In the twenty-plus years after my inaugural trip to China, I was privileged to visit extraordinary places in Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Europe. By the nature of my work, and personal preference when I had the chance, I spent a lot of time beyond the regular tourist haunts. In fact, as I bounced back and forth between the luxury of multi-starred hotels and the impoverished hinterlands and slums, things stirred in the corners of my brain (doesn’t happen often, I have to take full advantage of the circumstances when it does). The thing is, by 1990, electronic technology was universal. To a degree. I was often shocked to find, deep in the dark alleys or far out in the muddy peasant farms, television and computers. In China, there was a village of a dozen tiny cabins in the middle of endless rice paddies. The village goose had the job of driving off the water buffalo if the latter wandered into “town” looking to chow down on onions, turnips, tomatoes, and flowers in the little kitchen gardens. And in the little bodega purveying tobacco, alcohol, and other necessities, was a desktop Dell, running MS Windows and hooked up to the web. In the Philippines, a similar bodega deep in a flood-damaged neighborhood of improvised sheet metal and fiberglass shacks had a television running 24/7, people gathered around it at all hours.
Here’s the thing. The people in these communities struggle to subsist. There is next-to-no money, spotty schools, only the most basic medicine. And smack in the middle of the endless grinding poverty? Why, there’s a television or a computer showing life in the hygienic, overfed, safe, warm and dry world of wealth. What piqued at the corners of my mind was this: there are billions of people so impoverished that just living through the night is a victory. And right up in their faces is the constant electronic reminder of what life is like in the clean world. After two decades of observation, it dawned on me that the long-gone Cold War, and the ongoing Great Games of international politics, despite the frightening nature of their potential consequences, are not the most pressing dangers of the human ecosystem. The real tension is between the billions of people in tropical squalor, scraping by on next to nothing, and the millions of the rest of us here in the comfy temperate world, where the most universal problem is obesity.
For years and years, I struggled to understand why the billions of people in the impoverished tropics didn’t simply rise up, grabbing shovels and machetes on the way, and pour into the world of the wealthy, sticking our heads on pikes in the killing fields of the US, UK, EU, and other clean, wealthy, havens of civilization.
Well, it turns out that what was my personal nagging concern is beginning to manifest in the real world, right now. Several thousand people walked from sub-Saharan African hell to Israel, where nobody knows what to do about them. I just finished watching the (excellent) movie “Captain Philips”, where desperate Somalis have taken to piracy. The Washington Post this week ran a story about skyrocketing immigration from North Africa to Italy. Here in the US, we host millions of people from Central and South America who came because less-than-minimum-wage jobs here beat starvation and disease in their steamy homelands.
I don’t know where the world goes from here. But I believe the problem of pent-up global poverty is the single most important issue we have to come to grips with. Beating out climate change, industrial pollution, collapsing biodiversity, and the end of fossil fuels. It’s just gonna be nasty.
Like so many things in the fractal biosphere, there is an organismal analog of the ecosystem problem. And cancer is probably the best example. Cancers only appear after a complex sequence of cellular changes has taken place. Right up to the point where physiological dysfunction triggers actual cancer, the cellular changes are benign, or at least hidden. Very much like the grinding poverty of the tropical world, cancer doesn’t explode into action until a high threshold of physiological dysfunction is crossed.
Maybe we should, as a society, think a little bit about this analogy. Because the silent build-up of precancer conditions, when it hits that trigger, becomes an enormously dangerous problem.
And it’s one that, even as spring is coming here in the mid-Atlantic landscape, I continue to struggle with. For reasons I can’t fathom, I seem to have some kind of physiological cycle in my day-to-day health. I can go for a week or two or even three feeling almost healthy, almost comfortable, almost functional. And then, all of a sudden, I’ll have a stretch of days where I regress into uncomfortable illness. During the good times, when I take my meds, I feel powered up, sort of like some first-person shooter game where the characters can grab “power” modules as they plod through the hallways and alleyways of their digital world.
And when I have bad days, my medicines are really important, making the difference between being marginally functional vs. total collapse.
In any case, deep into my fourth year of cancer survivorship, I’m grateful for the simple fact that I’m here to experience good days and bad days. Because the alternative, which was dangerously close several times during my treatment, is that I ain’t here to experience nothin’.
So I’ll take those bad days. In fact, I’ll see your bad days, and raise you a couple good days. I’m alive. And, at least for the moment, that is just awesome. Hang in there, everybody. Spring is on the way. Remember the key lesson of cancer. You gotta live ‘em while you got ‘em. Rock the hell on!!!
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