Everything’s happening all the time. Superman said this. So did Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The repercussions are myriad. If, indeed, everything is happening all the time, then our every action, every gesture, every thought reverberates — sometimes pleasantly, sometimes unpleasantly, and sometimes in a way I’d rather not acknowledge.

For instance, I was recently parked (inconspicuously, I hoped) in the far corner of a local fast food parking lot about to remove the paper wrapper from a chicken sandwich. In an old van parked beside me, there was an elderly man unwrapping his sandwich, which he also chose to eat in his vehicle in the parking lot rather than joining the others contributing to the economy in the restaurant’s legitimate dining area. I don’t know what his reason was for eating in the parking lot. Maybe, like me, he was self-conscious about his trashy cravings and didn’t particularly want to be seen there. Or maybe, like me, his spouse was a vegetarian — not a militant one, mind you, one who makes you feel bad about carnivorous habits, but who goes quietly about life exhibiting the integrity of one’s convictions — far worse, in all actuality, than one who harangues you. Maybe he didn’t want that spouse to drive by and spy him guiltily consuming his fast-food lunch. Or maybe his clothes were as old and dirty as his van, and he was sensitive to his obvious poverty.

After all, there has been some attention given to the fact that currently in America it is often the poor who are overweight because they eat food like this. This is in opposition to how things were nutritionally a century ago, when vegetables and grains were the staples of a poverty diet and the poor seldom could afford meat and higher fat foods. But now we have no-fat fat and plenty of restaurants willing to prepare delectable and healthy meals for those who want real nutrients and can pay the price. The working poor need cheap and convenient food, and so this is what they eat. They eat what’s available in fast-food places, convenience stores, and what’s affordable from the freezer section of instant meals in grocery stores. The better off — and that includes me — can afford healthier food made with fresher ingredients if we want them. In any case, the old guy and I were simultaneously doing the same thing with our lunch.

And so there we were, slumming and salivating, and just as I was about to bite into my juicy chicken sandwich, I thought again about simultaneity, and it occurred to me that, according to Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Superman, I would forever be about to sink my canines into what was once this chicken’s breast. If that was the case, then the chicken which had died (that I might live) would for every moment throughout eternity be carried by its legs upside down above a conveyor belt headed for the mechanized knife that would cut its throat. And the underpaid workers wiping viscera and feathers from their aprons (in what Mother Jones magazine calls the most dangerous job in America) further down the line would be waiting throughout that same eternity for another chicken to arrive for butchering. And the owner of that particular hell farm in the Piedmont of North Carolina would continually be opening her mail to see if the scientists — fine researchers who had introduced time-saving and helpful antibiotics and growth hormones injected into the chickens on her farm — had yet produced the world’s first boneless chicken through the wonders of genetic engineering, thus furthering human comfort and happiness. (And why not boneless? — laying hens in egg factory farms already have their beaks removed to prevent pecking.)

But I took the bite anyway. And it tasted great, as it should. After all, the plant which produces the flavorings that give fast food their enticing aroma (just off the New Jersey turnpike, I understand) uses all the necessary chemicals to create the smell of delicious cooked meat. Ah, cooked meat. A tiny particle of the cooked meat I was eating landed on the jacket I was wearing. As I brushed it off, I thought about this new pile jacket. (I’d ordered it from a nice outdoor clothing company, whose catalog always depicts families with their summer homes and fourth generation golden retrievers, perpetually on vacation.) The jacket is a cozy blend of polyester, rayon, and nylon, and it both repels water and blocks wind.

As I thought further about the implications of everything happening all the time, I also thought about who had made this jacket, and who was, according to Albert, Stephen, and Clark, still making this jacket. The tag reads “Made in Mexico,” and so I considered NAFTA, and textile factories that employ children as well as adults to do the basic sewing on these garments. I envisioned the children, throughout the eons, operating their machines, watching the shiny needles go up and down, up and down, always trying to ensure that their quick and nimble little hands don’t get caught in those shiny needles. In my envisioning, the textile factory that produces this clever combination of materials only produces the tiniest bit of toxicity, and it’s only introduced into the air outside of, say, Juarez, Mexico. The members of the community don’t complain much. Most of them lost their farms when they couldn’t compete with international agribusiness, and so they are grateful to these magnanimous factory owners who allow them to construct scrap wood homes within walking distance of the factories where they work. This is particularly kind since most of the workers will never make enough money to buy a car.

As for me, I had to drive my own car back to work as soon as I finished my sandwich, so I needed to eat a little faster. I noticed my fuel indicator read near empty, and I needed to decide at which gas station to fill my tank. I ruled out Exxon, because my 9-year-old daughter read a book on the Valdez. Afterwards, she extracted from me the promise that I would never buy gas at Exxon. From my own reading, I understand that the CEO’s of Exxon have never troubled themselves with paying for the $5 billion in punitive damages levied against them by an Alaskan court. If Einstein, Hawking, and Superman are right, then the image which burned itself into my child’s brain — a sea otter covered in a thick black muck — is an image which is still taking place. The sea otter will be trying to breathe through its oil-clogged nostrils as the ages, as well as Exxon’s tankers, roll on.

Oh well, what doesn’t kill us can only make us stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche said that. So did Conan the Barbarian. Conan, what a guy. He knew how to live life close to the bone, and to suck out all that proverbial marrow. Driving life into a corner and sucking out its marrow was held in high esteem by Henry David Thoreau. Like me, Henry David was a failed vegetarian. That winter on Walden Pond was just too cold for beans. But Thoreau would be proud of me. He also said, “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity.” And I’m rushing right through this sandwich, so I’m not killing time, only chickens. Like Andrew Marvell and all of working America, I always hear “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Those English writers, you have to love them. Just think of Jane Austen. I love her so much that I completely excuse her for having winked at Britain’s slave trade in the novel Mansfield Park. She understood what it is to live comfortably. She understood the danger of questioning one’s culture, and the extent of the upheaval that might be created if that questioning were carried through to its logical ends. Most of all, she understood that it was in very poor taste to bring up something as disturbing as slaves in faraway Barbados when there was so much that was pleasant — games of whist, Ceylon tea in bone china cups, amateur theatricals (which, by the way, she did allow her heroine to frown upon as “immoral”).

This distaste for all that is not pleasing reminded me of a line from an old country song, “How can this feel so right and be so wrong?” I finished the last bite of sandwich. The bread was soft, the chicken juicy, the gassed tomato just right. As I wadded up the paper and dropped it in the trash, I thought again about Einstein, Hawking, and Superman. And I thought about the poor and the overly busy, and what we eat because it’s easy, and what we wear because it’s comfortable, and what we overlook because it’s distasteful. It’s just better not to know some things. I’d rather forget the saying, “If ignorance is bliss, then why aren’t more people happy?” Some anonymous Joe said that anyway, never dreaming that it would be cheerfully shortened to “Ignorance is bliss.” What I need to concentrate on is not thinking at all. If I can just make myself not think, I can continue to live a normal life in 21st century American culture. It all feels so good, and seems so innocent, I imagine we’ll be living this way forever.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a teacher in the Swain County public schools. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)

 

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