The spectrum of the human condition... in one dizzying day

For me, yesterday was a day of contrasts.

First, driving to work I heard an NPR story about cholera in Haiti.  Apparently, in sprawling, post-earthquake slums, such as one called ironically The City of God, multitudes live in shacks with no running water or toilet facilities.  When it rain, the shacks flood, the open sewers overflow, and people stand knee-deep in the foul water.  Cholera, previously unknown in Haiti for decades, raged last year and is expected to rage again.

Image: africa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


Later in the day, returning to my office from a meeting in North Jersey, my colleagues and I drove the back roads around Princeton, where we had the opportunity to view the estates with their mansions, stables and other amenities.

Then, on the way home, I listened to "Marketplace," which aired the second in its series called "The Robot Ate My Job."  This episode focused on who are the "winners" in robotics.  It ends with a Carnegie Mellon U. robotics professor looking at a janitor in his building and wondering "What will we do with all these people," when (inevitably?) robots can do their jobs better and cheaper than they can.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/robots-ate-my-job/robots-ate-my-road-trip-day-three

The human animal as a species has never figured out how to handle these vast disparities.  SOme simply shrug and say that's how it is.  Others argue that knocking down barriers to free enterprise gives everyone a chance to try for that estate in Princeton; of course, common sense tells most of us that this is nonsense.  But I guess it helps the very rich sleep at night.  Others, from Christ to Karl Marx, have tried to come up with ways for people to share and share alike.  Jesus devolved into a Christianity characterized by Crusades, Inquisitions, genocides, slavery, and sodomy.  Marx devolved into the economic disaster formerly known as the Soviet Union and the current economic disaster known as Cuba.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court --- or Justice Kennedy, if you care to simplify it --- ponders whether it is possible for COngress to require all Americans to share in the cost of our health care system.  That the question has to be asked is to me a sad commentary on how little progress has been made in the area of what we euphemistically refer to as humanitarianism.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/03/supreme_court_health_care_argu.html