Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (14 page)

For all we know, God may have been misquoted in the first place. You know how inaccurate reporters are. A second Bible I have quotes God as saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and
fill
the earth.”

The present occupants of the planet earth have more than fulfilled that biblical command. We've filled the earth and ought to stop multiplying before it overflows and we spill out into space.

We ought to have a grand plan for the planet's future that would include arrangements for maintaining some relationship between the number of people trying to live on earth and earth's ability to sustain that many.

We've already ruined all the rivers from the Yangtze to the Mississippi. Do you know of a lake you can drink from? Lake water was all drinkable before we started dumping our garbage, our sewage and our commercial waste in it. Now we've started ruining our oceans and, big as they are, they'll be seas of slop before long.

We often find ourselves breathing air we'd prefer not to have in our lungs, but we have no choice. That's all the air there is. Breathing Los Angeles air must be the equivalent of three packs a day.

The increase in the number of people is greatest in the countries least able to take care of them. On television, you see emaciated women in Ethiopia with emaciated babies, both dying of starvation. Nine months later you see dying women with week-old babies. The women must have been dying when they conceived the children.

Does it never occur to these people that it would have been better for her, better for the child and better for the world if she had said no to the guy? If the pope had been there and she could have asked his advice, what would he have said? Would he have advised her to go ahead and be fruitful and replenish the earth?

He's a good pope. He probably would have said, “In your case, I'm going to make an exception. The earth doesn't need any more people in Ethiopia this year, thank you.”

It's a pain to those who feel strongly about the tragedy of the black condition in America to see so many blacks assuring themselves and their children a dismal ghetto future by reproducing beyond their ability to take care of their children.

If birth control of one kind is wrong, you'd think birth control of any kind would be wrong. The most effective method of birth control is the widely—but reluctantly practiced—inhibition of desire. It's why all women are not constantly being attacked. Men curb their desire or rape would be rampant. It's birth control at the beginning. Do opponents of birth control oppose it?

It's difficult to understand how any society, government, philosophy or religion could encourage its constituents to do any more than reproduce its own numbers.

We could do great things in the world if we could stabilize the population and then gradually reduce it.

I'd like to see the world return to the way it was in the 1930s, when I was growing up.

Maybe they'd tear down some of the buildings they've put up on the vacant lots we used to play in.

They could tear up some of the wide concrete strips that cross the country and give us back some of those lovely little dirt roads that wound their way among the farms.

The line at the motor vehicle bureau might get shorter.

In summer, there might be a place at the shore big enough to spread a blanket again for a picnic.

The people who like to fish might find a quiet pond far from the noise of a radio.

There'd be seats on the bus, no traffic jams with the shopping carts at the supermarket.

Who knows, we might get a little of our privacy back if the world stopped having more babies than it can happily hold.

There are too many doctors, according to a report issued by the American Medical Association.

For me to believe that, the report would have had to be issued by patients instead of doctors. I'd like to get together a panel of patients who had just spent the morning sitting in a waiting room before being admitted for an eight-minute session with the doctor.

It also would be interesting to find out what someone thinks who became desperately ill in say, Kumquat, Iowa, and almost died before he got to the nearest doctor sixty miles away in Fort Dodge.

There are hundreds of communities in the United States that have no doctor. In some of them, a doctor would have a hard time making the doctors' average $108,000 a year, but if a doctor in a small town could make, say $60,000, or about three times as much as the high school principal makes, would that be a bad deal?

The idea that there are too many doctors comes up every year. It's as wrong this year as it was last year. There are not too many doctors. There are not enough doctors, and until each of us is assured immortality, there will never be enough doctors. Let me know when all pain and suffering is over. Call me when cancer is a thing of the past and when AIDS is a memory like diphtheria, and then I'll agree there are enough doctors.

Most of us hold the medical profession in high esteem. I do. We seem to have a higher regard for doctors than doctors have for themselves. I hope they aren't right.

Dr. James Sammons, the executive vice president of the AMA, says there's an overproduction of physicians, and he wants to cut down on the number of people admitted to medical schools and on the number of foreign doctors admitted to practice in the United States.

Dr. Sammons denies it but he's talking about doctors' income, not patients' health, when he says there are too many doctors. The AMA spends too much time on everything but medicine.

The report says too many doctors could mean that a doctor's skill might deteriorate because the physician “may not perform certain procedures frequently enough to maintain a high level of skill.” You mean, they need the practice?

The report also says that, because there are too many specialists, some doctors might be driven into general practice. I don't know enough to argue that point but, if true, is it terrible? If enough doctors are driven out of plastic surgery, Kumquat, Iowa, may get a doctor of its own someday. Maybe doctors will even start making house calls again.

The AMA sounds like a bricklayers' union. The bricklayers want to limit membership in the union so there will always be more bricks that need to be laid than there are bricklayers to lay them. Doctors don't want a lot of young doctors offering their services for less so they can pay back the money they borrowed to get through medical school.

Everyone in any business wishes there weren't so many people in it.
Established lawyers complain that law schools are turning out young lawyers faster than the legal profession can absorb them. Newspaper reporters wish there weren't so many bright young people coming out of college who want to be reporters.

In many hospitals across the country, doctors trained in medical schools in India, the Philippines and Mexico are doing the dirty work. They're working the long night shifts, doing the instant surgery on no-pay patients in the emergency rooms and generally providing medical services that would otherwise be neglected.

If foreign doctors are trained in approved teaching hospitals, the only thing wrong with their working here is that they are cheating the country they left. Dr. Sammons objects to their presence for the same reason Lee Iacocca would like to keep Japanese cars out of the United States.

I wallow in paper.

When the mail comes, it's a plethora of paper, most of which I don't need or want.

At the office, I get originals and duplicates of everything and then Jane makes copies of the copies. Jane and I work together, and she is better organized than I am but she's obsessed with making copies. One year when I got my eight tickets for the Giants' home football games, she Xeroxed my tickets so she'd have a record of them. (I still use the word “Xerox” even though I know it's a patented trade name. The proper word for what I mean is “photocopy” but it's not nearly so good a word as “Xerox.” Sorry about that, Xerox. I also call all paper handkerchiefs “Kleenex,” all plastic cups “Styrofoam,” and sometimes I even call the record player the “Victrola.”)

America has gone mad with paper since the invention of photocopy machines, and now the computer printers are spewing forth more printouts of everything than anyone possibly could have a use for.

Once upon a time, every office had a secretary who spent most of the day typing things that didn't need to be typed. Now it no longer takes a secretary to make a duplicate of anything. A walk to the copying machine is as much a part of office routine for the average executive
as a walk to the water cooler used to be. The executive often makes copies of things that don't need to be copied while the secretary is at the water cooler.

If you doubt we're using too much paper, walk through the business area of any large city before 6
A.M.
and see what the trash people are picking up the most. They're packing huge bundles of paper with printing on it and little holes along its edges into the maw of their compacting trucks.

Making duplicate copies or computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving Americans a new sense of purpose. Duplicating things makes people feel they're doing something important and, while they're doing that, they don't have to do any real work.

If I were in the paper business, I'd be nervous. Business was never better for these companies than it is right now but certainly there has to be a reaction. At some point the average American is going to revolt. “Enough, already!” they're going to cry. “Stop snowing us under with paper.”

A company called Accountemps in New York just completed a study concluding that U.S. businesses waste $2.6 billion annually on unnecessary photocopies. It estimates 350 billion photocopies are made every year and that, of those, one third will end up in the wastebasket.

This is a conservative estimate. I have no way of guessing how many photocopies will be made but I do have a way of guessing what proportion of them will go into the wastebasket. All I have to do is look at my own wastebasket. I throw out 50 percent of all the printed material that comes into my office, without ever opening the envelopes it comes in. I discard another 40 percent of it after giving it a quick glance and determining it's only someone trying to sell me something I don't want. Of the 10 percent I actually read, I save 2 percent.

There aren't enough filing cabinets in the whole United States in which to put all the copies of all the documents being duplicated. If there were enough filing cabinets, there wouldn't be anyplace to put them. If there were filing cabinets enough and storage space enough, there's no one with time enough to read them.

A piece of paper that's been duplicated on a photocopy machine reeks of the same sense of unimportance that a carbon copy used to have. When you were the person who got the carbon copy of something instead of the original, you knew you weren't very important. That's the way most of us feel now when we get something that's been, you'll pardon the expression, Xeroxed.

Whenever I hear of people praying for rain in a drought, I think how little faith they have in God.

God has so far ignored the prayers for rain, and his supplicants should concede that, for reasons unknown to them, God knows what's best. Don't they believe there's some grand plan? Don't they have faith that there's something good about drought?

I confess to not knowing whether there's a grand plan in which everything happens for the best or not, but it certainly seems as though something good for someone comes out of everything.

One recent October evening, there began a great storm in the Northeast. By morning there were fourteen inches of heavy snow on the ground and on everything else. The leaves were still on the trees and the weight of the snow caught on them broke their branches, uprooted whole trees and generally caused the kind of damage in the cities and in the forests that would bring tears to the eyes of a tree lover.

Who could possibly benefit from a storm like this? When I started to clean up a small wood lot behind our house in the country, someone who knows more about this sort of thing than I do pointed out that I should leave things the way they were because fallen and rotting trees in the woods provide a great home to all kinds of animals in nature. The bees, the birds, the bugs, the chipmunks, the raccoons, the deer all prefer a casual and messy wood lot to a manicured one.

It's not so clear what good drought in the Midwest does. It's the sort of weather pattern that makes you wonder if the world will end not in ice but in fire. Scientists are suggesting it may be partly due to our having burned away some of the ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun, like dark glasses protect the eyes.

Even so, I have the feeling a drought is part of some rhythm of life on earth. We can't even ignore the possibility that we ourselves are part of that rhythm. Maybe our having burned away the ozone layer is as much part of nature as a snowstorm.

Recently I went to a party in Washington and met Ann Landers. She's small, pretty, carefully dressed and easy to talk to. These are not the things I envy Ann Landers for, though. I envy her all those short, well-written letters she gets asking direct questions that she can make a column out of answering. All the letters I get are three pages long and they never ask me anything. They're always telling me.

Here's a sample of the kind of letters I'd like to get: