Fragile Technocracy

         I was driving down Sheridan Dr. in Amherst, New York. I was stooped at a red light, idling the car and musing. I happened to look at the car in the next lane from me. A woman, driver, clad entirely in a burka, was furiously texting on her i-phone. I was struck by the temporal anomaly of someone dressed in garb that represented the Middle East, some thousand years ago, manipulating a space-aged gadget with the computing power that could run a small city. We often forget how fragile our technologically-hip world really is. One major geographical or man-made catastrophe and we could be all exist back in the days of the horse and buggy. “Silly,” you say, looking around at all of our modern technology. “Not really,” I would reply.

        All it would take would be one major disruption of world commerce and after a hundred years or so of non-production, many of our gadgets would run out of batteries, rust over and be useless. You only have to look at Cuba to see how a civilization, cut off from the world, exists like we did in the 1950’s. A much longer isolation and commerce would revert to horses and mules. Solar flares, star-emanating electro magnetic pulses, natural disasters and wars are impartial to whom they inconvenience.  Ice storms, hurricanes and floods disrupt our society for weeks at a time. We only usually recover because those non-affected elements of our civilization step into help clean up and restart the broken and washed away conveniences.

       Certainly any disruption in the food supply cycle would be catastrophic. If scientists are to be believed, the age of the dinosaurs was wiped away, some sixty three million years ago, by several years of dust filled skies that precluded any vegetation growing and brought about by an enormous collision of the earth with a large meteor. Who is to say this won’t happen again in our near future? In the science fiction programs, they all have asteroid deflecting machines that save the earth at the last minute. In real life I don’t know of any such planet saving devices that are being assembled. Our water supply is both precious and fragile. Any wholesale disruption of that supply would vacate an entire geographic area. Look at the Mayans in Mexico. Huge well-constructed cities, all emptied mysteriously. What happened to them?

      I well remember the 1950’s and the cold-war nuclear scares. Homeowners built private bomb shelters in their basements, stocked with water and food that they hoped would sustain them until the skies cleared and the catastrophe ended. Fortunately, there was never any need to test their efficacy. How would we handle something like this as a civilization? Building large arks and space ships to other planets, for entire populations, is the stuff of movies.

       Even now, we see massive disruptions of civil populations in the war torn mid east. Tens of thousands of people are on the move, hoping to find peace and a sustainable life in lands not their own. Predictably, fences go up along the borders trying to prevent the hungry hordes from overwhelming the lands nearby.

         I wonder if Mexico would contemplate building a giant wall to keep out hungry Norte-Americanos, if our land became frozen and unsustainable and we tried to move south to warmer and more hospitable climes? It does give you pause to think.  The national juxtaposition makes me think of the wonderful John Hersey novel, “White Lotus.” In it, China had fought and won a war with America and taken many thousands of prisoners back to China as slaves. The white Americans lived like foreign-looking slaves and were subjected to the same depredations that slaves faced in pre civil war America. That gets y’all to thinking too.

         The people who would survive best are the Amish, who have eschewed motorized equipment and raised their own food for hundreds of years. I wonder how long these gentle people would survive before being over run by hungry and hostile neighbors? The more primitive societies on earth might actually fare better than the advanced ones. When you are used to living in the stone-age, it wouldn’t be much of a transition.

          The red light changed and I drove on, wondering what I was wondering. Will we see again camel and mule trains carrying water to settlers on the dusty plains? Farming would become a top profession then. Carpenters, plumbers, and other trades men would become once again the solid and much respected professionals that they were in times of yore. It makes you think of things differently. You can’t eat gold or drink oil. Carpe Diem, mes amie.

                                  -30-

                           (788 words)

                        Joseph Xavier Martin