Are We Lacking The Right Dimension?

I sat on a plastic chair in an open-air Foo-Chow-style  noodle restaurant and waited for my dish to arrive. The service was a little slow and I had nothing to do. My eyes wandered around in hope of catching something of remarkable or noteworthy quality.

What I found was situated right next to my table, or between the table and a tile-covered staircase entry leading upwards into a building, to be precise. What was it? A caravan of tiny ants carried tiny food remnants from the restaurant floor toward the staircase, up over several steps to disappear in a tiny crack of the stair wall.

With amazement I saw a cloud of ants enveloping a piece of French fries and carrying it with vigor and determination toward the staircase along a crowded ant highway. A smaller crowd of ants was busy lifting and dragging a rice corn vertically up to the second level of the stairs. What a heroic deed! Would they be able to do the same with the potato chunk?

Still on Ground 0, the crowds of a hundred ants lifted and dragged the chunk over wobbly concrete toward the first step, and struggled below a vertical wall of some seven inch, that awaiting to be climbed. But surprisingly, the legged potato chunk wandered left and right, in several turns, without making any significant progress. The ants seemed puzzled or not able to execute the final, decisive push upward.

First I looked at the scene somewhat bemused. But then an intriguing thought crossed my mind. Didn’t this scene well portray the reality of our human politics? It made me think of the many lobbies that push their self-centered agendas left or right and relentlessly over the political arena.

Like the ants dragging a chunk of potato, politics  are dragged from left to right and back, and seemingly cannot answers to problems of an another dimension, those which our global society is facing: Eradicating poverty, limiting population growth, dealing with dramatic climate change, preserving the environment…

Like the ants we seem to lack leadership of vision and people of strength to acknowledge and deal with problems that might decide about the future well-being of our planet or at least that of our children.

Overwhelmed by such deep thoughts I almost ignored my dish had arrived – steaming fried mee with soya and brown chili sauce. When the food’s smell reached my nose it made me forget politics and ground 0 potato ants for a while.

© 2004 by Franz L Kessler