Tag: 1st world problems

A Sophomore History Of The World – Part 3

Everything was going along just fine — until the Europeans learned how to build boats.  For the next 300 years, they sailed around the world being total dicks to everybody.  They’d show up uninvited at various pristine locations and start cutting down the trees and peeing in the rivers.  Then, when the locals, who were invariably running near-utopian civilizations — tidy, peaceful, and cultured — calmly suggested they stop, all hell would break loose.  The Europeans would go for their guns (products of the early Military-Industrial Complex) and start shooting people and stealing their best stuff.  Somehow, this always came as a complete surprise to indigenous peoples — even though the pattern was repeated over and over for 20 generations (1492 – 1776.).  (It should be noted that, although women have always made major contributions to the world, they had absolutely nothing to do with this nasty business and only concerned themselves with the good parts of history.)

In 1776 (although nobody knew it at the time) there was a major shift in world power when a bunch of rich, Virginia farm boys decided they didn’t want to be Europeans anymore: they wanted to be something even nastier – Americans.  They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations – but more about that later.

In the rest of the world, things were pretty much status quo.  Europeans were running around raping, pillaging, raiding, plundering, exploiting, kicking widows, spitting on orphans and staying awake nights, thinking up other horrible things to do to the planet and the people on it.  Eventually, they came up with the Industrial Revolution.  Wow!  What a game-changer!  Suddenly, raping, pillaging, raiding, plundering, exploiting, kicking widows and spitting on orphans wasn’t just a hit-and- miss proposition anymore; it was part of the system.  And here’s the nastiest bit!  The sneaky bastards called it “capitalism” and convinced the entire world it was a good thing.  Anyway, the Military-Industrial Complex loved capitalism the way a French pig loves truffles, and that kicked both systems into high gear.  Pretty soon, Europe was spewing arms and ammunition like a freshman at a frat party.  But it was a case of too many weapons and nobody left to kill.  By the 20th century, Europeans had already fought everybody — including the Maoris, the Nepalese, the Bhutanese and the Ethiopians. There was only one thing left to do: fight with each other.  Which leads us to World War I, World War II and Adolf Hitler – the meanest man in history.

But wait!  There’s more!

Remember those Virginia farm boys?  They’d been hiding out in North America, quietly practicing their own brand of nasty on anybody they could get their mitts on for 150 years.  They took one look at the Europeans going at each other, thought, “Hey! Here’s our chance! That Charlie Chaplin lookin’ sucker can’t be that tough.” and proceeded to kick his ass.  Suddenly, nasty had a new Numero Uno: America.

So here we are in the 21st century, the peak of human knowledge and social understanding, with a bunch of problems created by dead Europeans and America is busy making them worse.

The End

Disclaimer:  Folks! – please!  Before you send me that email questioning my knowledge, my ancestry and my sanity, remember: this is satire!  It’s meant to lampoon simple interpretations of complex problems.

The War On Dirt

dirtWe are literally cleaning ourselves to death.  Go to any household in the 1st World and you will find a cornucopia of chemical weapons worthy of Saddam Hussein in his heyday.  We’ve got antibacterial sprays, wipes, soaps, foams and a multitude of cleansers — all there to keep us safe from an evil array of nameless germs we’re convinced are waiting to ambush us.  And these aren’t even the dangerous ones like typhus, smallpox or cholera.  No — we’ve gone to all this trouble to try and fight off a runny nose.  (Good luck on that one, BTW)  But the question is does it do any good?  Nope!  In fact, ask any epidemiologist and she’ll tell you all we’re doing is helping Mother Nature cull the herd.  Plus, if we keep this stupidity up, we’re going to get ourselves in some serious trouble.  It isn’t a very complicated process, so here’s the Twitter version.

Antibacterial anything might be effective in the short term and, as the advertisement says, “kills 97% of all germs on contact.”  Yeah, that’s pretty cool!  But what about the other 3% who survived the attack?  Those tough little bastards are still hanging out, waiting for the all-clear signal to mutate and breed.  And guess what?  You just gave them a vaccination.  Suddenly, the next generation of wiggly little uglies aren’t all that worried about the active ingredient in Lysol™ (or anything else, for that matter.)  Now — clean your kitchen counter once a day for a year.  You’ve certainly killed off billions and billions of germs, no doubt — the weakest ones.  Unfortunately, what you have left is a strain of bacteria that’s had 365 cracks at the Immunity Challenge, and they’ve won every one of them.  Basically, you’ve bred a race of ass-kicking bacteria that’s sittin’ there, drinkin’ bleach as if it were red wine.  It simple genetics, folks.

I’m not saying we should go medieval on the world and revert to the dirt of past eras.  That’s just icky.  However, if we don’t lighten up on the chemical warfare, one of these days Mr. and Mrs. Bacteria are going to bring the kids over to play, and they’re not going to knock on the front door; they’re going to kick it in.