http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0114-01.htm
Published on Tuesday,
January 14, 2003 by the Boston Globe
The 29th Day for America?
by James Carroll
CONSIDER THE LILIES, Jesus said - but he was thinking of the field.
The lesson for the political season just underway comes from the
lilies of the pond, water lilies. It is an old French riddle.
''At first there is only one lily pad in the pond, but the next
day it doubles, and thereafter each of its descendants doubles.
The pond completely fills up with lily pads in 30 days. When is
the pond exactly half full? Answer: on the 29th
day.''
The entomologist Edward
O. Wilson uses this riddle to illustrate
the urgency of our ecological crisis. ''Because earth is finite
in many resources that determine the quality of life - including
arable soil, nutrients, fresh water, and space for natural
ecosystems - doubling of consumption at constant intervals
can bring disaster with shocking suddenness. Even when
a
nonrenewable resource has been only half used, it is still only
one interval away from the end.'' The 29th day can feel
like
a normal day - look how much room is left in the pond
- but it can actually be the eve of catastrophe. Only
those
who are paying close attention may see the dire significance
of the day, but by then their biggest problem is the complacency
of those who do not know what time it is.
On the 29th day, the
pond is half-choked to death, but it seems OK.
Surely we have another 29 days to fix the problem. But do we?
How this lesson applies to the earth's dwindling resources is
obvious,
but it has meaning in other areas as well.
Apply the image of
the exponentially reproducing lily pads to
the phenomenon of human aggressiveness. Am I imagining it,
or has there been a doubling and redoubling of world belligerence
since Sept. 11, 2001? Last January, the United States issued a
Nuclear Posture Review that effectively abandoned the longstanding
(and treaty-mandated) commitment to move toward the ultimate
elimination of nuclear weapons. That emphatic American legitimizing
of its own weapons of mass destruction surely led to a doubling
and redoubling of an attitude of reliance on weapons of mass
destruction around the pond, especially once their significance
for the exercise of power was made explicit by the United States
Strategic Doctrine in October 2002.
Last week, in a demonstration
of lily pad-like reproduction,
India issued its own nuclear posture statement, and the rumbles
from Pakistan immediately doubled. The two nations stake a
mutually threatening claim to power that is the very child of
the claim staked in Washington. (Indeed, Pakistan's terrifying
refusal to join India in renouncing first use of nuclear weapons
is itself patterned on - and legitimized by - the permanent
US refusal to renounce first use.) In this environment of
exponentially expanding belligerence, who does not shudder
to hear the North Koreans evoke the specter of World War III?
With such shocking new levels of war preparation roiling Asia,
imagine what decisions are quietly being made in Beijing and Tokyo.
Meanwhile, Israelis
and Palestinians take for granted a level of
weaponized contempt that would have been unthinkable not long
ago,
and, yes, there, too, the family vine of dead-or-alive militarism
is rooted in Washington. That these world developments approach
climax exactly when the United States finally orders the deployment
of its war-fighting army to the Middle East - coincidence?
The United States may or may not be the indispensable nation,
but when it come war, it is certainly the generating lily pad.
And this week the pond is half full.
Not only war. There
is an exponentially growing coarseness of
life in the United States. That homeless people are sleeping
in doorways again is a sure sign that the American sense of
civic kinship is being choked. That protections of law are
shrinking is another. We are constantly invited to care about
ourselves and our kind, with no concern for those in other
circumstances. The great symbol of this is the shrinking
role
of government as the guarantor, and if necessary the provider,
of essential human needs. Tax cuts may or may not be
economic
stimulators, but they are certainly death blows to clinics,
schools, libraries, laboratories, food banks - and the impulse
of the young to make careers in public service. Imagine our
nation as an overgrown pond in which a few lily pads have
ample sunlight and room to flourish while all the others are
drowning in the fetid dark. For a while yet, the privileged
lilies can maintain the illusion that they are not tied to
all the rest, equally doomed.
War abroad. Coarseness
at home. Ecological disaster, too.
On the 29th day, things may not seem so bad - but are we more
than ''one interval away from the end?'' This urgent question
must define the political season that begins now - the overdue
challenge to George W. Bush, whose policies are choking the
nation and the world.
James Carroll's column
appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2002
Globe Newspaper Company
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