By Jim Hagarty
2008
John Lennon had a lot of wonderful ideas about what a great place planet earth would be if we just didn’t have so many bad things in it. Things like hunger and poverty, sexism and racism, war and hate.
I could not agree more with the late great Beatle but I have begun to tone down my aspirations for humankind, given that it doesn’t look like we plan on changing very much; at least, we don’t appear in any hurry to sharpen up. I wonder if our goals have been too lofty and that is why we don’t seem to be making much progress.
Therefore, I would be happy if we could live in a world where, for example, fire departments didn’t have – and didn’t need – special extrication equipment popularly known as the “jaws of life”. It seems more than a bit ridiculous and a terrible, terrible shame that it is the job of some human beings in our society to go out on the roads to cut other human beings out of the mangled steel they’d been riding around in moments before. I think of my ancestors living out their days on their farms in Ireland and wonder how many times they would have ever had any need for the jaws of life. More food, maybe. Better shelter, perhaps. But the jaws of life?
Similarly, I long for a world where police departments don’t assign special weapons and and tactical (SWAT) teams; where it never occurred to a man, from one year to the next, that a real good plan would be to grab a shotgun and shoot his wife, kids, pets and a half a dozen neighbors, before maybe killing himself. Whatever happened to the good old days when a desperate soul turned himself into his pastor or his doctor and had no thoughts of trying to make the six o’clock news?
Take me straight to a world that has no need for a special telephone hotline for kids, a service which permits children to call total strangers and report mistreatment at the hands of their parents or other guardians. Who, I might ask, was the first parent who figured it out that a great way to keep that boy from disobeying parental commands would be to punch him, or kick him, or beat him with a belt or worse? Or send him to bed without supper and make him stay in his room till breakfast? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind a world with no need for a children’s aid society. Or child psychologists. Or a V-chip to attach to TVs so parents can stop violent programs from reaching their children.
And speaking of beatings, could I send a word or two out to all those husbands who have so little going for them that the best way they know how to express their feelings of anger and frustration to their wives is to make fists of their fingers and punch in the head, the ones they promised to “cherish.” A place without battered women’s shelters sounds like a good spot to me.
Twenty years ago, John Lennon asked us to imagine a world with no possessions, no greed, no hunger, and nothing to kill or die for. And now, here am I saying, how about a world with no pepper spray? No photo radar vans. No stun guns. No nicotine patches. No maximum security prisons. No detox centres. No abortion clinics. No psychiatric hospitals.
No offence intended, Mr. Lennon, but I’d like to imagine a world without voice mail or call waiting, safe sex or test-tube babies, hollow-point bullets and gene therapy, things that didn’t even exist when you did.
A ’60s song told us what the world needs now is love, sweet love. I’m sure it does. Failing that, could we at least have a break from all this lunacy? From robots that dismantle bombs? Human rights groups that shoot people? Kids packing guns? Crazed fans that assassinate rock stars?
Imagine that.
