Now that the holidays are both the ghost of Christmas past and the future as it is yet to be, I'm reminded of Scrooge and the unfurling of the two child/orphans of man "ignorance" and "want". Dickens was allegorical enough to realize that these two offspring come in many forms...from poor illiterates to mindless greed types. Want takes many forms from hunger to Madoff greed. Ignorance is even more desperate.So what of this picture? If I were on the Enterprise and Captain Kirk took a look down at his earth and was asked to pick the "average Joe" from the population...someone who stood right on the mid-line of the bell curve...what or who would he find?
Statistically it would be a rural Chinese making about $3000 a year and there are more than a few million of them. It would not be an American or a European nor someone from a lost tribe in the Philippines. Statistically we are in Western China somewhere and this is the guy. He isn't ignorant. Perhaps just not educated. He isn't poor by his contemporary standards and perhaps he doesn't "want" in the conventional sense except in times of poor harvest. So what's the point?
As we speed toward the latest cliff, please think that we have policy makers making huge decisions that effect the very fabric of society - economics and values. They make them on a basis that is so far removed from the "average Joe" just trying to get by as we do to the peasant in the picture. We have leaders who argue about what amounts to be a pittance - an undigested morsel - while moms everywhere are thinking about $8/gallon milk. Our average Joe's life isn't going to be much effected by our "crisis du jour" juxtaposed to the US's Joe who is going to be creamed by it.
The point is that the debates swirl at a level that is light years from the persons directly effected by the outcome. The gap or disconnect is huge. All the average Joe knows is that his life is the same as it was years or decades back yet it is somehow harder and he is less and less connected to those making decisions - the the decision makers are, unfortunately, just another set of fools suffering from ignorance and want.