A recent article reminds us what an unimaginably unfair place the world is — “A global wine shortage could soon be upon us” — its message of dread and foreboding including this catastrophic information:
Last year, global supply for wine already barely exceeded demand. Adjusting the demand to include non-wine uses (such as making vermouth), there was actually an undersupply of about 300 million cases, marking the largest such shortfall in almost 50 years.
The only thing less imaginable is that we’d lessen our demand commensurate with the ostensible lack of supply. Not even the most recondite prognosticators would harbor the fanciful notion that we might curb our hedonistic hankerings or our parched predilections. Why? Why now?
Given our affinity for hysteria, here’s a list of other shortages from which we’re likely to suffer:
- Gluten. According to Food Nazi, gluten is responsible for everything from common warts to homicidal sociopathy. Gluten tweezers (for picking out the glutens from wheat, rye, and barley) are the largest-selling items at Food Gizmos. And the only thing we’ll miss more than gluten are sane people who’ll read this article.
- Drone deliveries. Aside from the fact that they’d make life too convenient for too many people (we can’t have that), the WINGNUTS (Wonderfully Intrepid Nincompoops Getting Needlessly Unsympathetic To Sense) have begun anti-drone campaigns to protect everyone and everything they can irrationally construe as being in harm’s way.
- Global warming. Despite the momentum this hysterical hokum generated as a political cause célèbre — its cozy fit with other wealth-distribution schemes notwithstanding — this panic is dying of its own weight. Soon it’ll be little more than a manifestation of the admonition from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the fact becomes legend, print the legend.”
- Empiricism. We couldn’t do what we do, believe the promises we believe, defy our senses, and go along with all the nonsense we tolerate if we could see the evidence in front of our noses. Like courage, self-reliance, self-faith, personal responsibility, and integrity, empiricism is a dying art. As Joni Mitchell tried to tell us, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”
- Joy. See 1 through 4. ‘Nuff said.
Let’s get a grip of our knickers, shall we? And let’s start here:
- Eat whatever the hell we want. If it makes us ill, let’s stop eating it. And stop telling others what they should and shouldn’t eat.
- Determine to do the most good for the greatest numbers. If we’re content to kill people with drones, is it such a stretch to permit a private enterprise to deliver our books with them? While we’re at it, let’s read more books.
- Trust Accu-Window Weather. If the temperature outside is colder than it was last year — if there are fewer hurricanes and more polar bears, if there are fewer warm days and more polar ice — let the politicians and hysteria mongers find other ways to try to impose equality and social justice on the planet, okay?
- Accept the fact that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And if a politician tells us something we want has become a right, let’s suspend our gullibility, at least until we get one question answered: How will it be paid for?
- Enjoy ourselves. No matter what happens or is promised, let’s not permit our joy to be stolen from us. We only give up that which we permit to be taken. Let’s at least hang on to our joy.
If we don’t, we’ll definitely get the short end.
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Image by geralt, courtesy of pixabay.com.