The Arithmetic of Life and Death (21 page)

Assuming that the pace of diversity remains constant after 2030, then sometime around two
P.M
. on October 8, 2057, a date within the life expectancy of almost every American born after 1985, there will be no racial majority in the United States. Every race in this country will be in the minority.

This is a serious arithmetic problem. No prejudice can be safely practiced unless the principal bigots outnumber bigotees (skeptics may wish to research the fate of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires). Clearly, we need a newer, safer basis for prejudice, and we need it quickly so that we can start reeducating our children as soon as possible.

There is plenty of historical precedent for religious
prejudice, and it is even more arbitrary than prejudice based on skin color. Unfortunately, though, religion can be changed after birth, which unfairly protects the culpable, and, again, there is no clear majority. Also, with a few exceptions, religious preference cannot be identified at a distance with reasonable accuracy. It can be very difficult in Los Angeles, for instance, to tell a lay Protestant from a garden-variety Catholic, or a practicing Hindu from a Buddhist or a Taoist, or a recently converted Zoroastrian from a modern Sikh.

Whatever we choose to replace bias based on skin color, it needs to be easily observed. Eye color isn’t a good solution. Contact lenses can be tinted, and really cool people wear sunglasses even at night. For similar reasons, hair color doesn’t work very well, and country of origin is even worse than skin color. From fifty yards, how do you tell a Norwegian from a Dane? Or a Brazilian from a Bolivian? Or a Thai from an Indonesian?

Intellect doesn’t cut the mustard either. Lots of smart people act stupid. Some stupid people keep their mouths shut, causing practically everyone else to assume they’re smart, which may be the case. Even gender doesn’t work anymore. These days, it can be hard to determine from a distance, and it can be changed permanently. Moreover, there are women wrestlers and weight lifters and male nurses and secretaries. Very confusing.

Age doesn’t work either. Sometimes, you just can’t tell. Anyway, old people have the money, young people have the fun, and middle-aged people have the power. The cost of alienating any one group is just too high.

But human height meets all of the core criteria:

Moreover, everybody can play: Tall people can look down on short people as physically inferior; short people can look down on tall people as monstrous freaks who consume far too much space and resources; and the medium-sized majority can look down on both as fringe abnormalities. Better yet, height can be measured with precision, it cannot be altered by prolonged exposure to the sun, and the majority can be maintained over time simply by raising or lowering boundaries as necessary.

Nothing lasts forever. One of these days, the news about how Tiger Woods and Halle Berry were conceived may get out and same-race marriages will be dead forever. Even if the story can be kept under wraps, racial prejudice is rapidly running out of majority. If we are to continue to hold the human race well below its potential, then we need a replacement and we need it fast. Luckily, human height meets every criterion: It is easily seen, it is completely arbitrary, a majority can be maintained in perpetuity—and it elevates human stupidity to a yet another high.

C
ecilia Sharpe has two aunts who live back east in Chewelah, which is north of Spokane. Named Flora and Fauna, they were born fraternal twins but grew up to be just about as similar as salt and soda pop.

Fauna, the elder of Cecilia’s twin aunts, is a career skeptic and pessimist. She first acquired her disposition for the dark side when her fiancé lost his life at Inchon, South Korea, and later honed it in the halls of Chewelah High, where she taught world and American history for some thirty-five years.

Even though she has since retired to a comfortable life of gardening and CNN International, Fauna still feels compelled to share her peculiar historical perspective at almost every opportunity. This is especially true when a young lady is in attendance, which is the case several times each year
when Cecilia and Gwendolyn come to Sunday lunch at the house of Flora and Fauna.

Typically, Gwen dreads the requisite afternoon at her great-aunts’ house, despite the ever-cheerful presence of her aunt Flora, because Aunt Fauna’s perspectives have a certain repetitiveness and a skew to them that she finds discomforting. But this time, with her mother’s complicity and the assistance of a recent edition of
The Economist Pocket World in Figures
, Gwen had prepared a riposte.

Luncheon, which consisted of an excellent pork roast with baked apples and fresh corn on the cob, was filled with small talk, as if everyone were avoiding the inevitable. Afterward, the four women repaired to the sitting room for coffee and tea. They had not been sipping for long when Fauna, who had never married, mentioned that she had recently heard on television that Americans had the highest divorce rate in the world and that, as a direct result, marriage as an institution was doomed to insignificance.

Flora picked up her latest knitting project and began working quietly. Cecilia smiled politely. Gwendolyn, who was a graduate student in anthropology, checked her figures and then replied that the United States also had the tenth-highest marriage rate in the world and that the net marriage rate, which was marriages less divorces, was near the world average.

Undaunted, Fauna blamed the unprecedented divorce rate on the high cost of living and the necessity for both spouses to work to make ends meet. But, according to Gwen’s
Pocket World in Figures
, the purchasing power of the average U.S. citizen was the second-highest in the world, trailing only Luxembourg, and more than 20 percent greater than that of the Japanese, the Germans, the
French, the English, and the Canadians. She added that average buying power in the United States was more than twice that in Greece, South Korea, and Portugal, more than four times that of the average Mexican, and more than thirty times the purchasing power of citizens in a dozen African nations.

Like Macduff, Fauna redoubled her efforts. Glancing at the six-year-old Honda in their driveway, she observed that the cost of automobiles was still beyond the reach of most Americans. Gwendolyn answered that there was more than one car for every two Americans, the second-highest automotive ownership rate in the world and more than 50 percent higher than the Japanese. In comparison, some twenty-nine countries in the world, including China, managed to get by with less than one car for every 200 citizens.

Fauna sighed, looked over at Flora, who was purling in the corner and humming softly, and then suggested that the excessive rate of automobile ownership might explain why the roads were so crowded, especially in downtown Spokane. Gwendolyn nodded sympathetically, but then added that the U.S. road system was more than three times larger than that of any other nation in the world, more than five times larger than Russia’s, Japan’s, China’s, and Canada’s, and more than fifteen times as large as the United Kingdom’s.

Fauna replied that lax immigration laws had caused the United States to become far too crowded. But Gwendolyn checked her
Pocket World in Figures
and discovered that Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan were eight to eleven times as densely populated as the United States.

Cecilia could see that her aunt was showing signs of distress, so she suggested that they take a break. Fauna, however,
noted that she had little time left at her age and she intended to enjoy it with her relatives. Feeling a release from years of repetitive pessimism abuse, Gwen instantly responded that Fauna, who was sixty-five years old, could expect to live at least another twenty years, whereas had she been born in any of forty other countries in the world, it was likely that she would have already been dead for ten years or more.

Fauna shook her head, then stood to leave the room. Cecilia asked her to stay. Flora knitted. Gwendolyn said nothing. Fauna surveyed the room slowly, then remarked that, given the deteriorating quality of life in the United States, another twenty years might not be that much of a blessing.

Before Cecilia could intervene, Gwen replied that, according to a U.N. measurement that combined income level, literacy, and life expectancy (and not the weather), the United States had the second-highest quality of life in the world, trailing only Canada.

Fauna muttered something about packing for the move up north and left the room. Cecilia looked sternly at Gwen, who, despite her victory, had begun to fiddle nervously with her
World in Figures
. Flora, who had traveled extensively in her younger years, finished a stitch and looked up for the first time in nearly half an hour. Smiling, she told Cecilia and Gwen that, in more than six decades of existence, Fauna had never crossed an American border. As long as she didn’t, she would never have to confront the opinions she had so carefully formed in isolation. Thus, they would remain, until her demise, a trick of perspective.

F
lora Sharpe, Fauna’s younger twin and polar opposite, has been a hairdresser and a card-carrying optimist since grade school. Despite her advanced age and more physical imperfections than a Russian nuclear power plant, she still stands all day, six days per week, fixing hair at Flora’s Salon de Coiffure up on Cozy Nook Road in Chewelah.

On a late Sunday afternoon last summer, Flora fixed Cecilia’s hair, which was badly in need of a cut and some color, while Gwen reminisced with her
Pocket World in Figures
in an alcove next to the front window. Flora hummed, rather badly, as she worked. So, about two minutes into the cut, Cecilia asked Flora why she had chosen a career in hairdressing. Before the sun had set in the west on that fine, cloudless day, Cecilia understood the importance of small infinities.

Flora, it turned out, had always yearned for a career in the arts. Her first choice was architecture. Unfortunately, she learned in the third grade that she was both nearsighted and color-blind. Since she couldn’t draw a straight line anyway, the life of an architect or a landscape artist seemed out of the question.

Undaunted, young Flora tried her hand at music. But she had a tin ear, and her hands, although functional, had been malformed during gestation, leaving her fingers barely half the length of her sister’s. So Flora’s earnest attempts at the piccolo, the piano, and the bassoon produced some personal satisfaction but no practical prospect of a career.

Next, she took up dance. Sadly, though, the deformity that affected Flora’s fingers also affected her toes, and therefore her balance. And although she could boogie with the best in Stevens County, Flora was short and built not at all like a Rockette.