Air, water, and food spell happiness.

 

Air, water, and food spell happiness.

To go home, I drive by the Crowsnest Pass Food Bank. It is a relatively pleasant building with a good size parking lot that is never full. We often contribute in some ways, but hunger is not a glaring problem here.

I worked around homeless people in Calgary for a while. There were obvious problems, but we didn’t see people starving. It was not that rosy when I used to visit the United States. Statistics reveal that 38 million people there are food insecure every day.

We have our problems, but Canada is still one of the best places to be in, and our beloved mountain pass scores high even in our rich country. Anyone living here probably never witnessed the hunger and deprivation that is so common in other places.

As I am writing, there is a summit in the United Nations trying to address how to end hunger around the world by 2030. The world can produce all the food that we need, but there are millions, perhaps billions, of people who don’t know if they will have food on the table tonight.

If we have what people need, why are so many people migrating around the world and often fighting only to survive? Why do we need all the armies and very expensive weapons to secure our borders? How come millions of people are displaced with no place to call home? To me, it’s a question of management.

Everywhere in the world, people used to live on little self-sustaining farms. The efficiency of farming improved with modernization while jobs on farms disappeared. The same happened with industry. Until my grandparents’ generation, labour was a resource that we could not do without. Automation and offshoring took over. The goal of capitalism is to buy cheap and sell expensive, so we pushed the vast majority out of their sources of income. They had no work, and we had fewer customers.

People still need to eat, get medical care, and pursue happiness, which fuels the economy. What is left to do? Perhaps government jobs and service industries. Those jobs are simple to obtain, so their pay is being lowered. It does not motivate society to improve the situation, opting to chase the “surplus people” around and even exposing them to premature death. That is the rationale motivating people not to use vaccines and other life-prolonging measures.

I survey “news” from around the world and see a bleak picture. Life is good, but can’t stay that way. The world around me is literally burning, so I turn to professional help. The advice I receive is to restrict how much time I spend watching the news. It makes me feel like the cattle on a transport truck going to Cargill to be butchered and turned into Big Macs and Teen burgers. I search and find other solutions.

In 2015, a story went viral and soon disappeared. It resurfaced recently. It had the solution to our current problems, but it got buried in other news and people never followed through with the idea.

A young self-made millionaire named Dan Price changed the pay system in his company “Gravity Payments.” While he, as the CEO, was making 1.1 million a year, some of his employees who made less than 35,000 a year were having problems keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads. Dan Price took a scientific approach to solve the problem. His research revealed that people’s optimal income at the time was 75,000 a year. At that income level, they had a good life. Increasing the income did not add to their enjoyment of life. Dan met with all the employees and announced one pay for all the workers, including himself, 70,000 a year.

A few people lost pay and quit, his brother sued him, but the business went on and flourished. The media had a heyday. Fox News condemned him as a communist, but he was invited to the White House after winning business awards. All of this happened not far from the Crowsnest Pass, in Seattle. Now they also have an office in Boise, Idaho. There is much more information on the net.

The idea of changing society’s focus from predatory selfish goals to social caring and sharing is not new at all. When the focus is on people’s happiness instead of prestige and accumulated individual wealth, life becomes different. One can look at our neighbours, for example, the Hutterite Colonies around us. Although not everyone is cut for agrarian simple living, there is evidence that humans do well when freely sharing with each other.

Now Canadians have spoken clearly and decisively, choosing a minority government the second time around. We know that a third of us are believers in making the rich richer and waiting for it to trickle down. They also have other beliefs that may be the reason our hospitals are full to overcapacity. A third want to continue the way we are, and the last third wants a more progressive approach.

The Prime Minister is driving on a road paved for change. We have distributed money to many regular people and small businesses, which will alter the course of the country’s economy. Many people are choosing not to work for the barely livable income they had before. Many are choosing to work from home and others are starting new little businesses, choosing to be the masters of their own faith. Young students are begging to go to school. (Safely of course.) The Trump-engineered rift with China is healed and kids are out in the streets demanding solutions to the climate crisis. It’s a brave new world.

A person I don’t know said: “Let’s see if the whippersnapper has the guts to fight for food, water, and air for all Canadians.” I listened without saying a word.