On any morning at Starbucks, it is easy to see that the veneer of civilization is quite thin. Your life is in jeopardy if you dare to stand between someone on their way to work and their caffeine fix.
In the drive-thru, you have just milliseconds to order before you are blasted by a horn from an impatient motorist. Customers lose all civility if a barista has the audacity to serve someone a tall instead of a grande. This is a little off topic, but does anyone actually understand those sizes?
We believe that we are enlightened and at the pinnacle of history. We believe that we have built a safe, advanced society that will protect us from each other, nature and from our own stupidity. Just because I wrote this column doesn’t mean that I am immune from being stupid from time to time. We have agreed upon a social contract on how to treat one another. But it is a construct.
If we are really fortunate, our lives are materially comfortable. We have technology, food and an infrastructure. But this security is really an illusion. Modernity and a social contract do not mean that we are safe. We are much more likely to get hit by a bus in our modern town than we are to get eaten by a bear if we lived in the wild.
The recent dramatic weather is a reminder of how weak our connection is to the constructed world around us. Once the Wi-Fi and electricity are out, I am pretty miserable. If I was desperate for shelter, I would trade everything I owned for a parka and some kindling for a fire.
If you are brave enough to make a grocery store run before the next icepocalypse, you have witnessed how fragile our society is. You have to be quick to avoid the stampede for that last loaf of bread. Once the food is gone, it is only a few days before we will do whatever it takes to survive.
The colonizers of Jamestown, Virginia, learned this lesson the hard way. Without enough food and a drought followed by severe weather during the winter of 1609-1610, the settlers resorted to eating rats and human waste. Faced with starvation, the colonists violated one of the ultimate taboos of society: cannibalism. For some reason, Disney chose not to depict cannibalism in their animated movie, Pocahontas. Apparently they were not going for an accurate portrayal of Jamestown.
We do not know what we are really capable of until we face those same circumstances.
In need of further proof about how brittle our society is? Peruse the onions in this very same paper. With the shield of anonymity, someone is surely calling another person an idiot for their political beliefs, driving habits or opinions about train whistles.
No matter how advanced we think we are, passions still get the better of us. We have broken society before. Each time, it was hard to put back together again. As the tribal political divide worsens and the rhetoric spews out of control, we inch closer to the precipice. No message here. No moral to the story. Just an observation from Starbucks during the morning commute.
Aaron Miller is one of The Republic’s community columnists and all opinions expressed are those of the writer. He has a doctorate in history and is an associate professor of history at Ivy Tech Community College — Columbus. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com.
