Glass in Pocket

Curiously, I have noticed myself becoming ever more conscious of my impact on, and use of, the planet in the last year. A more rapid onset than can be explained by the steady stream of films, news and observations; this has culminated in the recurring theme of my Mother's wrapping paper habits.

When I was a boy, my Mother's insistence on saving the wrapping paper on Christmas Day, so that it could be flattened and reused the following year, became the defining signal of our generation gap. Along with my Father's "butter or jam" story, it came to symbolize, in my eyes, their stilted disconnection from the modern world that I was growing up in. Such resources are plentiful and cheap, and human efficiency was the mast on which we flew our flags. Materials were the object, people the subject, and any action that used more of the former and less of the latter was the definition of progress.

Curious then, for me, that I find myself saving paper bags for reuse and having an inner dialogue anytime I rip a clear plastic bag from a roll in the supermarket, to wrap a vegetable for its journey from the shelf to my kitchen cutting board. And yet I have no reservations about the obvious logic and important necessity of my newly heightened awareness about material consumption.

I now see that it is my attitudes that are stuck in a time warp. A warped time in which the world moved from a labor shortage to a planet shortage with such breathtaking pace that human culture, despite its much vaunted adaptability, has failed to keep up. There really is a finite limit to the amount of paper we can make, oil we can burn and money we can make. Limits that were there all the time but briefly hid behind a pink chiffon négligée, and looked so pretty doing it that I was distracted.

Now we know. Not only are we short of planet, but there is also a limit to our tolerance of our own complexity. There is a tipping point, beyond which our ingenuity does not make up for our ignorance, beyond which there is no escaping the very laws we relied upon to build our machine in the first place. In the year my Mother was born the first banking collapse of the modern capitalist system rocked the US economy and Messrs. Glass and Steagall drafted legislation to help protect the trust that underpins the whole concept of capital markets. The law protected the system from its own propensity to convoluted machinations by insisting on the separation of the complex and opaque from the simple and verifiable. There followed the most fantastic increase in human productivity since the birth of mankind, fastened by two generations that had not forgotten that this was just a mechanism, not founded on a gold standard. An innovation of human thought and therefore imperfect, frail and requiring protection from itself.

Time passed and generations raised in the machine from birth did not fathom their obvious reality to be anything other than the natural way of things. Chiffon realities clothed the new body of human endeavor, and spoke with disdaining impunity about qualities of self-reliance, ingenuity and the triumphal ascendance of the model machine. The occasional rebuke by older hands, like those from my parents, were easy for us to dismiss and were no doubt softened by their own awe at the wondrous spectacle the machine was unfolding on the landscape of the modern world.

As the century drew to a close, we threw off the shackles of yesteryear's Glass-Steagall so that we could truly jet propel ourselves into the bright new future that was so evidently our assured destiny. The model had proved itself through thick and thin and inoculated itself from the fragility of human infections. What it needed was oxygen. The glass was tossed in with the gold and, so long as we kept throwing more money into the pockets, all fared well.

Then one day, someone put their hands into their pocket to get a little of the gold back out. Not much, you know, just a little to repay a small bet on the wrong horse. Ouch! The glass was now so thoroughly mixed with the brass that it was quite impossible to get one without the other. If this was true of one pocket, who could know how much glass was in everyone else's pockets? The trust was gone and the rest is today's history in the making. The gold is still in there, but washing out the shards of sparkling silicon will be painstaking work, and very unfamiliar to the machine jockeys of the modern generation.

Perhaps I should have been saving my wrapping paper all this time, and kept a keen awareness of the fragility of my mind and its tendency to believe itself. We are, after all, imperfect creatures of a finite planet, living from day to day by the good graces of one another and dependent on a mutual trust that we will help each other pick out our pieces of glass, when we can no longer see them.