Incremental Apocalypse

Middle Daughter arrived home on Sunday, after her five-month volunteering jaunt through India and Africa. A few weeks ago she was diagnosed with malaria. She immediately upped her anti-malarial medication, and yesterday, a battery of tests showed no sign of the disease. Either she eradicated the malaria with the increased dosage of medicine, or she never had the disease at all. We'll never know.

As I write this, she's under the knife in the chair of an oral surgeon, getting skin scraped from the roof of her mouth and grafted onto a small portion of her lower jaw where, for some reason, she's suffered an almost total loss of gum tissue. She'll be in a lot of pain and a drug-induced swoon for a couple of days; then, we hope, she'll begin to heal in earnest.

From the minute we picked her up at the airport, stories have been tumbling out of her: the fall she took into a ditch in Tanzania, leaving, on the back of her left thigh, the largest bruise I have ever seen; the terror of crossing a street in Delhi, and learning the trick of crossing next to a cow, whose sacred status means it musn't be harmed (and whose size almost guarantees that it won't); the site of a black rhino at the Ngorongo Crater (hey: there's one now!); learning to sleep on trains clutching all your belongings; the deep bonds formed with the kids in the schools in Delhi and in Moshi, Tanzania, where she worked (that's Moshi in the other photo).

And coming home, she was at first delighted, then somewhat stunned at the ho-hum opulence of American life. A bathroom -- all to herself?! A toilet that wasn't a hole you had to squat over?! Heat, and lights, and big, comfortable cars, and television? And sushi?!!

The other night, before Middle Daughter got home, the One True Wife and I went out to dinner with friends who have the largest and most opulent house of any family I know. The friends built this house about five years ago. They told me that their kids now run through the house turning off lights in empty rooms, and scolding their parents for their excesses. It's more than just the cheerily correct PR of the classroom. Kids intuitively understand what their parents cannot or will not grasp: we're on the point of no return. The next little burst of energy into your flat-screen TV, or the switch that illuminates that room full of recessed lights, might be the end of the beginning of the end.

The latest science is clearly suggesting -- and in unusually frank terminology -- that the tipping point in global warming is happening right now.

The will to survive exerts itself spectacularly against spectacular threats -- but when the threat is creeping and gradual, the will may arrive too late.

Our kids know this in their bones. Middle Daughter fears that India will become one giant traffic jam when the bargain basement Renault/Nissan/Bajaj joint venture car begins to pour onto the market at the rate of 400,000 per year. She thinks even cows will become roadkill. And then there's the huge increase in demand for oil that the new cars will instigate.

Gabe is appalled that my Honda Accord Hybrid only averages about 25 miles per gallon. You call this a hybrid? And when are they going to hurry up and produce the Chevy Volt?

Oldest Daughter, she of the Washington, DC, internships and political perspective, thinks the Prius will look like a dinosaur within 18 months, and we should all hold out for better, more environmentally responsible technology.

Two nights ago, at Middle Daughter's craving's behest, we bought sushi from Whole Foods and sat around our ancient analog TV set, watching awful television and enjoying being together again. I thought about where the fish had come from, and the Burmese who could really have used that rice, and the electric meter spinning like a top; I loved having my whole family together again, and stopped, for a moment, wondering when the other shoe would drop.

--T.A.

Comments

[Chavi]

Ahh the simple life and simple pleasures. I love how you refer to your daughters and wife :)

[Mom]

Water--I think about what goes down the drain every time I turn on the faucet. The things we thought were unlimited and free that are now beginning to be precious and rare: clean cool water; air that's fresh and pure. And things we took for granted as being inexpensive: grain for our daily bread; pure graphite for pencils; real wood for floors and tables; and, of course, the auto, that curse of civilization that has been such a rotten but wonderful luxury--only we didn't realize at the time that it WAS a luxury. Can we yet save ourselves and our progeny?