Pondering Charlie the Coyote and Lack of Scarce Resources

Do human’s (some, anyway, I’m sure not all) set our expectations for ourselves and for life too high?  What I mean, is, have we reached a place in human development where the basic needs of life (food, water, shelter, air, reproduction, etc) become givens, so extraneous needs have been promoted to necessary facets, rather than perks, of life?

I’ll start out with an example, take you through the derivation of this thought.  Last night, I was walking my dog Roger (for those of you who don’t know, I have a German-Shepherd and Black Lab mix, five month old, 55 pound puppy named Roger…to see pics go to myspace.com/jonah14646) around my complex.  While he was “doing his business”, I turned around to find myself staring at two coyotes.  I ran over and hooked Roger to his leash, interrupting amidst a squeeze out  (I saw the coyotes before he did) then I squawked like a crazy chicken (which in retrospect wasn’t the best menacing response) and jumped around, hoping to scare them.  It didn’t work.  For the next frantic blocks, the two coyotes appeared to be working in tandem to separate me from barking, growling puppy.  In the end we made it safely on my home-side of my front fence.  Before going in the house, I looked out and saw the coyotes take a seat on my across-the-street neighbor’s lawn.

My question, last evening and this morning, surrounded my disbelief that the coyotes were not intimidated by my presence.  At the very least, my chicken-dance should have evidenced my mental instability, thus motivating them to find a less animated prey.  Roger is 55 pounds and has a menacing bark.  Both coyotes were smaller than he.  Why didn’t this scare them?  It wasn’t until this morning when I told my neighbor Julie the story and she said, “well, maybe they were really hungry”, did it make more sense.  That comment spring-boarded my thoughts to humans and our expectations versus coyotes and theirs.

To parallel this topic, I point to another Roger incident.  My dog trainer at Petsmart told me that Roger is a very intelligent dog, and not only should I aim to exhaust him physically, but I need to figure out ways to exhaust him mentally.  If he’s bored, in body or mind, then he becomes unmanageable.

Why are humans not happy with having a roof over their head, something to eat and drink as many times a day as they want, the ability to reproduce and raise our children in relatively safe environments (especially in America)?  Is it because of our elevated intelligence levels that we create “higher” demands on life?  Not only do we have to have enough money to eat, but we need to amass as much money as possible.  Not only do we have to have a roof over our heads, but this home needs to be the nicest in the neighborhood, must shock and awe our friends when they come over for wine and cheese night.  Not only do we need water, but it must be “spring mountain” water and fresh and cold.  Not only do we need to find a partner to reproduce, but we demand love in our relationships, and for God’s sake, the sex must be mind-blowing.

Are these expectations beyond the scope of basic needs raised because of our higher intelligence?

My life goal is to be a professional writer.  I want my work to be in libraries, to be talked about as “great art” long after my kids’s kids are dead.  I want to explore the outer regions of humanity and push the envelope of the written word.  I want to make movies that move people, that stick in their minds like “The Wrestler” did for me last night.  I’ve sacrificed relationships for this goal, sacrificed time spent with family, sacrificed my personal well-being and health and many of the other basic needs to pursue this goal.  Why do I do this?  I have a home, I eat and drink as much as I want, I will reproduce someday, I have security.  So why don’t I sit around on my laurels and enjoy the fruit of my labors?  Why do I set goals for myself beyond the realm of life necessity and pursue these goals to the detriment of my well-being?  What drives humans to these ends?

I wonder if the two coyotes from last night were given three square meals a day, a nice, warm den, an unlimited supply of bottled water, and a nice partner to make as many babies as they wish what they would do with their days.  Would they sit in the shade of a bush and lick themselves all day?  Or would they decide that their neighbor Carl the Coyote has a nicer den than they and try to come up with a way to “move on up”?  Would they ponder the constant bickering between the squirrels and the birds in a local tree over a the supply of acorns and try to come up with a way ameliorate this fighting?  Would they decide to sit down, really commit, to making the great coyote nation novel?  Would they organize a couple of other bored coyotes to invade Saddam Coyote’s territory and remove him as pack leader in order to secure the richest grazing lands in the valley?

If scarce resources were eliminated, what would happen?

America: A New Hope

Perception is everything.  For the last eight years, the rest of the world has looked at America as a ignorant, stubborn cowboy.  Now, we are all professors.  Group-think dominates the cultures of the world, yet this idea doesn’t encapsulate America.  The interesting facet of America is our complexity.  We have some of the grandest mountain ranges in the world, some of the flattest plateaus, two oceans, thousands of lakes, desert and tropical climates, snow and sun.  Americans come in all colors, shapes, believe in different God’s and no God’s, lean toward the political right or the left, love sport and hate sport.  It’s annoying to me that the world doesn’t appear to recognize our diversity.  World, we are not all broad-shouldered, nearly illiterate Texans; nor are we all bi-racial, well-read intellectuals.  Some of us favor both the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of us favor Israel, own guns, are black, love dogs; while others are anti-war, pro-Palestine, anti-gun, white, and own cats.  

As most of you know, Barack Obama is now our President, yet the vision I can’t get out of my head is Former President Bush riding off into the sun-set.  I feel as though President Obama is my President, where as President Bush was not, but the fact that the rest of the world has now erased their image of America is a broad-shouldered cowboy in favor of a skinny intellectual bothers me.  We are neither.  We are both.

In the next four years, I know I will agree with some of the changes President Obama enacts.  I’m sure I will disagree with some decisions, too.  Yes, President Bush appeared to make a lot of bad decisions, but he also did more for Africa than any other President in history.  Say what you want about No Child Left Behind, but the fact remains that Former President Bush brought the issues of our public school system into the light.  He tried to do the same with social security and health coverage as well.  Former President Bush will be judged.  I’m sure when it is over, a thousand books will be written rehashing his Presidency.  The fact remains, like our country isn’t black and white, President Bush’s presidency wasn’t black and white, either, it was grey.  He made good decisions and bad decisions and decisions fifty percent of us agreed with and fifty percent of us hated.

So much hope has been piled on President Obama’s shoulders, from both inside the United States and internationally.  It is realistic to believe President Obama will pacify everyone.  Even Presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt didn’t leave office free of debris.  Both enacted martial law, for instance.  Roosevelt didn’t save the Jews and Lincoln didn’t free the slaves (in the north, sure, but they were already free).  

Our greatest hope is not President Obama himself, but the feelings of ownership he can inspire in each one of us.  We’ve been raised by televisions, so many of us expect to sit back and watch and let him fix everything.  Life doesn’t work like that.  I think the strongest aspect of his message on Inauguration Day was that change isn’t his responsibility, it is ours.  America is a diverse country, with a plethora of views and beliefs, and every individual needs to raise his or her voice and be heard.  The world needs to be introduced to America’s complexity, shown that some of us are gun-toting Texans while others are bi-racial intellectuals and still others are somewhere in-between.  Only when each of us takes ownership of our destiny and works toward making this a better world will America and Earth truly have a new hope.

Our Trust in Government: A Tenuous Relationship

(To my loyal blog readers, sorry I’ve been MIA for the last couple weeks.  Basically, I’ve felt like someone had jammed a hand into my abdomen and was squeezing and releasing my bowels at their whimsy.  I feel better now, so let’s do some good ol’ government bashing!)

 

“The feud between Russia and Ukraine over natural gas prices and transit fees has left large swaths of Europe without heat…Europe is suffering as well, with hundreds of thousands of people in southeastern Europe living without heat for six days and factories shutting down in several countries.

Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said: “Little or no gas is currently flowing. We are not at this stage jumping to conclusions. But this situation is obviously very serious and needs to improve rapidly. We do need to get to the bottom of this.”

                        –The New York Times, January 9, 2009

 

“We do need to get to the bottom of this.” You think, Mr. Hansen?  Maybe you should stop talking and start, I DON’T KNOW, heating people’s homes!  Wow.  As Americans, we wouldn’t understand this, would we?  Every morning we wake up to power feeding electricity to our alarm clocks.  Clean water is piped into our homes at any temperature we want, so we can wash our face and brush our teeth without any fear of ingesting disease.  Go to the bathroom—number one or number two—and hit a lever and our disgusting bodily waste gets flushed away.  Food, if it’s not kept cool or frozen in our fridges and freezers, can be found at the corner grocery in basically any form we wish.  And what to do about those disgusting banana peels, doggie poop, cans of tuna?  Wheel them out to the street once a week and they’ll disappear.  And what about getting to work?  Easy as pie, right (even though sometimes we wished it weren’t).  Get in your car and drive away.  There’s gas, and plenty of it.

As Americans, we have it easy, don’t we?  Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  All built in to the Constitution, an American guarantee.  And we believe because we elect our leaders it is in their self-interest to insure we continue to have power zapped into our homes, eggs ready to eat at the local market, but who’s to say what is happening in Russia can’t happen here.  We place a lot of trust in government.  And I know my faith in the American system has been shaken in the last eight years.  We are involved in two wars—which, in the best case, we were taken advantage of or in the worst case, we were lied to in order to get into—that are utterly unpopular.  We are going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  There is a current investigation going on involving the illegal firing of federal prosecutors.  The validity of our voting system is coming under attack.  American federal agents are torturing “enemies of the state” in secret prisons.  American.

But as long as the trains run on time, we’ll turn a blind eye.  What if the trains didn’t run on time?  What if water stopped coming to our homes?  What if our government lost the ability to provide the American people with gas resources or electricity?  What if, with the elimination of American farms to make land for building homes or businesses, America must resort to importing food and there’s a shortage?

This situation might sound outlandish, but I remind you of the gas shortage in the 1970’s and I cite the current state of the economy.  Kind of hard to enjoy the spoils of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness when you lose your job and can’t feed your family.

So, what is the solution?  I believe Americans must take a very serious look at self-sufficiency.  There are many ways to take responsibility for our own well-being away from the bureaucratic systems that we place too much trust in and too much pressure on.  Look at the public schools.  When they were created, their mission was never to educate every child in America.  They were designed as a small-scale solution to educate the few, not the many.  I realize home schooling isn’t a credible option for most parents, but supplemental schooling can be.  How many parents provide educational activities for their kids outside of school?  How many parents sit down every night or morning with children and teach them?  How many help them with their homework?  How many out-source this responsibility to the broken public school system?

Investing in self-sufficient homes is another way to create independence.  Solar powered water heaters, solar panels, wind power…etc.  There is an amazing amount of new technology out there to accomplish this.  I’ve looked into solar power.  For about 20,000 dollars I could completely outfit my home with solar power.  And that’s before government tax credits.  If done, this would put me in a place to actually sell my extra power back to the power companies at the same rate they used to charge me!

Another easy way to place yourself on the road to self-sufficiency is a back-yard garden.  I realize—especially for families and for some difficult to grow vegetables—complete self-sufficiency isn’t reasonable.  But a good home garden could supplement your shopping.  More importantly, learning the techniques of growing your own food and investing time in the process would allow you the capability to do so if the occasion arrived.

Gas is a problem.  Sure, I could say that abandoning your car would achieve this, but that isn’t feasible for most people.  I read an article that said the American car companies are investing solely in the electric car to be the future of transportation.  This is great.  But plug-in electric cars still rely on the electricity funneled into our homes.  Though if our homes are run by solar or wind power, then an electric car would be a solution to the gas problem.  I guess, on the gas front, until there exist viable alternatives to the combustion engine, limiting the reliance on your car is the best you can do.

One of the exciting aspects of the Obama presidency, I hope, will be his mission to draw out these limited known technologies, which will draw in capital and enhance the feasibility of the average American to obtain and utilize and gain a higher level of self-dependency and responsibility for their lives.  This is the hope.  I think we look at the gas crisis between Russia and Ukraine and believe something like that couldn’t happen in America.  My big fear is we’ll have overestimated our government.  Sitting back and receiving the goods provided to us is lazy and potentially fatal; taking responsibility for our lives is our responsibility.

I’d be very interested in anyone else’s thoughts on gaining self-sufficiency in their lives.  Are there things you do or have heard about or want to do to achieve this?