Jenny and Erin

We are living in magic times. Times when we embrace technologies we don’t understand. Times in which we are disconnected from the very knowledge our survival depends upon. Why do the lights turn on when you flip a switch? How does clean water show up in the faucet? How exactly is the internet bringing this post to you right now? We rarely even realize how much we don’t understand, much less dwell on it. If we did, it would be too scary.

This knowledge gap is so disturbing because it is hard to predict cause and effect if you don’t understand something. I was watching TV with an 8 year old and a commercial came on - a woman approaches a grocery store shelf to get a carton of orange juice. The scene cuts to an orchard and a supervisor yelling at farmhands to hurry up. They toss him a container of juice and he manages to put it on the shelf just in time for the shopping woman to grab it. This smart city girl turned to me wide-eyed if this was really where orange juice came from. I explained about orchards, fruit pickers, packaging plants and delivery trucks, but still I could feel her doubt. Lack of knowledge creates doubt.

When you don’t know or think about something’s origins, such as the orange juice, it is easy to get wrapped up in the wrong things. If orange juice for all practical purposes comes from a grocery store, not an orchard, then a clean grocery store is more important than the conditions the oranges are grown or packaged under. When your orange juice is recalled and the nightly news runs reports about chemically tainted orange juice, the disconnect between your watchfulness of the local grocery’s hygiene and the tainted juice in your fridge scares you. Your lack of knowledge about the orange juice’s true origins caused you to fail miserably when accurately predicting danger. Cause and effect are not linked. A clean store doesn’t equal safe food. The world is a dangerous place. The doubt you felt before at your lack of knowledge has now crystallized into fear.

Bound tightly to these knowledge gaps (the very source of our fears) is a lack of understanding about whom or what is good, or bad. In fact, you can’t even determine where to look to for information. Once you start searching for the truth, even for something as seemingly straightforward as orange juice, you realize it’s hard to know what to believe and/or who to trust. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is overworked and a quick internet search informs you that its monitoring systems are overwhelmed and spotty at best. It takes hours of concentrated study to understand the differences amongst organic, locally grown, and natural foods. Then you have to figure out how to apply this new knowledge, all the while not exactly sure how accurate it is since it came from the internet and your local food co-op staff. But hey, you’re trying! Your fear has been replaced with a vague sense of distrust.

After surviving the tainted orange juice, researching the best alternatives and taking the time and financial hits associated with feeding your family organically, you hear something on the radio driving home that causes a flash of anger. A large chain store has been accused and acknowledges they have been “mislabeling” non-organic foods as organic and selling them to you at organic prices. Your anger builds as you drive home, as you tell your wife and when you remember the tainted juice in your refrigerator. It’s easy for anger to tip over into hate.

The orange juice was just a silly example, now consider how this can be applied to the water system, our electrical system and the “rolling blackouts” the gripped parts of the nation, our national security, or even your retirement accounts. Pssst…here’s the dirty little secret that no one wants to speak in these magic times. Lack of understanding creates doubt. Doubt blends into fear. Fear encourages distrust. Distrust creates hate. When you are angry your actions become uncontrollable and highly unpredictable. Hate can destroy us all. Living in magic times is dangerous.

This entry was posted in Social Commentary on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 by Jenny. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.