In Praise of Factory Farming, Coal, Capitalism, & The American Empire
An Exercise in Thanksgiving.
“What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”
―Andy Warhol
The Communist Revolution already happened and America did it through Capitalism.
Praise be.
Is there still inequality? Yes. Sure. As Jesus said, “The poor you always have with you.” But, objectively speaking, we live in the most equal society ever to exist. You and Taylor Swift have the exact same iPhone. Your neighbor is capable of driving the same car as Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs wore very affordable blue jeans and Elon Musk, on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, spends his free time posting on social media and playing Diablo IV.
Everything people want, we’ve made cheap.
McMansions rise ever higher from sea to shining sea, car salesmen have speed boats, and Beef, a meat once so rare that The Poor tasted it perhaps only a handful of times, is now served through a window to your car for five dollars. The millionaires buy the same things, watch the same movies, and waste their time doom scrolling on the same apps as you do. Money has largely ceased to matter. Almost all the consumer goods that The Rich buy you can also buy, and the only areas where money still counts for something are real estate and travel. The Beach Front Property. The Private Jet. Everything else has been democratized. Everything else is available at Costco.
We are profoundly ungrateful.
We walk into a room and flip a switch and the lights come on and the heater works and there’s running water and all we can do is complain that the source of all these miracles isn’t “green” enough. “Meh.” We utter with upmost snark. “It should be different. Meh. It should happen via a different miraculous technology that doesn’t exist yet. Meh.”
Does Coal have its problems? Does gasoline? Sure. But you know what? One single gallon of gas can take a 4000 lb. vehicle about 25 miles. It can do this in under twenty-five minutes. Do you realize how many horses it would take to do that? How many men? For a little over 3 U.S. dollars you have the obscene privilege of moving two tons anywhere you want while listening to podcasts on Spotify. For twenty cents you can run a lightbulb all day. Using nothing but the salary of a Dunkin Donuts manager, you can heat a two-bedroom apartment through the coldest winter of Wyoming.
It’s luxury in the obscene.
You, today, probably use more kilowatts in a single hour than people a few hundred years ago used in their entire lifetimes. Let the oceans boil. We can relocate the polar bears. Human life is better than it’s ever been and even the poorest among us live in many ways more lavishly than past-gone kings.
“Waaaaa! Waaaaa! (Baby Crying Noises) But the food is poison! Waaa!!! It has preservatives and has been processed! Waaaa! Oh no! Someone figured out how to keep bread from molding in two days! Waaaaa!”
Do you farm?
Do you own a garden?
Then shut up about it.
A great, enormous, Glorious System has been set up to move every kind of meat, vegetable, fruit, and grain across the entire planet, and get it to you in neatly packaged units that are often pre-cut, pre-dried, and pre-prepped. You can have bananas in Norway in February. You can get Avocados in January in Maine. Milk by the gallon without ever touching a cow and cheese in every possible flavor and variety. Yes. Sure. Cargill and Monsanto maybe have some questionable ethics. Tyson could treat their chickens better. Fine. But have you been tasked with providing food for a billion people? No?
Then maybe don’t be so quick to judge.
The System ain’t perfect, no. But we’ve eliminated Famine. One of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Dead. Killed by Just-in-time Logistics and Pesticides.
That’s not nothing.
That’s an omelet worth breaking a few eggs over.
So be Grateful. Be Thankful. Say, “Thank you Joe Biden.” Say, “Thank you Donald Trump.” “Thank you, Wall Street.” “Thank you, Bankers.”
The American System, The American Empire is far from perfect. I agree. But women seldom die in pregnancy anymore. 99% of children survive infancy. The other horseman of Disease isn’t dead but he’s on life support. The unfairly derided healthcare systems of every modern country have beaten back his main weapons of bacterial and viral infection and gone a good distance in breaking his other swords as well. War is also against the ropes. Outside of the very unfortunate cases of Gaza and Ukraine, the Pax Americana reigns supreme.
Things are actually going shockingly well.
And, in light of that, all the doom and gloom, “Woe Unto Me” stuff that gets posted online is frankly a bit pathetic.
“I just can’t imagine bringing a child into a world like this.”
“Yeah. It’s just awful with all this medicine and books.”
— A Joe Rogan joke.
I’m not saying things can’t get even better. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t push for them to become so. But I am saying that for $600 dollars you can fly almost 5000 miles from the East Coast to Hawaii. I am saying that Fire Codes have made it so that Firemen have almost nothing to do. I am pointing out that we have so much excess that you can find entire suits in fine condition for $10 at the consignment store. I’m saying… at no other time in human history was it normal to hire a taxi for your burrito.
If you’re unhappy in 2024, consider that maybe it’s a You problem.
I don’t mean that in a snarky, mean kind of way. I mean that in a “re-examine your assumptions about where contentment comes from”, kind of way. You have, objectively, more material wealth than could have even been imagined a few generations ago. So, if you’re miserable… then maybe “Happiness” doesn’t come from stuff?
Maybe the culprit actually isn’t “systemic issues”, because, really, let me tell ya… The System ain’t doing half bad.
Maybe you’re the kind of person that would be unhappy even if everything was a Utopia. Maybe, in the Green Solar Punk Paradise of full diversity and questionably efficient floating windmills…
You’d still be sad.
You’d still be anxious.
You’d still be bitter.
So maybe it’s not The System.
Maybe it’s you?
That’s why Thanksgiving is one of the best holidays. Because we need to be reminded that ungrateful people can never be happy. You see, without training yourself to take stock of the good in your life and count your blessings, you will train your brain to only see the negatives. You will become like a beautiful woman who looks in the mirror and can only see her one slightly off-putting mole.
He who seeks finds.
You look for the Bad in life, in the world? You’re sure to find it. You look for the Good? You’re sure to find that too. So ask yourself… which would you like to find? What kind of person do you actually want to be?
Be thankful my friends. The world is a beautiful place, and we’re going to make it even better. The future’s so bright, we’re gonna need shades.
Thank you for this. I agree 110%. Wish a happy, peaceful blessed Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones.
I have so much to be thankful for I don't know where to begin.
Love, love, love!
Happy Thanksgiving Yoshi!