Scarcity

This week’s ponderings all started, as I’m sure it often does for great thinkers, with toilet paper. You may have followed my saga on Facebook where Cassie and I made daily dashes to the front door at the slightest sound from outside as we were anxiously awaiting the promised delivery of toilet paper from Who Gives a Crap. It was getting dire. I was down to rationing; experimenting with first 7 sheets, and then 5. Just how many folds is needed to keep both, my hands dry, and at the same time, the necessary mop up operation at the optimally frugal level? It was a trial. It was at moments terrifying to contemplate the consequences. Our local store had not seen toilet paper in a month and while murmurings on social media made promises of sightings at various locations across town, the arrival would only end in bitter disappointment when rushing into the store, I’d find once again, the shelves were bare. Curse my old legs for not being fast enough.

And then there were the mocking posts on social media of initially innocent-seeming pieces about adorable cats leaping over walls of toilet paper rolls, as though launching some sort of Cat Olympics. But I saw through those immediately. It was nothing to do with the cats. It was flaunting their wealth of toilet paper. I have so many rolls, my cat is struggling to leap over the Great Wall of Chipping Norton that I can afford to build.

So then as soon as the box of loo paper arrived, like a miracle on the eve of the opening of the final roll ceremony planned for this morning in fact, I realised this whole event was actually a metaphorical representation of the great existential question of just how much is enough?

I could up until yesterday, begin to see the beauty in hoarding. I could feel the creeping accretion of callous self interest overtaking my usually phlegmatic and generous nature; the desire to throw little old ladies (older than me obviously) aside with a kick for good measure, (you don’t want them getting up for another go) to reach the last pack and stuff it into my trolley and be damned with their disapproving looks. Who cares what they think?! I now have toilet paper.

There was a glory, I could imagine, to be had in casually lying on the floor with a camera and filming cats leaping over your amassed wealth. There would be a shroud encompassing you in an almost spiritual euphoria of wellbeing; all was well with the world. How God must have felt at the close of each day’s labour; “And God saw it was good.” I know because I now had that feeling enveloping me in a tender caress. I have enough toilet paper. I will see out this plague. And without an unfortunate need for octogenarian violence.

And so with my many rolls of toilet paper, I sat on my loo and revelled in the soft tinkle of my bodily function, resting assured that the Great Experiment was now over. I could now grab great fistfuls of paper to see to my ablutions. I could without the slightest worry, in fact waste as much as I wanted.

And that brought me to the concept of scarcity.

I thought firstly about all those people in the world who never have toilet paper. I thought about that unfortunate time in Malaysia with the hose, the purpose for which I had no idea until it was far too late. I thought about those for whom it’s a luxury and they spend their entire lives experimenting with optimally frugal levels because they just don’t have the money to replace it when it runs out. They live their entire lives without a pantry or any backup food or necessities because they’re never in a position of having spare cash to allow a build up of back up. That’s how most of the world live. So why do we in the West panic?

Much of our Western world is built on this concept; we just don’t have enough. I need to have great swathes of loo paper, mountains of canned beans and pasta and rice in the pantry in case the family gather en masse for an impromptu dinner. The fact I only have 2 sons and a brother who never visit is irrelevant; it’s what everyone else does. It’s what our political systems seem bent on maintaining; a constant state of fear of missing out and not having enough. And this led me to a much more sober subject that all started with the idea of scarcity. The world can’t feed its population. Apparently.

I was watching the Political something or other of Population Control on Al Jazeera this morning, that looked at the astounding fact that in India and China and South Korea there is such a dearth of women that there has been a sharp rise in female child abductions, prostitution, trafficking and violence against women in the past decade or more.

What?

In the 1950’s the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, among others, gathered together and the predominantly white male members sought to do something about the exploding world population. World hunger was an issue they wished to tackle. They believed that there were insufficient supplies of food for everyone so they saw the need to reduce the population. In Third World countries. They didn’t tackle poverty directly, but reduced the number of children that the poor had in order to achieve that aim.

Vast amounts of money was donated to various programs around the world- paying for sterilisations in India, abortions in South Korea and pressure put on China which resulted in the One Child Policy. Monetary incentives were offered to millions of the poor in India for sterilisations. In 1975, Indira Ghandi forced 8 million sterilisations on both men and women.

Henry Kissinger wrote a paper recommending an increase in abortions and the US pressured these countries to legalise the procedure despite cultural abhorrence. Effective advertising campaigns were launched, playing on the already heavy cultural proclivity for male children. In addition, the US made available new technologies that could determine the sex of foetuses, thus contributing to the push for abortions of all female babies. This played well into the existing cultural preferences for male heirs and the rates of abortions in India, South Korea and China sky rocketed.

All during a time when American women were protesting at home to push for abortion rights that the Congress refused to consider.

The female population is now so low in India, there are tens of thousands of men who can find no wife. Cue such events as Sejina being stolen from her village in northern India. After months of pushing the police to search for her, they finally found her in another village, married off to one man and hired out to 7 others in the village who used her as a sex slave.

Research in India has shown that the higher the male population, the higher the violence against women. Crime rates are high among young, single males and remain so until the men are married. What? Respect for women is low and yet there’s a cultural expectation that you are not a man until you are married. So many young men have no hope of that and are so “desperate” they commit horrific crimes against women. What?

There have never in its history, been higher rates of abortions than today in India. The desire for male heirs is still prevalent and women so disregarded as to be viewed as chattels. One woman spoke of her wealthy and well-placed father-in-law forcing her to have 6 abortions in 8 years and when still she couldn’t provide a male heir, they cast her out- social death in India. So this is not just an issue for the uneducated poor.

In China 1 in 5 men cannot find a wife and every Sunday in Shanghai there’s a market where mothers gather with portfolios of their sons and daughters to try and find the best deal for their child in a massively limited market of female brides. China has had a rapid increase in female child abductions. A girl can cost up to $8000. The kidnappers take the young girls to a family who raise her alongside their son until it’s time to marry. If the son does not wish to marry her, she can be sold on to another family for a tidy profit.

In South Korea, the situation is the same and it can cost as much as $10000 for a Vietnamese wife for the men who are desperately seeking a wife in a population that is short on women due to female abortions through the sixties and seventies. To acerbate this, modern South Korean women are choosing not to have children, despite government monetary incentives to increase pregnancies. The government has now reversed its policy and advertisements and government education is now pushing abortion as murder in a bid to curb the practice and bring the population back into balance. China too has done an about face and introduced a ‘2 child policy’ in the hope that the gender inequity may find an equilibrium.

But it seems to me that much of the problem is exactly the same as it was in the fifties with the decision by the rich white dudes to get rid of world overpopulation by getting rid of poor babies. I see how you can justify that, but all that happened was an increase in grossly undervaluing women, using their bodies to their own ends.

Had they then, as they should now, engaged in spending their millions of dollars on education instead of spurious and barbaric population control methods, they would have achieved a reduction in births without all the heartache, rapes and bloodshed. African research has shown that women given an education inevitably put off child rearing for further education and do not have as many children. Education too would see men being taught to value women as is their human right. These countries have now seen that without women, there is no country eventually. Who’d have thought?

Perhaps we need to educate the rich white dudes.