May 14th, 2007

OK, imagine this scenario: You are driving up to an intersection when the light turns red. You stop in the middle lane behind a couple of cars, and then someone pulls into the right lane beside you (the right-turn lane) and pulls up next to the first car in your line. Then maybe another car does it, and suddenly you all have traffic-slowing merge issues once the light turns green. And, either you are aggressive and prevent the cars beside you from merging into the only lane on the other side of the intersection, or you watch helplessly as you or other cars in front of you let them in. You get frustrated, your blood pressure rises.

Or how about this: You are waiting in line at a store, when the clerks open another register. People all sprint to be the first in the new line, and you end up standing in the same line because you weren't the "next in line", which is what the cashier called out for. Your blood boils as three people who were previously behind you are now out the door while you stand watching someone argue about the price of squash.

Or even, perhaps, this: You report all your earnings and pay all your taxes, while other people take advantage of loopholes and grey areas that result in them seeing a larger tax return. Say, for example, they live in Canada 6 months minus a couple of days (reducing or eliminating their taxes), but then show up at the emergency room in the hospital repeatedly for even the smallest of ailments. You resent them, calling them bad citizens and selfish pigs, though that hardly helps you from flushing in anger.

You know what's really curdling your cream? It's not that other people were a little less self-conscious than you and sprinted to the next line, or somehow took advantage "without shame". It's not that you are being reminded of some horrible truth about yourself, such as that you must be slower and stupider than everyone else. No, it's just this: You clung to a "sense of fair play" when they didn't. You acted "with honour" and you "played cricket" while they had no such belief or interest in clinging to such a societal framework.

In pre-school terms (since all the feelings you'll ever have are known and categorized by then): You shared the crayons, willing to work with fewer colours out of "fairness", but they grabbed the whole box just as soon as you took your hand off of it.

And it makes your hair turn grey to think that you gave up your chance to run, clutch, grab, and hoard because you had a sense of "what is decent" and so they got the fast line, or they got the nicest dessert off the tray, or they got the best paintbrush in the box because of your hesitance.

Okay, so what's with all my quotation marks around the civilized behaviours? I mean, why does "sense of fair play" and "with honour", etc. need to be qualified? Well, it's just this: We are living in a multicultural world, whether we like it or not. And "playing cricket" (etc.) is very -er- white and very British. We call it decency, but most of the rest of the world calls it stupid—when they even stop to think about it, which is probably rarely.

The simple fact is that we have had an abundance of resources and we have had wide open spaces to develop our culture. And when that ran out we went all Imperial and expanded our empires to keep the elbow room around us. The Nazis, by the way, called it "Lebensraum" or "Living Space". Charming, isn't it? Well, when you get that Living Space, you can afford to be white and pleasant and polite to your fellow neighbor. You can obey the little niceties of Proper White Society (PWS) by staying in your line-up, while the people who really are next move to the open one.

But, in case you haven't noticed, the third world is coming to a lifestyle near you. Resources, which were already being drained irreplaceably fast, are becoming more and more demanded and, subsequently, less and less available. So we friendly white people think that we can still wait our turn patiently for those resources (which seemed so abundant to us as we were growing up) and we figure that the rest of the world around us will do the same. Um, except that as we cling to those quaint notions of being polite and patient, the people who did not grow up with an abundance of resources (or they grew up so crowded by others that not fighting tooth-and-nail for those resources meant giving up the ghost) are rapidly outflanking us.

This is not a call to arms or an exhortation that we should start fighting with claws out for everything we need or want, but I do think that the burn we feel when we are outpaced to something because we "played fair" is because we feel a deep and serious panic: When it comes to resources, we are seeing the first faint whispers of the storm that will blow and crash as we just plain run out of things. Right now it's just rudeness in line-ups, but it's not going to stay that way forever. We feel panic because, deep down, we know that the competition will just get harder and stronger.

We feel panic because we might not win this race, and second place means starving to death.

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