| EGGSHELLS
by Erica Sontheimer
Yes, I suppose, but I really wasn’t aware of it. I guess I was so engrossed in creating it that I didn’t notice how long it took. It was nothing…I mean, I’ve made a couple before, so I had some practice. But then, this one’s special, that’s what I was thinking the whole time I was painting it. Still, if it’s too much trouble…
Oh, are they? My hands always shake, it’s nothing to worry about. You know, I could always keep it for you, but then I guess that wouldn’t really be the same. You wouldn’t be able to look at it whenever you wished then, and I don’t think it’d be happy sitting in my room when it was meant for you. So if you’d like it, I’d much rather give it to you, and I’ll understand if something happens to it. Only as long as it gives you more joy than concern. I’d never give you something that was going to cause you strife! But I thought, well, I already told you; I thought you might enjoy having it near you.
Yes, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have troubled you with it. I don’t know what I was thinking, and now I regret bringing it to you, without warning too, as you yourself said. No, I think it might be better to take it back with me, wrap it carefully and guard it in a box, store it in a safe place. I could always take it out again then, when I wanted to remember it or show it to someone else.
Okay, here it is. It fits nicely in there, but of course you couldn’t keep it in your hands like that, that’d be rather silly.
Oh please take it, it would mean so much to me, even if you break it! It really isn’t complete until I give it to you and you accept it. Then at least it’ll have passed from my hands to yours, that much will have been done, regardless of what might happen next. No, wait, what am I saying? Suddenly this has become so complicated, when all I was trying to do was simplify things. That’s the problem with giving; it requires responsibility for both, the giver and the receiver, and I didn’t want to do that. I shouldn’t have made it at all, now that I think about it. I could have been doing something else, something more useful, more worthwhile. Here, let me have it back; I’m sorry to have concerned you.
But I wonder how you’ll feel tomorrow, or a year from now, having it in your possession. Will it still be something you care for, something you enjoy? Will you pick it up now and then and dust it off? No, again I’m sorry, but I can’t give it to you. I’d rather give you the relief of not having it, the liberty from the care of it. I…I meant to show you with this eggshell that I care about you, I just wanted to give, freely, but there’s no such thing, I realize now. Somewhere I read that you hold onto someone through all that you give them, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m holding you back or holding you down or…I don’t know.
Hm.
I don’t know. Give me back my eggshell. For some reason it hurts me more to hear you say this when you’re holding it there in your hand. I don’t know, I don’t know, now I just wish I’d never done anything at all! But who cares, you’ll forget about it eventually, and so will I—there’s more than enough to worry about these days, right? Give it back; I want to break it—at least I can be responsible for that much, and that will be an act of completion, that will suffice.
Oh, enough already! It doesn’t matter—it’s all worthless, didn’t you say so yourself? Even if I break it, make that "act of completion," it’s a lie—there’s no such thing. Why are we always trying to fool ourselves into believing there are patterns, rules, right and wrong? I don’t care either way now, honestly, none of it matters, I don’t know how I feel.
Hm.
Hm. Yes. Take it. I give it to you. Now shut up. by Howard McCord The notion that compassion is always a virtue is an illusion of long durability in the west, doubtless due to its prominence in the Judeo-Christian ethos. This particular illusion has clouded the minds of otherwise brilliant folk, and led to catastrophic suffering—especially in this century of scientific advance. It is my contention, in fact, that indiscriminate compassion has led to greater human misery than all the brutish and savage wars of this century. It has done so by giving an implicit priority to the broadest possible application of every medical advance which prolongs life expectancy. This has been the century in which medicine was transformed from an art to a science, a science which has enjoyed phenomenal development. Life expectancy has increased by at least a third, and the rate of infant mortality has dropped as dramatically; consequently more and more people live long enough to breed, and the population has increased from two billion to more than six billion this century. Such an increase has come at increased cost and damage to the whole ecological system of the earth. Other species are disappearing rapidly, land is laid waste as forests are downed, and agricultural land exhausted, and the time grows near when the Malthusian vectors intersect, and food production can no longer match population demands. Already millions of youths live only long enough to breed in poverty, exist in some minimal way until they are ground down. If they are within reach of medical treatment and public health services, their plight is worsened, because they do not die in infancy and early childhood by those diseases which once held human population in check, but are saved for a lingering death in a squalid-shanty town, or in some barbarous tribal conflict brought on not only by stupidity and prejudice, but by pressure of numbers on limited soil. Children can be inoculated against various diseases, but not against hunger, despair, violence. When such children died in infancy or their early years, their deaths seldom generated wars, their struggles were tiny, and however painful to those who loved them, did not extrapolate into larger conflicts. Today, however, in Africa the average soldier is in his young teens, as in our own cities the most violent criminals are youths. In such numbers, in such poverty, there are no means to socialize them, humanize them, give the many meaningful connection to civilization. Biologically, man is the supreme predator, and no more so than on his own kind. Homo hominus lupus - Man is a wolf to man. Early in the history of DDT, when it was used successfully to wipe out a good deal of malaria in India, the Indian government was faced with the problem of what to do with several million more Indians than the economic and agricultural system was prepared to care for. The cost of these saved millions ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars which India did not have. Wide-scale famine was averted only by the fortuitous arrival of "The Green Revolution" which provided new strains of rice and wheat that saved the day—and the next few years—but not all the tomorrows. To apply measures which increase life expectancy on a mass scale, without considering the consequences is foolish, and bad public policy. To presume that there is some categorical imperative that demands that every life which can be saved, must be saved is even more than foolish. We live in a value-free universe, whatever religious fantasists may claim; all we have is our reason between us and the darkness. If we care about the species, we should at least remember what animal management has learned about the relation between numbers and food. If we care only for ourselves, our families, and our kind, we should then make decisions based on the good that will come to those by our actions. It is a vanity or vanities to suppose that all those born to humans can be expected to live out a full ripe age, generation after burgeoning generation, on an earth that does not expand at all. This is blindness and folly. The most basic control to excessive population growth is economic. Only those with economic power can expect to eat or be cured; the devil was created specifically to take the hindmost. But time and again we see societies attempting not to give the devil his due. One might argue that local welfare is reasonable, as it smoothes out the economic wrinkles that do occur, and provides some passage over rough times for those who indeed generally are able to pay their own way. Here in the USA, we are certainly engaged in a debate about how much and for how long everyone should pay for everyone else; and as we look beyond our borders, we see a curious mix of concern and disdain, of passionate cries to lend aid, and refusals to become engaged—with most of this a reflection of internal politics rather than philosophic reasoning. I believe the western world is generally deluded by its illusion that compassion is a categorical imperative, a good that should be abrogated. The western mind, inflamed by the success of science, has become fundamentally optimistic, believing all problems have pleasant solutions. But the Malthusian vectors admit to no such pleasant solution. Sooner or later, they intersect. The only way to avoid that catastrophe is to re-think the western enthronement of compassion as a primary civic virtue. Learn to let them not be born; learn to let them die. |
