The Lord hears the cry of the poor.

 

The Lord hears the cry of the poor.

I think it was 1955. We were sitting around the kitchen table on the farm with light from the kerosene lamp. There was also a candle with a lot of wax drips around it that we could take to the bathroom. I was little playing with a little wooden truck and my parents were playing cards. It was quiet, aside from some horse noise from the barn. No electricity, telephone or a car. All that we had came from the little store in the town about a mile away. I could hear the rain on the roof and window.

This same scenario was repeated all over the world, including rural Alberta. Most people lived like that. I had been to the city a few times and knew that at night there were lights in the windows, cars in the streets, and people walking with umbrellas. For us, there was a hand-cranked World War II flashlight that I couldn’t operate yet. The stars on a clear night were outstanding. Mostly we lived as people did for thousands of years, but there was a bus twice a day and sometimes we heard a prop airplane and used to run out to see it. People read books and the occasional newspaper when it was available. Everybody did some crafts. I was wearing socks that mom knitted. Our energy footprint was tiny.

Now more than half a century passed, and the world changed a lot. Many people still use candles and lamps but we are playing with new toys. Nomads in tents have cell phones. Two of us, my wife and I, have seven computer-like devices, two vehicles and God only knows how many lightbulbs. Hardly anyone makes things by hand. I live modestly yet I possess more things than a whole town used to. Most of the “things” are made somewhere else in the world. If I had to pay someone here to make them, it would bankrupt me many times over. Mom invested a week to make my socks and now I am wearing socks I bought for a couple of bucks at a two-for-one sale. In 1955, the world had less than half the people that we have now.

The US and Canada industrialized years ago and people moved to the cities to work in “jobs” while farms and small businesses disappeared. When I entered the market, there was still a need for skilled workers, but the jobs were slowly broken into components requiring less skill. Some thirty years or so ago, a transformation occurred. It became more efficient to move our jobs to less developed countries and transport finished goods back. The less developed countries took advantage of the situation and here workers were left with less ability to make a good living.  

Soon our tradespeople no longer could make things, they mostly replaced components made in China. The high skilled people no longer could apply their skills without machines made somewhere else, and we were competing with people living in poverty in faraway lands. We elected leaders who promised more “efficiency,” and at the same time more well-paying jobs. While they flooded the market with cheaply made goods, there was no room or need for skilled highly pay workers. Only one solution remained. “Create jobs.”

How can you do that? Our automated industries hardly need most of our workers. Cheap workers for service industries are imported and our folks don’t do cheap jobs, but the economy needs their buying power to continue working. Most created jobs depend on revenues from dwindling or dangerous exploitation of natural resources or on government injection of money. We could solve the problem, but it would require withdrawing from addictions we formed. Addictions to using what we can no longer produce and selling raw materials or stored energy that we dig up.

Our other addiction is our fanatical devotion to the few amongst us who “made it”. We look at them, taking the meat and fat from our economy, by tax manipulation, admiring them, and dreaming that someday we will be them. They enjoy our admiration and risk our species’ survival to get more.

When all the manufacturing jobs were exported, the related pollution went with it. Now it gives the corporations an excuse not to curtail pollution. China and India are blamed. Fantastic schemes are named saving graces. The future generations will filter carbon out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Other possibilities are, increased production of pollutants will enable us to afford cleaning up the planet. Another, we will “promise” the poorest nations money in carbon credits for their rescue and let them burn or drown. We will promise them vaccines against a pandemic also in the same breath.

The new situation, where the world is changing thanks to the effects of pollution is creating tension at the borders. There are additional factors that make some parts of the world uninhabitable and it’s growing. People who are hardly equipped to deal with change are squeezed, often losing the traditional farms in areas that no longer can provide the necessities of life. We left them with one option, to migrate to new areas, including the more prosperous West. This creates fights and armed conflicts. Those fortunate to exist where conditions are somewhat better rise to defend their way of living. We spent more money on defending borders than on improving the situation.

Solutions are developing like Mycelium (mushroom roots) to replace plastics Perovskite (sand) Solar Cells to make electricity from windows, but we do not divert the money that keeps polluting industries to make them viable. Existing industries fight back.

I listen to my favourite hymn; The Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor, Psalms 34, and wonder. Where will He take it from here? We can’t go back to 1955. Is the Lord going to abandon us and start working on a new race that will do better than us?

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