127. Nasruddin’s Big Pot
Nasruddin brought some friends home. He seated them at the table and then went into the kitchen.
“But we have no food!” his wife said. “No meat, no rice, no vegetables, nothing. We don’t even have wood to light a fire to cook with.”
“I’ll think of something,” said Nasruddin.
He looked around the kitchen, grabbed their biggest cooking pot, and went into the other room.
“Dear friends,” he said, “if we had any meat or rice or vegetables, or wood with which to light a fire, this is the pot I would use to cook a soup for you!”
This Tale is from “Tiny Tales of Nasruddin” by Laura Gibbs. The book is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-202The2 Laura Gibbs
A short and quick shopping trip to the local restaurant and what now passes as the general store in small town America. The restaurant was the Windmill which is less than a mile north of the Park where I call home. This is the second time I have stopped there. The breakfast was so so but the best thing about the place was that it was open when it claimed to be. The other restaurant nearby, the Fe Skillet, has been closed three times when I stopped on days that it claimed to be open. Three strikes and your out is how the came is played – it is out. The local store is a Dollar General and I now think of them as being the replacement for the old time general store that got wiped out by Walmart. However, in small towns Dollar General is moving into that vacuum.
American and European exceptionalism has existed in one form or another since the early days of colonialism. It’s hundreds of years of gunboat diplomacy and technological breakouts, as the rest of the world struggled to understand what was happening, and cope with the invaders. And the last cards in that game are going to be played in this present generation. In the future, we’re all Mexicans. That’s the standard of living towards which globalisation is driving us. Every country will have its rich and its poor, and some will generally do better than others, but the overwhelming military and technological superiority, which was the foundation of the economic hegemony of America and Europe, is largely at an end. Europeans and Americans are soon going to live in the same world as everybody else: the world in which you do not have everything you want, and sometimes you do not have enough. That is coming because the plenty we took for granted was based on the absurd political power imbalances that gunpowder and mechanised war brought us, when only we controlled them. As military force runs out as an option, and industrial production becomes available to everybody, America and Europe lose the economic advantages which came with being in control of the majority of resources of the globe.
In the future, all of us on Planet Earth are going to be dealing with the fact that there are seven billion of us. In the future, you do not get a jacuzzi. Not unless you are very, very lucky and are one of the rich, or unless your jacuzzi runs on abundant resources, not scarce ones. If you live in a hot country, you can use the sun. In a country with abundant biomass, you can burn wood. In a cold country with geothermal springs, you can use the ground. But you are not going to burn natural gas for fun in 50 years time in any scenario I can imagine from here, and that’s the end of a brief, short, foolish age. We can still live well, but it must be wisely and appropriately, as if we were going to live a thousand years, but knowing we will not. — ‘Black Elephants and Skull Jackets’ by Vinay Gupta in Dark Mountain