Africa

So that I don't sound out of place, this is the first post in a series that Gabe and I have been discussing. We have very different views on Africa, what Africa needs, and what we can do to help; this started as a series of emails and conversations and now will be a sort of dueling blogs type of series. I may sound like some inhumane, entitled, detached person, and you may hate that, and I don't care.

I am a selfish westerner.

And so are you.

It's weird when one can have such prescience, such preparedness, when witnessing the destruction of a society. The fact is that we have seen the exact same thing happen with the native populations of Canada and the United States; we should have had the foresight not to screw up another indigenous group somewhere else. It is, to me, frustrating to see the same mistakes being made in Africa that were made here some 400 years ago. Africa is the new frontier, the new unexplored and untapped landmass, and we feel that we have to take that away, just as we did North America.

Saying that we did not learn from our mistakes in the old new-world would be shortsighted, as the Europeans came over with an air of dominance while we are going to Africa with the idea of cohabitation and sharing, which is a very nice Norman Rockwell painting in itself, but the same problems arise, even if we are being nicer to the locals: we are interrupting evolution.

Before the west showed up, Africa was tribal. Running water, electricity, cars, political structure, commerce - the cornerstones of western society - did not exist, nor were they known to exist. Aligning this in history, the Romans had built aqueducts and sewers some 2000 years ago. Africa wasn't even there yet. They were still in hunter-gatherer mode, still in the stone age.

The adaptability of the human mind and condition is amazing, and that is evidenced by the acceptance that Africans have to all of our western goods. Everything here is now there, and this has changed in the last 100 or so years. Cars, running water, electricity, it all exists. Gabe raves about the amazing cell phone reception everywhere, while we still have patchy reception some places in Canada. It's great. Good for the Africans, they've adapted well, and in only a few more years, they will be technologically equal to the rest of the world.

What did they miss though?

No inventions of any kind. No history of any kind. They missed everything. In the time between the Roman Empire - seen as the first "modern" time - and now, we have dealt with the dark ages, which was the worst documented period in western history; the renaissance, where more art was produced than ever before; the industrial revolution; the technological revolution.

Each of these periods were destructive and constructive; there was both something wrong and right with each era of western history and we lived through it all. We have 10,000 years of documented history to look back on; we can see both where we came from as well as what we should avoid.

The only reason why we know of corruption is because people such as Caligula, Hitler and Mussolini have existed. We only know about widespread diseases because we dealt with, and documented, the Black Plague. We only know of religious wars because of the Crusades. The only reason why computers exist is because we can track backwards to the printing press through different technological revolutions.

What I am getting at is that history has shaped our society, and every society ever. You touch the hot stove and get burnt and you never touch it again, but it takes that first burn to understand why.

Africa has never touched the stove. Africa doesn't have this fantastic historical record. As Gabe said, Tanzania has 50 years in the books.

It's crazy that in the world we live in, where everyone is connected through the internet; where Wikipedia is the easiest way to become an expert on anything; where you can buy a pair of shoes from Japan and get them in the mail the next morning; where you can get a job in any country you can think of without leaving your home, that one place is behind.

Africa is behind. Africa is missing those 10,000 years of history. Africa was tribal and now they aren't, in just 50 years. Africa is messed up. We messed them up.

Who came from Canada to tell the crusaders that they were doing more harm than good?

Who was sent in to tell the citizens of Rome that Caligula was going to run the empire poorly?

Who was sent to China with knives and forks?

Nobody.

Nobody went.

There were no missionaries; there were no westerners; there were no more advanced countries sent to tell people that all of these things were wrong. Instead, the problem was let to conclude naturally.

And from those events, the west has not fought a religious war since; corruption was combatted, not accepted (see: Martin Luther), and China invented the chopsticks. All on their own without us.

Africa doesn't need some sort of mass western intervention. They don't need the genocides in Darfur to be halted, they need them to be documented; the corrupt leaders don't need to be removed, they need to oppress so that after they are gone, oppression never happens again.

Africa needs time, not help. The problems need to be known before they can be fixed.

The chicken or the egg?

I am here to solve a problem that has plagued everybody through the years: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

The egg came first.

Read that, and read it again if you think the chicken came first.

The egg came first.

One day there was a single celled organism, and through genetic mutations, that organism, many years later, became a myriad celled organism. That myriad celled organism looked very much like a chicken.

It bocked like a chicken, walked like a chicken smelled like a chicken.

And it looked like one too.

But it wasn't a chicken.

It was a hideous mutant created by some bastardization of mammalian childbirth and reptilian childbirth. It probably came from an egg grown inside and hatched inside its equally strange mother.

One day, this strange creature excretes a large white (or brown) egg shaped object, and from that object (herein called an egg) was the first chicken birthed.

You see, a chicken, in the classical sense is an animal that lays chicken eggs, but is also hatched from one.

When that animal lay the first chicken egg, it created the first chicken but was not a chicken in and of itself.

So next time someone asks that chicken or egg question, say "the egg."

Dreams

Last night I had a dream that I was sitting in the back drivers' side seat of a car. Nobody else was in the car and it was barreling down a steep road, along with a bunch of other cars. At the bottom of the hill, the road ended and you could turn left or right but could not continue straight.

As I reached the bottom of the hill, I discovered that my foot could reach the brake pedal and my arms could reach the steering wheel but I could not reach the gearshift. When I stepped on the brake pedal, the car slowed, but not nearly enough and a voice in my head said "Downshift! Downshift!" But I couldn't.

The car kept on descending and the brakes kept on failing and I kept on yelling at myself to shift gears, but nothing was happening. At the bottom of the hill there was a red light, but, unable to stop, I had to blow through it and veered to the left, causing cars to crash and honk and yell at me but I was safe. I just kept on rolling down the street in the back seat of the car, unable to shift gears.

Strange.

Two Chances

I was told a pretty funny anecdote today at work. After putting a case of wine in the main cellar at the restaurant, one of my coworkers warned me to "keep my elbows in" when I went in there. I asked him why, and he said that one of the first times he went in, his elbow brushed up against a wine bottle and it shattered on the ground. He then shyly approached the owner of the restaurant with the news and was told that "mistakes happen" and to clean it up and try not to do it again.

This was not the reaction that the guy was expecting.

A few months later, the same guy went in to the cellar and again brushed up against a bottle, breaking it. When he went to clean it up, the owner threatened to cut his fingers off. This time he was visibly angry.

Julius Caesar said to the senate upon his return that everyone is forgiven, even those who fought against him; however, Rome will not forgive anyone a second time. Julius wasn't ruthless, ruthless would be killing all of the betrayers after the first time. He understood that the first betrayal was a mistake, but the second one would be conscious.

I thought some more about chances, and realized that we were given three of them far more often than we were given two. Rumplestiltskin gives the princess three days to guess his name; baseball gives batters three strikes; the boy cried wolf three times.

Why three? Why is it acceptable to fail twice if you can only succeed once? "You fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." That's it; that's all. One failure, one success.

Rooted in tradition, religion and history, three is a nice number. When it comes to betrayal, mistakes and chances, two is much better.

Good Things

Good things come to those who wait, but those who hustle get to choose what they get.

Are you a hustler or a waiter?

Following your own advice

Advice is tricky. Everyone gives it and everyone follows at least some of it.

Here is some advice from one of my favourite hip-hop groups, Mobb Deep. The verse is rapped by Prodigy, one of its two members:

Livin' the high life, make your moves at night, pack your heat in this warzone
Niggas is trife, runnin from one time, aint no time to slip, make one
False move and its a up north trip.

To those who don't know the meaning of the word "trife," it means "just getting by" (From here)

To those who are confused as to the meaning of an "up north trip," the rap duo are from Queensbridge, near New York City, and up north would mean upstate, to prison. Or it could mean up to the heavens, where one would go if he were to die.

The advice then, that Prodigy is giving, is to be prepared and, were you to do anything illegal, do it as quickly as possible under cover of the night. Don't screw up.

Here is a link to what Prodigy is doing now: Link He's taking an up north trip. And the advice he gave, he didn't heed.

If there's one thing I can't take, it's someone saying one thing while doing another. Someone not following his own advice.

Merits, now what?

I am usually a merit-based thinker. If I can't justify trying, I won't try. If it doesn't merit energy, I won't give my energy to it. I am not unique in thinking this way, but it was only recently that I discovered it was wrong.

Three weeks ago I got a new job in a restaurant. A pretty damn good restaurant. I am connected to the owners of this restaurant in a very convoluted fashion, but that doesn't matter; my connections got me the job.

Before I started, I got some of the best advice I have ever received. I was told that had I gone out and found the job on my own, I could do whatever I wanted as the only thing I would be hurting is my own reputation. However, now that someone else's name is attached to mine, in that they vouched for me to give me this job; if I screw around, I tarnish both of our reputations.

It really stuck.

I started three weeks ago, and "fuck it, I don't need to put the extra effort in" turned into "fuck it, I'll give it all I got."

After the first week, the two people I worked closest with told me what a great job I was doing and that I was helping them out a ton.

After the second week, the same two people told me that they were talking me up to the other restaurant workers and that I was basically indispensable now.

Now, that I have just worked my last day of the third week, one of the chefs came up to me and offered to throw my name into the mix for a promotion. He liked how much I was busting my balls today.

Three weeks has managed to change my thought process. I now only see the biggest flaw is right in the DNA of merit-based decision making: the reward is rarely seen before you embark. It would have been nearly impossible for me to foresee a possible promotion after three weeks, but it has happened.

The worst case scenario now that I have tried my hardest is being congratulated by my peers, being respected, and being able to hold the job without worrying about losing it. These things have already happened, and I expect that they will continue to.

Had I half assed it, the best case scenario would have made me the mediocre guy. Nothing special, nothing worth talking about to other people. No promotion. No feeling special. No being told that I am 'indispensable."

Ethical Decision Making

Let me present you with an ethical dilemma:

You are standing at the switching station on a train track; you have the option of making the train go either right or left. The train is moving too quickly to stop before you guide it on its eventual path. On the right track, one man is tied up; on the left, five men are tied up. If the train goes to the right, the one man dies; if it goes to the left, all five men die. Which way do you direct the train?

Although it is tough to let one man die, it seems reasonable to let him perish in order to save the five on the other track. Killing one to save five is much better than killing five to save one. (unless the one man possesses the cure for cancer while the five are all serial killers, this is not the case though, in this hypothetical, all six men are identical.)

Now here's a slightly different dilemma:

You are a doctor in a hospital. In five rooms, you have five men who need five different organ transplants. They will all die without the transplant in the next day and there are no available organs to give to them. There is a sixth man who is capable of giving his organs to each of the five men, letting them live, but killing the donor. Do you kill the man to save the other five?

Instinctively no. But is the situation much different, or any different, than the train track scenario? What separates them?

The Economics of Speeding Tickets

I was just driving back to Montreal with my dad after spending a weekend in cottage country. We passed a sign that labeled all of the fines and penalties associated with driving a certain speed on the autoroute; in big bold lettering, it stated that if you drove 160 km/h, you would be hit with an $895 fine and 10 points taken off of your license.

Whoa.

Wait, really?

After seeing this, I got my dad to calm down and slow from 130 to 110, where tickets are rarely given.

I thought that $895 was a little steep for a speeding ticket but soon changed my mind and wondered if it was steep enough. $895 is breaking the bank for people riding in their rusted out cars who are barely scraping by with the heavy increases in gas prices. $895 is huge for people who can't afford to drive. $895 is huge for everyone who doesn't drive 160.

The target, then, for the $895 speeding ticket is for the people who can a) afford the cars that go 160 km/h, and therefore, b) afford the big ticket.

It's stupid of me to assume that everyone in a BMW has thousands of dollars to throw away, but it shouldn't be that hard to come up with the cash. A cancelled newspaper subscription, the 'basic' satellite TV package, non-name brand food, a cheaper bottle of wine each night, all will contribute to $895 in savings over six months. In this case, the big ticket is a deterrent against going 160 but not enough to stop it.

Let's say the province raised the ticket to $20,000. I don't know many people who have a disposable $20,000. When the ticket price goes up and sits on a level with the price of private school tuition for a year, a new car, food for a year, people will not drive 160. 

It boils down to necessity and ability: the rust bucket drivers can barely scrape enough cash together to buy gas at $1.50 a litre and therefore do not drive at speeds that would tax them nearly $900.

Unlike the less fortunate drivers, the execs in their BMW's, can manage with a $900 hit. If anyone wants to stop people driving at 160 km/h, make it unmanageable for everyone.