On
the way to London's Heathrow airport, I am, at the moment, surrounded
by many sleeping passengers. Most, that is, with the exception of
the fellow who is in the aisle seat next to my inner seat, who is
watching a program on his video monitor. He pulled his feet back to
allow me to get to my seat. The seats are arranged with two aisles in 2-4-2 arrangement, with seats alternating in direction, either facing forward or facing aft.
Peter had accumulated enough air miles to get us
tickets in Business Class, which, on British Airways, is very, very
nice. Our seats fold down completely flat, and there are footstools
opposite our seats that flip down from the partition between seats. Peter and I are in seats D
and E, in the middle. We're sitting facing the rear of the plane.
Takeoff was smooth, and though there has been some mild turbulence,
it's been a pretty good ride.
Prior to boarding the plane, we sat in the British
Airways lounge at the San Diego airport and each had a bowl of
tomato-based cream soup. We shared a charcuterie plate, with a
couple kinds of sausage, sliced prosciutto, and what they call
“country pate,” which is really just a terrine made with coarsely
ground meat. The passenger on my outside just turned off his video
screen, so I'm under the impression that he's going to go to sleep
for a while.
Actually,
I may go back to sleep.
After
eating dinner, which started with lobster tail and a salad, followed
by cheese-stuffed pasta with a creamy mushroom sauce, I thought about
how I wanted to finish the meal, and decided on the dessert, which
was a slice made up of a chocolate layer and a hazelnut layer, topped
by a white cream. The hazelnut and chocolate layers are firm,
something between a dense cake and a cookie. The white cream on top
was... well, creamy. I had coffee with it. The coffee filled the
cup almost all the way to the rim, so the mild turbulence spilt some
of the coffee out onto the placemat on my tray.
Peter'd
opted for the cheese plate with a glass of port. The flight
attendant serving him poured him a pretty tall glass of port. She
apologised for pouring so much, but Peter took it, anyway. I
reminded him, when he had finished most of the cheese on the plate,
that one of the privileges of flying (in general, traveling) this way
is that one need not feel compelled to be a “clean-plater.”
We
had a short conversation about clean-platers, whom are created out of
a sense of necessity, because the implication is that one must eat
while one can because one's next meal is not assured. Peter said
that that is an upbringing thing, isn't it, and I said yes, it is.
He explained that he was raised as a clean-plater, but that he has
not raised his daughters that way, which probably gives them a
healthier relationship with food. I am trying to do similarly with Kat,
though I think I've inadvertently raised a clean-plater...
It's
a class issue: “upper” classes of people can eat to a
comfortable level of fullness, because once one feels full, one stops
eating, thus not overfilling one's belly with unnecessary calories.
There is always more food to be had when necessary. Unfortunately,
there are people (a large minority of the human population, I
believe, if not an actual majority) for whom this is not the case.
Food is a necessity that must be used wholly and completely, because
one may not know where or from whence one's next meal is coming, or
whether it is coming at all.
Human
society, as a whole, is striving to feeding its entire population
sufficiently. However, with the ever-increasing number of humans on a limited planet, this has not, so far, been possible. Some
geographic and economic regions are richer than others and have the
luxury of food abundance, whether the food is grown locally, as in
such is in places like San Diego, or imported, as in places such as
Las Vegas, where much of the
population have sufficient wealth to import foods from those more productive regions. This is true not only on a local or
national level, but on an international level: some countries, like
the United States, are flush with food (even though food distribution
is unequal). Other regions of the world, such as the desert regions
of Africa, do not have the ability to produce or buy sufficient food
to support their burgeoning human populations.
Before
modern human technology, which only occurred in the last couple
hundred years or so, each geographical region could only support a
certain (human) population density, and different numbers of people
lived in different geographical regions of the world. There was zero
overpopulation. If a population's demands outstrip resources, a
portion of the population will die, leaving (one hopes) a healthier
(or more fit) population to continue as a smaller population.
The
human population began its exponential growth with advances in
medical technology which have lowered the death rate phenomenally.
Not only are more people surviving to breeding age, but people are
living longer (with the recent news of life expectancy
notwithstanding). Modern science has even eradicated many childhood
diseases which used to be a rite of passage, like chicken pox and
measles, as well as (nearly) ridding us of other, more dangerous,
diseases, like typhoid and smallpox...
Thinking
about disease eradication, there are few groups of people I despise
more than people who refuse to vaccinate their children. In all
fairness, I think these parents ought to be winners of the Darwin
Awards, leaving a healthier, if less-religiously inclined,
population. Unfortunately, anti-vaccers don't only cause the spread
of disease in their own lineage, but spread it to innocents around
them.
The
claim of parental privilege when it comes to the willful neglect of
children appalls me. It is a form of child abuse.
When one can
perceive a threat to one's offspring, is one not obligated by one's
conscience (or at least by a desire to pass on one's genetics) to
protect that life? What these parents fail to realise
is that they live within a healthy society because
of modern medicine's ability to eradicate much of the diseases that
used to plague it. They deny not only their children that same
privilege, but also the others in their community. I think that as a
step towards a healthy population, children who are not immunised be
excluded from public schools, at the very least. If parents truly
wish to remain a part of the society into which they are privileged to have been born, they will act accordingly in order to maintain herd immunity
to preventable diseases.
A
current, if mild, example of the curse of anti-vaccers is whooping
cough. It has reared its ugly head in California, and has spread to otherwise healthy children. Parents who
tend to deny their children vaccines also tend to have children at an
alarming rate. They claim religious privilege, but my opinion is
that their religious privilege ends where my child's right to live,
unencumbered by the threat of easily eradicable diseases, begins.
Their right to practice their religion does not
give them the right to kill others through willful neglect. By
refusing to live up to the implicit agreement between the individual
and the society, they are, essentially, forfeiting their right to
live amongst that society. The world has run out of room for
religious zealots to pioneer new territory under the influence of the
insanity that is religion, particularly one: christianity.
The
United States, my home, was founded on secular
principles. Those principles are being challenged by the incursion
of religious pretensions. That zealotry needs to be stamped out, and
I believe it's happening. I can only do my part to inform and
educate. I hope that the recent rise in fundamentalism and acting
out (ie, terrorism) on the part of various religions (muslim,
christian, and otherwise) is religion in its death throws.
It is society's forward momentum that will finally advance our
species beyond the dark age of magical thinking.
