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to Basic Four - Air, water food and shelter
Compiled by
Sohail Moughal
3 March 2007
The tallest free standing structure in the world, 1815 feet high, not meant
for human occupation, but meant to support a TV antenna is in Toronto. It is
called the CN Tower. A few years ago, I was forced by my client to climb to
about 1700 feet level, to inspect the installation of a product that was manufactured
by the company I worked for at that time. Going up the elevator was easy, but
while climbing the ladder after the elevator, I was gasping for air, was terribly
cold, had to stop every few rungs of the ladder to have a drink. I don't know
if I needed the drink or had to take a breath, but it surely had turned out
to be much more different experience than I had expected. The contractors foreman
who was guiding me to show the installation offered me an energy bar when we
reached the area to be inspected. That's when I thought of air, water, food
and shelter. Thats all I wanted at that time.
Needless to say that at the very basic level, we the humans need these four
things for our survival as entities. I call them the basic four. Survival as
a species or a race needs one more thing called sex. Sex amongst other things
progresses the mankind, keeps our species from going extinct. Still sex holds
a secondary position in the race for survival as our entities need to have air,
water, food and shelter more than sex. I am sure if a human was dying on an
island or gasping for breath at the top of a tower, sex would be the farthest
thing to come to ones mind.
So lets see what have we done as humans, to counter our dependency on "the
basic four". "The basic four" is a handicap we as a species have
to live with. The history of mankind shows that we have evolved tremendously
from the caves we used to live in to things like travel into space for leisure
and adventure. I would assume, that every single species in the world knows
what they need to survive. The species fight, struggle, try hard to reduce their
dependency on their handicaps. Some fight independently to overcome their handicaps
and some fight collectively. As I see it, humans have been fighting independently
and the collective effort, despite being the most intelligent species of all,
has not happened. Air, water, food and shelter at the basic level for all the
humans, shouldnt cost much.
So lets see what are the achievements of mankind. We are struggling to build
the highest, largest, and widest buildings every day. The worlds largest usable
space is owned by Boeing in Washington and engulfs 13.3 million cubic meters.
According to a Children's welfare organization, in Washington, a child is born
into poverty every 43 minutes. Today in the U.S. the poverty line is $13 per
person per day before taxes. The US census bureau says that 17.6% of U.S. children
live in poverty, whereas the poverty rate for black children is 33.2% and for
Hispanic children is 28.9%, compared with a poverty rate of 14.8% for white
children. Every year more than a million people in the U.S. embrace the poverty
line according to the Washington Post. Just to check the significance of our
cell phones with built in calculators, a simple calculation will reveal a lot
of cubic meters of irony, knowing that the high class construction in the world
ranges between 1800 USD to 4400 USD per square meter. The Great Wall of China
has the largest footprint in the world of around 4.16 million square meters.
Second to the Wall of China is a flower selling shop in Australia of around
a million square meters. It sells around 20 million flowers every day. The biggest
floor area is also in China owned by Asia Container Terminals Limited spanning
about a million square meters. The largest mass is owned by the Romanian Parliament
with over a million cubic meters of marble. In addition to other things like
steel, bronze, wood, and glass, the crystal weighs 3500 metric tons. The woolen
carpets alone scatter over are quarter of a million square meters. The shopping
Mall with biggest leaseable space is in China, which will be surpassed soon
by the two Malls being built in Dubai with over a million square meters of rentable
space. Monuments like Angkor wat, Petra, the Pyramids, The Acropolis, Machi
Puicchu, Chichen Itza and host of other recent ones like the Taj Mahal, show
how fond of grandeur we always have been. Not just the businessmen, but the
warlords, priests, kings, caliphs, lovers, architects and engineers were all
involved in reflecting how ignorant we are. Industrialisation and megaprojects
created vast wealth for a few, but left the mankind trapped, struggling for
the basic four. The pursuit of finer elements of life replaced the fulfillment
of primary and basic needs. Did they ever think of what mankind really needs
the foremost. Some one said, if you really think of the world we live in, we
are very small entities and therefore our needs are very small too. These gigantic
wonders of science do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Across
the developing world, man-made climate change is an indisputable reality and
it is already hitting hardest against the poorest nations. Peru's glaciers are
melting. High in the Andes, freak hailstorms and cold snaps are freezing llamas
to death. In the north of Kenya, unprecedented droughts have driven herdsmen
into deadly battles for the few water holes. In the mountains of Tajikistan,
near the border with Afghanistan, flooding and landslides are washing away the
crops. The amount of resource depletion and the size of ecological footprint
caused by a few million cubic meters of construction here and a few more million
meters of industries there, who cares, we are even more awed by the advances
of science and technology.
Today, in addition to adding new categories for the wonders of the world, we
are continuously conducting nuclear tests, contaminating the land with radiations,
creating a lot of junk in the space and in the oceans and on land, we are implanting
biocompatible computer chips in ourselves, and fiddling with our genes. Soon
we will be blending ourselves with machines, turning natural-born humans into
endangered species. Look what we are doing to ourselves. In the past we were
divided into different populations with no contact with each other for a long
time, and thus we diverged into different gene pools. But now we are all assimilating.
Out of 2500 languages in the world at present, only a few hundred will be passed
on to the next generations. Out of the many cultures only a few will prevail.
Soon we shall be planning to create a super human race. It seems that we have
decided to evolve ourselves in a way that a best mix of genes is created throughout
the mankind. Who knows, maybe someone somewhere might think of "the basic
four" and create a super human without these dependencies. We have athletes
and army men being turned into superhuman's already. We have super models and
super performers in the media too. Soon we will have them in colleges, night
clubs and offices. But who knows for how long the super human is going to survive.
Many think that diversity should be left alone and not mixed. Because a homogenous
human will be prone to many new risks and face a quicker distinction without
leaving isolated and diverse populations behind to start anew. So even if we
think we might solve the issue of "the basic four" this way, its really
not going to get solved still.
I see juvenile armies with guns. I see people with no homes, some feeding from
garbage and some dying in the cold winter or lack of drinking water or lack
of food or too much heat. I see pregnant women with no desire to have babies.
I see men with no purpose, some killing others for power and some killing themselves
for the lack of power. I see kids addicted to drugs, or born with tubercolosis
or HIV. I see humans torn apart for revenge tied to two cars driving in opposite
directions, or some amputated for voting against or for someone. I see women
selling themselves for a drop of milk for a newborn, some being smuggled and
some willing to be smuggled for whatever reasons. I see overthrown democracies
and installed dictatorships. I see brutal secret police and death squads trained
for personal enimosities. I see people displaced from their homelands. I see
people suffering continuously with no hope on the horizon. I see it happening
everywhere, in places like Central Africa, above the Arctic Circle, on the banks
of Nile or Indus or the Ganges, in the depths of the outback, in the middle
of oil rich countires, and on the streets of super powers, both sides of the
equator. I
find it hard to understand what could we have posibly achieved from the historic
events of 65 million people dying in the two world wars, another 45 million
dying from the great leap forward and the secret famines of China, not to forget
what we humans did in Congo free state, Khmer Rouge, Biafran Revolt, Rawandan
massacres, Indo Chine wars, Mexican revolution, and the Colonial era. Not only
the Jews, Sudenese, Angolans, Aboriginies, Red Indians, Somalians, Ethiopians,
West Pakistanis, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranis, Palestinians, and the Lebanese, but
if we look at the biggest 30 atrocities of the century, we see, we've got rich
countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small, all caught
in the denial process. We've got people of all colors -- white, black, yellow
and brown -- widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees.
We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another
in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've
got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some
are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We've got innocent victims
invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we've got plenty of countries who brought
it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. We have been bad,
very very bad, really. And we are still struggling for the basic four.
Imagine how our lives would have been if we did not have to worry about the
air, water, food and shelter. Imagine these things were available for free.
One of them, air, pretty much is. As the air is becoming scarce and the air
quality is becoming worse, we have started making oxygen bars, environmental
protocols, and prohibitive and lavish policies. No one thought about issues
around air a few hundred years ago. It was in abundance. Now its not. But everyone
thought about the other three, water, food and shelter, and the lavishness that
could be achieved around them. They had expensive wine jugs, gormet wines, amazing
feasts, lavish tombs and mammoth palaces. Is it possible that, all the effort
that went into these three was just because they were not available for free
to all. If they were available for free, mankind would have done something different
to show the lavishness. And it might not have been so bad as it is now. Sometimes,
I think if mankind was not dependant on these four things, there was no need
for a law to control them or a religion to teach them. Imagine a baby being
born without the need for these basic four. Imagine a family without the need
for these four. Imagine an employee without the need for these four. Imagine
a ruler without the need for these four. Imagine yourself without the need for
these basic four. Imagine the freedom. We would be some what like animals. Sometimes
I ask myself are we the better creatures or actually the inferior ones. Totally
controlled, totally dependant, totally handicapped. Add sex to the basic four,
and start imagining again.