We Are All One Percenters

Today I am going to relate your brief life as a spermatozoa to what I expect will be the lack of a crowd at the Thanksgiving memorial to Charles Eimers. I have an important insight to the nature of your own personal life which I am sure you never thought of, and which you will never forget once I explain it. It will also explain and make us all feel better about the triumphant rise of the New Plutocracy in the good ol’ U.S. of A.  [Don’t know who Charles Eimers was?  Click here]

An unarguable fact is that every person alive on earth has won a lottery about a million times as unlikely as winning the Super-Power-Ball-whatever jackpot. Here are the numbers: of a woman’s one million eggs, only 300 get a shot at ovulating. And these are chased by an average man’s 525 BILLION lifetime sperms. So here is the image of myself I cannot forget: I only exist because I was one of 3/525,000,000,000 of my dad’s sperm to get together with one of 3/300 of my mom’s eggs.

That makes me a one in 50 trillion chance of being the guy I am today, DNA-wise. And that applies to you and everyone else on the planet. We should all feel really good about ourselves, at having won the most important cut-throat race in our existence: the chase for the egg.

So we won, and that may be part of the reason that over half of the current U.S. population identifies more with the 1% served by the new political leaders of our country. At a DNA-deep level, we are indeed big winners against impossible odds. Really!  Let that sink in. The sperm that was/is you had its little tail spinning wildly in a mad, desperate rush to get to that egg FIRST.  There was no silver medal for second place. Numero Uno, you, exist, and second- through 100 millionth place do not.

So what does all that have to do with Charles Eimers and the triumph of the New Plutocracy? In these columns, I have been perplexed by why the economic 99%-ers have let the 1%-ers buy their votes, or their non-voting complacency. But now I can see where they’re coming from. The 1% are not “they.” By the very fact of our having been conceived, we are all in the elite superminority.

Thus so many who appear to be economic losers identify with the winners, and scorn other losers. The swashbuckling CEO is in all of us. No cooperation or union got us to the egg first. At our core, we are all lone wolf grand champions. And we identify with our kind.

Thus we see so little sympathy with misery and oppression. If something doesn’t hurt us personally, who cares. Police violence in Bahama Village? Not even worth a mention in the daily paper. SUFA being destroyed by a malign County Commission? Not  another nonprofit in the Keys raises a voice in protest. Schoolkids slaughtered by automatic weapons? Don’t inconvenience my purchasing one myself.

The wildly successful sperm at the core of all of our beings also doesn’t care about drone attacks on civilians, or our breaking the Geneva Convention to use torture. Outlawing torture was a complex cooperative agreement to make a more humane world for all, even in a time of war. Even Nazis who slaughtered Jews, and Communists who slaughtered tens of millions of their own in Russia and China followed it. The idea is, you don’t torture our guys, and we won’t torture yours.

We, the United States, decided that we don’t need to cooperate with anybody about anything. Thus we waterboarded and “rendered” enemies we dehumanized as terrorists. Now these enemies are reacting exactly in the way wise leaders anticipated when they enacted the Geneva protocols.

The kidnapped Americans and Brits being beheaded in Syria are being treated as prisoners exactly the way we have been treating their captors. They wear the orange jumpsuits and hoods we put our prisoners in at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. When an ISIL  captive returns to the holding cell from torture, the others hope to see blood, as that means at least he was not waterboarded, the cruelest of  procedures. As we sowed, we now reap.

The American people are blithely unconcerned with torture. Or drone attacks on American teenagers and wedding parties. Or whistleblowers who expose such attacks getting tortured themselves before being imprisoned for 30 years. They don’t care about rapacious bankers—remember, the Tea Party began as an attack on the practice of trying to modify mortgages for people screwed by those very bailed-out banking execs.

So who cares about the police killing a guy because they thought he was homeless? People do not want to think about it. Tough cops and the roar of F-18s are the sounds of freedom to the majority. Nothing says wild sperm like a swat team or warrior jet plane. That’s where we come from. Them’s our homies, not the weak and the victims.

So I will be surprised to see any kind of turnout for the Charles Eimers Memorial at the beach where he died on Thanksgiving. Are you going?  Do you care?

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