gat

"Don’t do it," I begged. "They should take off running, but what if they don’t? What if that pack
of fighting drunks goes for you because they like to fight and think it’s none of your business?
Why don’t we just find another place for you to sleep? You’ve got a plane to Germany in the
morning. Let’s keep our eye on the ball." Driving to another motel, I said cautiously, "You know,
what they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as
we get older." She was too angry to hear, I think.
It’s fairly clear to me by now that we engage in our endless foreign adventures, launching military
forces against tiny islands like Grenada, or tiny nations like Panama, bombing the vast deserts of
Iraq, a country of 22 million people, or engage in our reckless social adventures, too, patenting
human genes, forcing kids to be dumb, because our leadership classes are worn out from the long
strain of organizing everything over the centuries. Our leadership has degenerated dramatically,
just as British leadership did after Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking. Recently I read of an
American newsman who walked unchallenged into a nuclear weapons storage facility near
Moscow watched over by a single guard without a weapon. It tends to make me skeptical about
any orderly scientific future. Is it possible that those who sit atop the social bell curve represent
the worst of evolution’s products, not its best? Have the fools among us who just don’t get it
risen up and taken command?
Think of the valent symbols of our time: Coca-Cola, the Marlboro Man, disposable diapers,
disposable children, Dolly the cloned sheep, Verdun, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the national highway
system, My Lai, fiat money, the space program, Chernobyl, Waco, the Highway of Death,
welfare, Bhopal, hordes of homeless, psychopathic kids filling the corridors of the schools put out
of sight and mind until their morale is deteriorated; think of Princess Di and the Ponzi scheme we
call Social Security, the missile attack on the Sudan, the naval blockade of Haiti. The naval
blockade of Haiti? Is any of this real? People who walk the dogs and kiss the grandchildren are all
so tired of grandiose schemes and restless utopians I doubt if too many would really care if the
planet exploded tomorrow.
Think of the never-ending stream of manufactured crises like the invasion of Panama or the
cremation of Iraq, principal products of a spent leadership trying to buy itself time while the grail
search for a destiny worth having goes on in laboratories and conference rooms instead of in
homes and villages where it belongs. Did the people who arrange this sorry soap opera ever take
note how green the world really is, how worthwhile the minds and hearts of average men and
women, how particular the hue of each blade of grass? It’s the terrible idleness of the social
engineering classes that drives them mad, I think. They have nothing worthwhile to do, so they do
us.
Tania Aebi
Tania Aebi was a seventeen-year-old New York City school dropout bicycle messenger in 1987
when she decided to become the first American woman to sail around the world alone. She had a
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