Simple Solutions

I’ve been thinking again. That’s always a bad sign. I’ve been thinking about simple solutions to many of our problems. For example, the unusually high price of drugs. It would be relatively easy to reduce the price of drugs, just make it illegal for pharmaceutical companies to spend obscenely on advertising their drugs. They didn’t always advertise drugs as they do now and we managed to survive. Why should people be urged to run to their doctor and ask about every drug advertised on TV at great expense? Of course people in the advertising industry, apparently an absolutely vital part of the economy, would be out of work.

How about our national debt? It would be a simple matter to begin taking care of our incredible national debt. All we would have to do is substantially decrease the obscene amount of money we spend on what is euphemistically referred to as national defense. As we spend far more money on this elusive goal than all the rest of the world combined, and as it is perfectly obvious that most of what we are producing for that goal is not at all necessary, there should be no reason not to reduce, reduce, reduce. Of course that would mean a lot of people would be out of work.

There are environmental concerns also that could be easily solved. As we know there are now literally oceans of plastic fouling both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and as we know we produce annually enough plastic bottles to circle the earth many times, to say nothing of billions of plastic bags and etc., if we stopped producing all this plastic and went to some form of easily biodegradable product, we would save our environment. Of course lots of people in the plastic industry would be out of work.

It would also be environmentally beneficial to stop drilling for oil, especially in the deepest parts of the ocean where the potential for disaster is so great, as we have recently experienced in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. But if we were to stop lots of oil workers would be unemployed.

Chemicals, too, are a genuine problem. We seem to create new ones at an unseemly rapid rate, many of which seem to get on the market long before they are known to be safe. This is true not only of chemicals that we use in making drugs, but also chemicals to fertilize the soil, inoculate our animals, fight plant diseases, and so on. We know that over time many of these chemicals are probably quite harmful to the earth, and to the very soils that provide our food. We could easily be far more careful and judicious in our use of these kinds of pesticides and fertilizers and such. Of course a lot of people would be out of work if we were to be more careful and produce less of these noxious substances.

The problem of energy could also be solved if we really wanted to solve it. Energy, that is, that is produced by coal and oil and other potentially exhaustible resources, that in addition to being exhaustible also create environmental problems like acid rain, global warming, air and water pollution, health problems, and what have you. We could of course cut back on the production of coal and oil and such, and try to move to more environmentally friendly sources of energy, but lots of people would lose their jobs.

Waste is another area where we have a serious problem. Because we produce so much stuff, including noxious chemicals, plastics, and what have you, we also need to dispose of all this stuff. This is a particularly serious problem when it comes to nuclear waste, but is also a genuine problem when it comes to disposing of unused drugs, plastic, and such. There is no waste in nature, so waste is a peculiarly human phenomenon. We could attempt to minimize waste, as we have in recent years attempted somewhat feebly to do, but our efforts so far as little more than laughable. But if we were to eliminate waste all those people who are now employed in the waste industry would be out of work.

I realize that these simple solutions are not as simple as they might appear, but they point to what I believe is the greatest quandary ever faced by anyone ever, we keep doing what we are doing although it is terrible for us because we dare not stop, but if we do not stop it will be terrible for us and we will likely perish. To do anything constructive seems to involve putting someone out of work. We can’t protect the owls, the oceans, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, even the planet we live on, because, because, because…

I am at two with nature.
Woody Allen