I am a pessimist. That’s all right with me.
Optimists are wacko dreamers. I’m not. They plan for nirvana, a stateless workers’ paradise, heaven, lots of virgins, and global free markets. Everyone has their own idea of what it’s going to be like before long. I have news for them. This is it. Get used to getting up on the wrong side of the bed. News will be terrible and you’ll feel rotten and have to go do some dumb job for way too many hours. That’s it. Be happy, it could be worse.
OK, it’s not that way every day. But there are enough rotten days so you lose count.
I am a steady-state pessimist. I don’t think its going to get much worse either. Some pessimists see doom and fire and bad tattoo sores doing us in. But we get used to this life the way it is. People are about the same as they were way, way back when they climbed in trees and mostly ate bananas. We have mothers who hug us and brothers who beat on us. We grow up bad, but not that bad. Not bad enough for hell. Not good enough for heaven either. That’s for sure.
So why don’t I think things will get better? I look at what us most highly evolved Americans really think and do. We are not getting more peaceful. Almost half of us have guns in our house. Thirty thousand people a year get fatally shot, suicide included (that’s more than half the total). We make about five million guns a year. We make about four million babies in the same time. That’s one gun per baby with enough left over for every immigrant to have an automatic, even if they send a couple guns back home. How can it get better with odds like this?
But will it get much worse? Here is the good news: every year, for every killer with a gun there are 25 thousand non-killers. That’s a lot. That’s like one guy in a good-sized, sold-out baseball stadium shooting the person next to him every July 4th. All the other days of the year everybody just sits there and holds tight to their guns yelling and shouting and even winging a couple folks, but they don’t kill anyone. Only on July 4. That’s not too bad. Not great, but think how easy it is to shoot a gun. I used to do it. Pull the trigger. Bang. Some guy is dead. Western Civ really did well on this design--bullets work good! (Look at the shooting suicide success rate—92%--that was an A in my high school).
You want to hear about bad. What if every guy with a gun in the house just shot two people—not even a minutes work—then—zap—that’s it. We’re all gone. Even the babies. That’s bad. Real bad.
Optimists argue that things are different now in the post modern world. We have cheeseburgers, ipods and SUVs for everyone. Our monkey-ancestors living in the trees never had anything like that. Even those knights who bashed in heads and chopped off arms never got much past one-horsepower engines and battering rams. Now factories in China churn out enough stuff for everybody to have all new duds every July 4th and throw out their old clothes, shoes, refrigerators and, even, friends once a year. We live in a world of stuff and it’s almost free compared to a couple hundred years back when most people wore rags, ate potato skins and drank gin and opium. The optimists ask me, how can you say it’s the same when what people fought about is stuff. I want yours and you want mine kind of fights.
It’s true that we do have way too much stuff being built, but remember, we still fight over it. But now, guns make fights much messier. And A-bombs clean things out good but are very bad for us people. I watch the news and see the bodies lying around. Even the crowds at Wal-Mart Presidents’ Day sales give a punch or two. No one really has enough stuff. Who doesn’t want another hot cell phone or fancy droopy pants? Or maybe a big shiny gun to put in their new car next to their six-foot-wide speakers and wheel-lifting music amplifier machine. Even poor people want stuff--like food and maybe a doctor visit. So don’t give me the China argument that we reached our stuff capacity. We can pile it up a hundred feet high and still fight over new hi-tops and skull painted tee shirts. We are like those monkeys who had free bananas but still fought wars over their banana piles. We just exchanged bananas for hi-fashion poofy dogs and big-print hoodies.
And wars. Don’t forget those. Things get really bad when you give out a hunting license to bag a couple of your neighbors.
You optimists think things change when you got new ideas and religion. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition. God plays cheerleader too often for me to have much hope for him. And Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Bush twist ideas like wrestlers giving the famous pretzel death hold. Ideas don’t change people. Ideas just give us something besides stuff to fight for.
Is all hope really lost then? I hear there is one last chance that things may change. My friend, who helped invent computers, tells me that we are on the verge of something new. Those genetic engineers are messing with our brain cells, making us better. Things may be different but I am worried because this friend used to tell me about how computers would solve everything. Now I put up with spammy email, work all night from home after all day at the office, watch out for four jillion useless blogs, and run when house refinancing ads pop up in my online dictionary. My friend says gene therapy will fix us up, even if computers didn’t. Engineers are working right now on impulse control circuits in the cerebellum to slow them down with some hot-shot enzymes. It might work.
I am scared. I like my impulses.
In the morning impulses get me up, not my alarm clock. Impulses make me eat chocolate and crab legs. Impulses make me do all sorts of stuff. Put on the impulse brakes and who knows where that leads. We may just sit there and smile. Why shoot anyone if you don’t get an urge is what the scientists say, but I say why do anything at all. Hurray for urges. At least for mine.
And who’s to say they won’t just replace my old fashion impulses with ones like they show on TV, telling us to eat more cheeseburgers and wear more droopy clothes. Impulse control is way too big for big corporations to pass up.
So I say leave my impulses alone. I am making a list of everything I had an urge to do last year, before those engineers got working on my enzymes. I will be sticking to my old urge list, keeping my true, original impulses, no matter what those engineers do with my cerebellum. To make sure, I am writing my Impulse Popper© computer program that jumps up on my screen (like those Viagra ads do now) and tells me to do something right now that I had an urge to do last year. Not weird new corporate-driven impulses. Real Chuck Kerns impulses that I know are my own. That’s how I fight back.
Now the real news. I am going to sell my Impulse Popper © program to Google and save us all from all those false-implanted cheeseburger, Jack LaLane Juicer and hair restorer urges that we know will get implanted in our enzymes soon. With my Impulse Popper © you can stay pure and live according to your true self. Your cerebellum may change but your impulse list won’t. You can pass it on like an heirloom to your kiddies and human nature will always be the same.
Well that’s not quite true. Don’t tell anyone but if you do have an urge to shoot someone on your impulse list, Google is going to erase that item. Their lawyers advised them about this. So maybe some things will change after all.
