Run, Humans, Run
By Mickey Z.
In the 1999 German film “Run, Lola, Run”, the female protagonist is magically
given three chances to cope with a thorny situation. Like the reset button on a video game
or computer, Lola gets to go back and start from the beginning if she screws up.
September 14, 2001: There are people outside my building holding candles, waving flags and
singing the National Anthem as an SUV cruises by with the words “Nuke ‘em”
soaped onto its rear window. They are all craving normalcy. Even with the severity of the
World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the ultimate goal at the end of the day is always
normalcy. This allows for the authorities to pronounce amidst the fear, sorrow, doubt and
anger, “Don’t worry. Things were bad before, but now we’ve gotten
everything back to normal.”
Normal. Perhaps that’s precisely where the problem lies. What is normal in our
country and on our planet? What type of society have we humans cultivated as we sit
arrogantly atop the intellectual food chain?
The New York Stock Exchange was shut down by the attacks, but once things return to
normal, Wall Street will go back to making decisions that impact horrendously upon the
large majority of the globe and the top one percent of Americans will continue to own
wealth equal to the bottom 95 percent.
Cars will again have free reign on the island of Manhattan. The toxic haze caused by the
Two Towers collapsing will be replaced by the normal toxic haze induced by America’s
automobile culture (not to mention the normal amount of air traffic). That SUV owner I
mentioned earlier will wipe the soap off his window and continue driving in a nation where
an area equal to all the arable land in Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania was paved in the
last century, an area that requires maintenance costing over $200 million a day and a
bloated military to keep the oil flowing.
The individuals I heard singing songs of patriotism will dwell in the normalcy of 1200
citizens incarcerated each week, 4000 new cases of cancer diagnosed each day, and 19
insect species becoming extinct each hour. They’ll step over homeless people to go
buy clothes made in sweatshops or prisons or by slave labor while 52 of the top 100
economies on the planet aren’t countries, they’re corporations. The largest
employer in the U.S. will still be Wal-Mart and 50 percent of their employees will still
qualify for food stamps.
Our children will be vaccinated and medicated to attend school. Every day, 80 percent of
Americans will take a potentially addictive prescription drug and 52 percent of those
drugs will still be either pulled from the shelves or relabeled because they’ll prove
to be more hazardous than studies had indicated. Normal means 100,000 Americans per month
will continue to lose their health insurance while two million disabled people are still
held against their will in nursing homes.
Automobiles, trucks and other fossil-fuel burning vehicles still kill a million wild
animals per week in the U.S. (not counting tens of thousands of family pets). One hundred
animal species a day become extinct, 100 million animals per year die in laboratories, and
15 million animals are slaughtered each day although up to 14 times as many people could
be fed by using the same land currently reserved for livestock grazing.
Normal means land mines and the death penalty; it means racial profiling and slavery.
It means gay-bashing and sexism and the shooting of abortion doctors.
It means pesticides, homicides and suicides.
Normal means GMOs, HMOs, HBO and the WTO.
The FBI, CIA, NSA and KKK.
It means banned books, COINTELPRO, and the war on drugs.
Strip malls, strip mining and strip joints.
Normal means television and junk food and Nike sneakers.
It means global warming, the greenhouse effect, topsoil depletion and nuclear
proliferation.
Normal means religion and advertising and public relations and the so-called free market.
And it also means consumerism and capitalism and bunch of other “-isms”.
When all is back to normal, innumerable children will be sold into prostitution, five
thousand Americans die each day due to heart disease or cancer while 5000 Iraqi children
die each month thanks to U.S.-sponsored sanctions. An average of 2,174 people will die
each day due to war. Nine out of ten will be civilians. Five out of ten of those civilians
will be children. Each day, 27 American children will die from poverty and starvation, 60
million people will starve to death each year worldwide, and every two seconds, somewhere
on this planet, a child starves to death. (How many have we lost while you read this
article?)
In his 1941 classic, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller contemplated what it
might be like to bring back an American Indian to life and show him the steel mills of
Pennsylvania. Miller imagined him thinking: “So it was for this that you deprived us
of our birthright?” Miller pondered, “Do you think it would be easy to get him
to change places with one of our steady workers? What sort of persuasion would you use?
What now could you promise him that would be truly seductive?”
I think I know what might persuade that resurrected soul. A reset button, just like the
one Lola had. For if this is the best humanity could produce with the gift we’ve been
given; if this is what is accepted by normal by the majority of Homo Sapiens on the
planet, what we really need is another try.
Postscript: For years, I’ve endured the complaint about my writing being too negative
and I’ve already heard that this particular piece offers no solutions. Many people
imply that unless a critic expounds a specific strategy for change, the critique is
worthless or too negative. The problem with this understandable retort is that it misses
the crucial role critical analysis plays in a society where problems are so cleverly
disguised. When discussing the future, the first step is often an identification and
demystification of the past and present. In order to hit the reset button, we must first
all agree that we got it wrong the first time.