Autism

We're so comfortable, we want a callus around ourselves that protects us from the awful shit that's going down, or going to. I point out the fact that the people who make words (Romans and the rest of history) only inserted an 'o' to get to 'callous.' I have, and have had for a while, this dilemma rolling around my mind. There are close to seven billion people in the world- India and China can make the twisted boast that a billion persons walk or beg inside their borders. Most of the persons I know are fortunate: we have food at as many meals as we want, we have beds in heated rooms; I don't fine mine well-heated enough. That I can even make that complaint!

An argument for concern seems redundant to me- my clearest thoughts always push me to kindness. And the ideal assumes that each human life is infinitely valuable, which is also to say that each human life is worth the same as every other. They deal in potential- within himself, every human has at least the potential to consider his existence valid. Most probably do. We're not up against it yet, but there's enough disaster looming ahead of us in time that we might come up against these assumptions in a way we haven't so far. There are many possibilities that arise with ignoring global warming, for instance; the Stern Review indicates that allowing the 2 to 3 degrees centigrade rise in global temperature will correspondingly jumpstart the biggest market failure in human history. One upshot: 200 million persons permanently displaced, a good number from several of the world's largest cities, as the Greenland ice sheet and other huge blocks of ice melt and raise sea levels. These aren't the kind of natural disasters that take people's lives by their own force, though- people are going to fight over what's left as crop yields fall and the land on which they've lived is covered in water. This is just one problem, and I don't expect governments to give it more than lipservice before the effects are irreversible- apparently, the nature of this problem makes it pick up speed of its own accord. There are others: last year we had a good time with a book that gloated over oil running out and pitched a similar story, except with disaster coming from within the bounds of human activity. Unrest, combined with rogue groups in possession of nuclear weapons, adds another angle to this picture.

In light of these things I can see how we want to get our fill now, and how the Lord's Resistance Army and Darfur and other 'third-world' concerns don't really move us. But the commodification of human life makes a more willing partner to a surplus of it, with the outcome that it won't be shameful to have second-class citizens. My question is (I address this first to America on immigrants, and then to Israel, for introspection's sake) how are they chosen?