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we need to be confronting our fears
Thursday, October 25 2001
Gretchen's brother Brian is getting married this weekend down in Silver Spring, Maryland, so that's where I'm going to be. Gretchen is renting a car and leaving today and I'll be leaving Friday night. In the course of my life, I've attended approximately three funerals and one Catholic baptism, but this will be the first time I've ever attended a wedding. My friends are not the sort with a penchant for getting married.
If several people are using peer-to-peer software to download big files from your computer, and you have a mind to reboot, what is the proper protocol? Perhaps you can speed up the ongoing downloads by trimming off the ones who have the least invested, those who are less than 20% of the way into their download. I know from being on the other side of this question that I feel as though I've been dealt a special injustice when my download is terminated only ten percent of the way from the finish line. The decision I made was to kill off those with the least invested. I was watching something on CNN about the wretchedness of life in Afghanistan at the time, and I wondered how my Godlike toying with the lives of downloads compared to triage decisions made about the worth of human lives based only on their ages.
In our peculiar form of Western Culture, the Baby is celebrated like few other humans of an age group. This is probably partly because, despite the prevailing (and unfair) religious doctrine of "original sin," there is a widespread belief among Americans that babies are more spiritually pure than older human beings. People who hold this belief feel that the death of a baby is profoundly unfair, since what could the baby have done to deserve this? Extremists of this view extend the over-valuation of Babies to the pre-born fœtal and even embryonic phase. Extremists of the extremist view occasionally resort to terrorist acts, killing full-grown and highly-educated doctors in order to save the precious nearly-pure (but thoroughly uneducated) unborn.
My view (and the view of most of the world) is far more pragmatic. Babies, to me, represent the least investment of any post-birth age group. Their parents would suffer less loss from the death of a baby than from the death of a teenage child. In America, a teenage child represents years of grief and scores of thousands of dollars of investment, while a newborn mostly just represents stretch marks, several dozen nauseated mornings, and nine months of pleasure abstinence.
But while a download is only useful after it concludes, a human lifespan is useful only until it finishes. For this reason, in the course of making human triage decisions based only on age, a person approaching the close end of his lifespan must be regarded as declining in value. I do not know at what point a human being reaches maximum value, since the wisdom of age is worth a great deal. But if we have to kill innocent people, let's try to stick to babies and the elderly.
 Talk about the value of babies to you.
In the evening I was hungry so I walked down to the Wai Ling "Chinese American Restaurant" down on Flatbush near 8th Avenue. I'd never been there in peak dining hours before, so I got a chance to see the sort of food normally eaten by Wai Ling's largely African American clientele. I was in for a bit of a shock, imagining (based on the yellow-hued photographs of the dishes over the counter) that this was a Chinese restaurant. But most of the people there were eating soul food (or a subset thereof), fried chicken entrees that would not have been out of place at a Popeye's. In one of the three booths in the brightly-lit, brightly-colored dining room, a father was admonishing his young daughter about her unsightly voraciousness in attacking a drumstick. A young woman, the only other white person there, was evidently thinking the same thing I was and turned to me and asked semi-smirkingly if I'd ever tried the Mexican food here. I hadn't. She hadn't either and admitted that the menu I characterized as a "multicultural potpourri" was "scary."
Remember, guys, Halloween is about dressing up as something scary. Back in 1998, during the early phase of what was to become the dotcom boom, I attended my still-modest dotcom's Halloween party dressed as a stock market crash. It defies the spirit of the season for kids to dress up as firemen, policemen, and postal workers. I know we owe a dept of gratitude to people on the front line in our war against ??????, but in this season, we need to be confronting our fears, not celebrating our heroes. I'm not giving candy to kids unless they're dressed as Islamic terrorists, envelopes leaking mysterious powders, cylindrical anthrax bacilli, or perhaps (for something of a retro feel) man-eating sharks, intern-screwing politicians, or, most fearsome of all, Phil Collins.
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