(And yes, you should worry)
We’ve all had the experience of running out of something. For most of us, it’s just a minor inconvenience. Running out of toilet paper but not noticing until you’ve just finished a messy one and looked over to see an empty cardboard tube mocking you. Running out of gas despite the best efforts of the car companies to give you warning lights that let you know it’s probably a good idea to fill the tank. Running out of milk after you’ve splashed just enough on your Captain Crunch to make the ones on top slightly damp. These things happen, we cuss for a few minutes, and move on. Most of us have never run out of something we REALLY needed, like a fighter pilot running out of altitude before he’s had a chance to eject, or a cave diver running out of oxygen before he can make it back.
However, mankind AS A WHOLE is running out of a lot of things we really need, and once they’re gone life for all of us is going to change, and not for the better. I’m not talking about running out of oil. Screw running out of oil. It’s not going to happen for a long time, and by the time it does happen, most of you reading this won’t care. Yeah. It’ll take that long. Of course, oil and gas is going to get as expensive as FUCK before it runs out, but that’s a topic for another day, because I am not going to shoot the entirety of my wad in just one column.
Let’s begin, shall we? Here some things we are running out of :
Antibiotics that actually work: Ever hear of Allan Pinkerton? He founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which depending on your point of view, is either a good thing or a bad thing. We’ll cover that in a later column, because I am practicing Conservation of Wad here. Want to know how he died? He stumbled while going for a walk, bit his tongue, and died of Goddamn gangrene. Gangrene, for those of you who don’t know it, is when a large amount of tissue that is still attached to you dies and starts to become necrotic, just like the flesh of a corpse. It happens for two reasons: injury or infection. As for Allan, he threw the dice and came up snake eyes: injury and infection. His bitten tongue got infected (because your mouth is pretty filthy, truth be told), and this was before antibiotics, so no medical treatment was going to help. Sit down for a second and think about this: before antibiotics came along, this kind of shit happened all the time. Then antibiotics came along, and antibiotics kill germs, and everyone thought the problem was solved.
But there’s a problem. We’ve all heard that old saying “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” For us, it’s a saying used by motivational speakers. For bacteria, it’s their fucking Plan A for world domination. They don’t have a Plan B. They don’t need one.
Antibiotics kill germs. The problem is, when you have an infection there’s billions upon billions of germs in your body, and every fucking one of them wants to live to fight another day. When the doctor gives you a bottle of pills, there’s a reason one of the little labels instructs you to finish all the medication. The doctor wants you to finish all the medication, because he wants every last one of those germs dead. Some people, however, stop taking the antibiotic when they feel better. This means that most of the germs were killed, but some were only weakened. The weakened ones get down and start doing push-ups, because some drill sergeant bacteria is standing in front of them screaming “come on, you maggots! Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! NOW GET STRONGER!” The next time you get sick, you take your pills, but this time it takes longer to work, because the bacteria leveled up and now you need all the pills to kill them. Along the line, some people stop taking the pills after a few days because they feel better, and the bacteria that toughened up and survived start doing more push-ups. After a few decades of this, bacteria that once ran away screaming from antibiotics now walk up to the antibiotics, take their lunch money, and then punch them in the stomach for good measure. Penicillin? Once a miracle drug, it’s now little better than drinking a glass of water.
It’s gotten so bad that there are now germs that no antibiotic on the planet can touch. Ever heard of a nosocomial infection? It’s a fancy word for getting infected while you’re hospitalized. Some of the deadliest and most antibiotic-resistant germs in the world lurk in hospitals, because they’ve evolved to handle whatever the hospital staff can throw at them. Current estimates are that in the United States alone close to 100,000 people a year die from infections they picked up in a place they went to get better. Let the horror of that wash over you for a moment.
The World Health Organization has stated that this problem is not a worst-case scenario that may happen in the future, it’s happening right now. While there is vigorous research being conducted to develop new antibiotics, there is nothing to prevent the exact same scenario from occurring with anything new that is developed.
Water fit for drinking: Here in the good old U.S. of A., we don’t think too much about water. Thanks to a massively complex and very efficient infrastructure that is carefully engineered to get the water that falls down out of the sky, flows in rivers, burbles in streams, and collects in reservoirs (in each of these places, an unbelievable number of creatures -humans included- shit in that very same water) to flow out of a faucet clearly and cleanly whenever you turn the handle.
Here’s the problem. Only three fucking percent of the water on the planet is fit for drinking. Of that three percent, less than one fucking percent is freely available. The rest is frozen in the ice caps and glaciers.
In most of the world people just don’t have the luxury of turning the tap and having water flow out. In some places, women and children walk an average of seven miles a day just to get water and bring it back to where they live. To get an idea of what that’s like, call up a friend and tell him to go put a glass of water down three miles from where you are sitting right now. Then push yourself away from the computer (Cracked will still be here when you get back), and walk to that water. Took you about an hour, didn’t it? Maybe longer, depending on what kind of shape you are in. But don’t drink the water. You have to take it back home and give to someone in your family that couldn’t make that walk. After that, you can head back out and get your own glass of water. That’s a shit-ton of walking for something you and I take for granted. And this isn’t carefully treated and cleaned water, it’s water from a stream or river or lake. See my previous note about such water above. Water-borne illnesses and a lack of drinkable water kills millions of people a year. Want to know how most of them die? Diarrhea. This diarrhea is not something a bottle of Pepto or a popping a few Imodium is going to help. Filthy water gives them diarrhea, which causes them to lose fluids they can’t afford to lose, which causes them to drink more water, which means-. Well, it’s a vicious cycle.
Even here in the U.S., thanks to industrial pollution even though we have clean drinkable water, it takes more work than ever to take that water and make it fit to drink. More work equals more expense, and many see a day coming when you really see your water bill going up, and suddenly watering the lawn becomes a economic question of can you afford to do it, not an aesthetic question of does the lawn really need it. The United States is undergoing a devastating drought right now, lakes and rivers are drying up, the water table is dropping, and current projections say that if this keeps up, then Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Nevada, and California are going to run out of water. Running out as in turning on the faucet and having nothing but air come out. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask your parents (or your grandparents, for that matter) about the fuel shortages of the 1970’s, when people waited in line for hours just to get a tank of gas. In some places, they couldn’t even fill the tank, they got five or ten gallons, max. Everyone thought it couldn’t happen. Everyone was wrong.
Children: Wait a minute. What, we’re running out of children? Fuck, go to any shopping mall or playground and you’ll see more children than you can shake a stick at. As a matter of fact, you’ll probably see their exasperated parents shaking actual sticks at them, trying to get them to slow down and behave. How can we be running out of children?
The problem is not so much children, as it is that birth rates are falling all over the world. The reasons are complex. Declining female fertility, declining male fertility (pollution is suspected in both these cases), couples choosing to put off having children for several reasons and therefore a woman’s best and most fertile years for childbirth are skipped over, couples choosing to have only one child or in many cases no children at all, etc. Both researchers and the U.N. have started to pay attention this problem, because a problem that needs to be paid attention to is what it is. Each couple needs to have about 2.4 children to continue the species. The extra .4 is to compensate for the children who die early. Many countries have already fallen below this level, and it’s a hole that is damned difficult to climb out of. Get too far below that 2.4 births per couple, and the population starts falling drastically. Birth rates in the European Union have dropped steadily over the past fifty years. Slovenia’s is down to under 1.3 per woman of childbearing years. Many governments, such as France, offer very good incentives to women who choose to have children, in order to try and reverse the trend.
China is even worse off. Thanks to a decision many years ago by Chinese leaders, each couple in China is allowed only one child (The coffee was heavily spiked with stupid the day this decision was made). China did this because they wanted to decrease their population. In a classic case of not thinking things through, they failed to take into account the fact that families in China want male children, both to act as breadwinners and to take care of their parents when they get older. This means that female fetuses are being aborted wholesale in China, so that the couple can try again and hopefully have a male. After decades of this, you have millions of men who have no chance of marrying and settling down because there are just not any available women. Many of the women choose not to have children in order to pursue a career. The impact of the social problems China is going to face because of this cannot be calculated.
Sorry if I have made you worry a little bit. If it’s any consolation, there’s lot of other things to worry about that I didn’t have space to cover here.
The View From The Trenches 