The Question Of Chance.

As I write this, someone could have just chopped a tree this very minute; with the assumption that it’s just one tree out of the millions out there. It might never occur to him that scores of others are using the same assumption.

Someone else could be secretly dumping toxic wastes into some river or water body. It could be an individual, a company or even a city etc. What many fail to see is the joint or combined impact that these activities could be having on the environment.

What we see is some hurricane in the Caribbean or some flooding somewhere with little or no connection to our actual activities. Few are able to link their activities to some of the world’s disasters—both natural and man made calamities—that we face ever so often. Well, something is definitely at play and I choose to call it “The law of chance”

Let’s take other examples like watching news. Many people, the world over, watch the news with a mental sieve. It’s usually the same international news, I bet, but we only take a keen interest on what affects us or interests us most. We brush off what doesn’t concern us. Some of us even just happen to be watching that channel.

As I initially wrote this article, on 9th November 2009, Hurricane Ida was ranked as a category two storm and flooding had just killed 91 people in El Salvador. But I am so far away from these events to be very perturbed, right! We also recently had the Haiti earthquake and the Chile one, didn’t we?

This mental sieve works more so when reading the dailies; where we tend to read more selectively. I looked critically at this phenomenon on a global scale and was amazed at what I found out.

The world is getting to be a global village with each coming day. We have been united by events like climate change, economic integration, global insecurity, diseases, religious tension etc. What hasn’t caught on yet, is the mental realization that what we, individually or as a group, are engaged in can affect others gravely even if it’s across continents. Take the invention of the AK 47 for instance. I’m pretty sure Mr. Mikhail Kalashnikov did not envision how much strife this invention will create. What about a man in some African village clearing a forest to gain some farmland! It will rarely occur to him that that very act, plus a myriad other connected activities worldwide could have contributed to the 91 deaths in El Salvador. It is this lack of foresight that defines my law.

The law is thus defined as “the belief that there is a high chance that what we are doing for our benefit or harm is not bad enough to cause the same for others. We could be doing whatever it is for our own selfish gains, or we could be doing it out of ignorance. It could be driving a car unnecessarily around or throwing household waste in the open. It could be burning rubbish or even noise pollution. We often assume it will not harm anybody including ourselves!

Open any newspaper and look at the current events taking place. You might find news on bad weather, floods, melting ice caps, global warming, soil erosion, and wildfires. But you might not see how these happenings are interconnected.

Well, all I can say it that the law of chance is doing us all in. The net effect of all these activities carried out by a good portion of the earth's, six and a half billion or so, people is enough to make you kiss the ozone layer, among other things, goodbye. It’s time we got smatter, people.

If you happen to have the end “The End"—currently also available as an ebook for lending or purchasing—you might by now what what I see that others dont.