Compared to the days of our forefathers, we certainly know more these days…or do we?
When I pull the flush in my bathroom, I have no idea what happens next, …not that I even care! I just walk away, feeling quite happy that someone else will do the dirty work. It may end up in the rivers or get recycled and pumped back to our houses as drinking water. It’s the same with whatever garbage each of us may have. We happily pack them in plastic bags, which, we’ve been told, is not at all environment-friendly, and we dump them in the bins outside for someone to come and cart it all away…not that we even care where they’ll take it or what they’ll do with it!
These days, we live in the world like guests in someone else’s house. We have only the faintest notion about what is going on around us, and we do not even seem to want to know at all! Someone is polluting the rivers and the seas, someone is cutting down the forests, someone is adulterating the food, injecting meat with hormones or genetically engineering the tomatoes. But who are these people? Thanks to the wealth of information we have at our disposal, from the newspapers and magazines from the tv to the Internet, we should know more about what is going on than our ancestors ever did but the sad fact is…we have never been less in touch with what is going on around us in our daily lives.
Year in, year out, the forests in Indonesia go up in smoke. We get to know about that because the SMOKE GETS IN OUR EYES!
Everyday, my living room is crowded with famine victims, big-eyed and boney, jostling against victims of natural disasters, or terrorism, from countries that my grandparents probably had never heard of. Even I have only a vague idea where Rwanda or Serbia-Croatia are! Meanwhile, tiger economies have been reduced to mewing kittens and nobody is really sure why their money has devalued.
Our ancestors lived simpler, more primitive lives but one thing’s for sure, they had better control of things…
When they were sick, they would go into the jungle to look for roots or leaves for their ailment. They knew exactly what they put in their mouths! They knew exactly where their food came from and they took care of their own garbage.
Modern science is supposed to be the great liberator, but most of us are blinded by it as we are by the forest fires. Scientists clone sheep and what-have-you, and harvest human eggs according to their whims and fancies and whether we believe it is for the general good of all or the work of the devil, there is very little we can do…either way! And who made the decision to feed the cows with bits and bobs from other animals? We may beef about it now But it is too late to stop the cows from getting hopping mad! Now they tell us that happy hens lay bigger and better eggs and we even have healthier low-cholesterol eggs! What on earth are they? How do they produce them? Well, we don’t know and we don’t even care! We just eat them!
What exactly is going on in the world today? Are we, like those unfortunate laboratory mice, participating in some vast research experiment? If so, that would explain why the messages keep changing! – Coffee is bad for you; correction, actually it is good for you. Pass the margarine, not the butter, please!…No, sorry, butter is actually better! Eggs are bad for you…No, they’re good! Just take the yolk and the white together. This goes on and on and there is no way you can prove or disprove anything that the so-called experts tell you.
Today we live in fear of cancer, AIDS, the bird flu, SARS, JE and all kinds of diseases. In the bad old days, people just died and they did not necessarily know what had caused it. Sigh! In this technologically-advanced world where information is at our fingertips, I find myself feeling insignificant and helpless, …clueless like a billion other lost souls.
So do we actually know more these days?…..
Footnote: Sources of photos unknown.
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 