda International Airport Live cam.” At this very instant on the other side of the world, I get a camera view showing an overcast day on June 12 with five jetliners at their gates, another jet taxiing away, and a baggage truck going along.
Aha, another jet taxis by just now. Does it even occur to any of the passengers on board that a guy in Phoenix is watching their plane? Well, did it ever occur to me on a plane at, say, San Francisco, that someone in, say, Rome, was watching my plane. (No.)
Now, I just tried “Rome airport webcams” and I get the choice to look up its restaurants and shopping. That’s a meal that’ll have to wait for another day.
Talk about spinoffs. The technology that powers the world just happens to include the serendipitous webcam ability to look at busy freeways or empty streets far away.
Were scientific attainments by the twentieth century putting many people at relative ease to the extent that, before long, some of them grew, ahem, uncomfortable with more comfortable lives? Where’s all the stress that most people always had to live with? How to satisfy this yearning that we’ve gotta fight, fight to resist the onslaughts?
We see left-wing “activists” doing damage now with the claim this is necessary to save the world — including using glue to immobilize themselves or throwing paint on art treasures or just simply at the walls of hamburger restaurants, in order to get attention.
However, if you’re a left-winger this activism is unnecessary because a news release is sufficient to draw the fawning attention and microphones and lenses of complicit media to your lectern.
Strangely, infantile behavior seems to come easily to left-wingers to whom actual infants are despicable and best killed — at least aside from a baby or two that can be viewed as a pet useful for adult gratification or wish fulfillment.
But if destructive behavior by such protesting individuals has increased, truly awful proposals with dangerous potential are coming from quarters better situated to impose them. That is, governments going out of bounds, likely after being prodded by guilty-feeling billionaire activists and their unthinking think tanks.
We’re told that cattle must be slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands and agricultural fields removed from production because meat and crops and fertilizer supposedly put too much stress on poor, defenseless Mother Earth — who actually seems to have done a better job of enduring through the millennia than the puny princes who strutted about on her surface.
Bugs On The Buns
With the same fervor of advertising pitches that told us in the 1950s that cigarettes were not only good for our health but also helpful for women’s equality, now we’re told that virtue consists of eating insects.
Hey, every continent has its own tastes. I just read an article that claims Europeans can’t stand the U.S. standard of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
But we’re expected to admire articles now with actual headlines like, “Meaty, cheesy, coconutty: a chef’s quest to prove insects taste delicious.” And, “Meet the New York chef who wants to change our diets one bug at a time.”
Meanwhile, a Madrid newspaper reports that “climate activists” in Spain throw their biodegradable red paint on a Burger King restaurant as a protest against the dangers it supposedly poses for the planet. Would putting bugs on the buns soften their outrage?
And a Berlin newspaper reports that 580 criminal offenses have been attributed to the “climate activists” of “Last Generation,” mostly concerning coercion and damage to property.
One might think that without the efforts of inflamed “climate activism,” it has been scientifically proven that Earthly temperatures will increase by 200 degrees. Not at all, but aching consciences find it easier to try to bury their mortal sins so popular on the left by pretending their property violations are in the service of virtue. A “virtue” which is NOT, however, part of “traditional morality.”
Life is starting to become harder again for the middle class — what we might call ordinary people — because of globalist ambitions to control and suppress them. For those in the U.S., the Joe Biden administration harbors animosity and ill will toward them that were unthinkable two decades ago.
And not only Biden but also his political mirror images from California to Canada and wherever else “progressivism” has grabbed legislative and bureaucratic levers.
The “Manhattan Contrarian” blog by New Yorker and retired attorney Francis Menton often is useful for news about government scheming to make ordinary people’s lives more difficult and more like existence was hundreds of years ago.
On June 6, for instance, Menton posted about “The federal war against your lifestyle.” Not the lifestyle of the fashionably rich and famous, who always can find shelter under the wings of the politically powerful attracted to the glitterati, but the “lifestyles” of those using gas stoves and gas-powered automobiles. And other amenities that all seem increasingly offensive to regulators.
It’s been said that green is the new red — meaning green environmentalism and the old red of the Marxist state, not the red of, say, red-state Florida.
(Hey, did you notice some years ago when the media were assigning colors to political sympathies, they chose red for conservatism, lest liberals got the red label and people said, “Aha, just like Stalin’s government.” And conservatives had to watch as true-blue for patriotism was awarded to the lefties.)
In his June 6 blog, Menton cites an article in National Review by Noah Rothman titled, “The war on things that work.”
Menton writes: “One thing that Rothman’s list makes clear is that, although the regulations are principally rationalized as part of the fight against ‘climate change,’ there are many respects in which the new restrictions have nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘climate’ issue, even if you believe that greenhouse gases like CO2 are some kind of existential threat to humanity.”
Making this point, Menton writes, “Rothman leads off his article with the well-known quote from one-time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti: ‘The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.’ It was, in fact, ‘a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing’.”
And how did the Democratic Party’s AOC first come to our attention? As a socialist who defeated a veteran Democrat in a primary election.
Elections indeed have consequences. But the Biden government will be happier when its election results are guaranteed by the manipulations that we’ve seen emerging in recent years. And then there’ll be no elections at all.
But hey, once we’re back to having to live with the caves and campfires of long, long ago, people never had to worry about elections at all. Unless they were voting on who got to go out with the spear to bring back that evening’s wild animal to cook for dinner.
Whoops, eating animal meat? Don’t those cave people understand that bugs are better?
A hundred years ago, a politician promising “A chicken in every pot” was thought to be advancing the betterment of “the working man.” But today the meal must be mealworms.
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