When I was a kid my mom used to take every opportunity to hang our laundry outside on a clothesline. Out back, strung across our volleyball/basketball court would be our sheets, our towels, jeans, shirts, and underwear. She loved the smell of laundry hung out to dry even if that meant jeans as stiff as boards and towels as rough as burlap. My mom thought it was a waste of energy to use a dryer when weather permitted clothes to hang outdoors.
I'm thinking of this on a Sunday morning while I sit here drinking my coffee and listening to the dryer tumbling away in the adjacent laundry room. I think of this after sitting here and watching a post to Facebook of a Youtube video of a young girl addressing the United Nations at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Somehow I'd never seen this before and I was surprised after watching to learn this address was made in 1992, a quarter of a century ago. And it got me to thinking, what if?
What if every family in the world lived like me, like us, here in the United States? What if every family on earth lived in a house, a house with electricity, hot and cold running water, heated in the winter and cooled in the summer? What if every house on earth was a house like ours with at least one toilet, a house where boxes of tissues were gone through every week, rolls of toilet paper every few days, paper towels, plastic bags, sandwich bags. A house where every newborn is kept in disposal diapers for the first 12 months. What if every house on earth had a stove, a microwave, a refrigerator, a computer, and at least one television? What if every one of those houses around the world had a garage with at least one car, if not a couple? And what if at least half of those households could match an American's appetite for beef, pork, chicken, and fish? What if every one of those houses could use stuff and dispose of stuff, consume and waste, at the same rate as do we here in the U.S.? Without knowing for certain, I'd have to guess it would be damn near impossible to achieve and certainly unsustainable.
So, what if somehow we committed to just ensuring that no one in the world goes without adequate food and an adequate supply of clean water? I know: too broad, too big, unrealistic.
So, what if somehow we committed to achieving that here in the United States? What if we decided we would work to ensure no man, woman or child within the United States goes without adequate food and water? Could we somehow make that happen? We don't even have to commit ourselves to providing shelter-- just food and water. Could we do that? Could we do it just in Los Angeles or Detroit? Denver or Billings or Tulsa or even little bitty Owosso, Michigan? Just food and water. No other commitment.
I think that successful living is as addictive and, quite possibly, as dangerous as our much touted opioid epidemic. Successful living is successful biology. And biology trumps sociology every time. As clever, caring, and sophisticated as we might like to think we are, we are still pretty much slaves to a genetic fabric that drives us to reproduce and thrive. And thriving is not sharing.
We may succeed at changing the world, feeding the hungry, providing water and shelter to those in need, but it will require that we learn to live with less in order that others may have more. It will require a true belief in the oneness of all humankind. We have to recognize poverty as the most dangerous threat we face. And we must recognize the elimination of hunger and poverty as our most potent defense in ensuring world peace and a sustainable inhabitation of this planet.
A quick look around the globe today would indicate we have a long damn way to go. I applaud youth like Severn Cullis-Suzuki but I can pretty much guarantee: It's not gonna happen until it's the 50, 60, 70, and 80 year olds around the world standing together and embracing the challenge-- and we all have our laundry hanging on the clothesline.
