I know it’s an impossible dream, but wouldn’t it make for a wonderful world if everyone started to play nice and fair. When I say “play,” I mean it as a euphemism for all of the ways, that we humans interact on both grand and small scales. What kind of inane notions am I spewing today? What I’m thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if, starting today, we stopped pulling out bazookas, tanks, rocket launchers, missiles, fighter jets and other weapons of mass and individual destruction every time we wanted to settle an argument.
I know it’s an impossible dream, but wouldn’t it make for a wonderful world if everyone started to play nice and fair. When I say "play,” I mean it as a euphemism for all of the ways, that we humans interact on both grand and small scales.
What kind of inane notions am I spewing today?
What I’m thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if, starting today, we stopped pulling out bazookas, tanks, rocket launchers, missiles, fighter jets and other weapons of mass and individual destruction every time we wanted to settle an argument.
Of course am not talking about the miniature arguments you have with a "moto” or "convayeri” or colleague at work after being short changed, no, I am talking about arguments on a colossal scale.
And wouldn’t it be fabulous if the citizens of every country in the world could use peaceful, democratic means rather than starting civil wars and intra-country battles, to decide which leaders will have the opportunity to lead and represent them.
While we’re at it, let’s also imagine a world without corruption, domestic violence, theft, fraud, and other forms of lying, computer viruses, spam and all of life’s other injustices, large and small.
I would also appreciate it if I could get an office in parliament when I wanted one, but I’d be willing to forego that if it meant we could achieve a peaceful, honorable and just existence for all of us.
I’m not naive. I know that nastiness - the massive and the minor kinds, as well as every form of evilness in between, is not going to disappear in my lifetime and certainly not yours too. Hell, it will probably continue for as long as there are two or more humans left alive in this universe.
Nevertheless, I find it pleasing to dream every once in a while. It’s comforting for me to imagine, impossible though it might be, what a wonderful world it would be if only …
Ok, enough of dreaming.
I realise that there’s a fatal flaw in my dream and that’s unemployment. It would skyrocket, and sky-rocketing it would on an epic scale.
Think about it. Without war or the threat of war, we wouldn’t need the military or the defense ministry and all the weaponry factories worldwide, they must employ at least tens of millions of people.
And if we never had to worry about anyone robbing us, the companies that make burglar alarms would go out of business. Security guards patrolling through the "imidugudu” all night wouldn’t be necessary either.
And we could get rid of our door locks too, so people in that department would go bankrupt as well. So safes, bicycle chains, computer passwords and any sort of security for this matter would all have to be forgotten about.
They’d be superfluous. How many millions of people around the world would be thrown out of work because of all of that?
What’s more, if nobody was out there trying to do some nasty business to our computers, the companies that distribute and configure fire walls, anti-viruses and anti-spam software for our computers would send all their employees packing. Come to think of it this way too, what would show up as breaking news on the numerous news channels of the world, and what blaring headlines, would appear on front pages of the newspapers?
Oh, and if people stopped committing crimes, we wouldn’t need police forces. They’d still be flooding the roadside pavements, but they’d be looking for jobs, not ensuring law and order.
What of private investigators? They might still be private, but there would be nothing that anyone would pay them to investigate.
We’d probably still need a few lawyers to help us define, in a peaceful, just way, the formal relationships that we forge with other people. The lawyers might also be called upon occasionally to sort out the ambiguities that might accidentally sneak into contracts, and to reconcile varying interpretations of contract articles and clauses.
How about criminal lawyers? They’d have to shake off their coffee-making skills and apply for jobs in Onatracom or Tigo buses. Maybe they could make a good "convayeri”, the one that doesn’t argue!
No, doing away with nastiness would be a disaster. Too many good people - people who "we” now employ to fight, mitigate or recover from the nastiness, would be forced to live on the streets, in even the worst of climates and trust me, these unfortunate people would freeze to death.
I guess we’ll just have to put up with evil, injustice and meanness in the interest of the economy. Sorry to have wasted your time. I made it clear at the beginning that it was a "spew” of inane notions.
Please get back to whatever you were reading before I so rudely interrupted your reading.