You may or may not be familiar with a film called The Gods Must Be Crazy. If not, I'll explain:
It's basically about a group of bushmen who live a happy life in the Kalahari desert. They have no rules, no laws, don't need to time, and as a result live a life of mutual respect and freedom. No one fights or argues, no one owns anything better than anyone else. Until one day, when a "noisy bird that flew without flapping its wings" (a plane) flew over and the pilot threw an empty bottle out of the window. One of the bushmen found this new thing and it all went downhill form there.
Everyone wanted to use the new thing that the gods had sent them. There was only one, so it had to be shared. Some people thought their tasks were more important that others', others got jealous and eventually the tribe started fighting with each other. You get the vibe...
The beginning of the film compares the life of the bushmen to the lives of modern man, and the narrator sums it up pretty damn well:
"Civilised man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labour slaving devices. But somehow he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make his life easier, the more complicated he made it.
So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilised man, who refused to adapt himself to his natural surroundings, now finally has to adapt and readapt himself every day, and every hour of the day, to his self-created environment.
For instance; if the day is called "Monday" and and the number seven-three-zero comes up, you have to disadapt yourself from your domestic surroundings and readapt yourself to an entirely different environment...
... But in the Kalahari it's always Tuesday, or Thursday if you like, or Sunday. No clocks or calendars tell you to do this or that."
What I want to know is, at what point did we lose touch?
People get upset at the millions of animals that die to feed us, at the millions of tons of garbage that we create. In some way I feel like we have no right to be angry about it. As humans, we are responsible. We may not be directly responsible, but we are human, we have the ability to change that.
So how do we?
