What Do You Mean Its Still Tuesday

by Billy Bob Richardson

  “To tell the truth, my first thought was, ‘Ya right!’” Al told him.

  “Agreed, it is a philosophy that is unsupportable long term. Let’s say we are starving and you and I go fishing. I catch one small fish that feeds me and keeps me from dying. You catch no fish and the one I have cannot feed two. It doesn’t matter how anyone would like to twist logic, you are very obviously a ‘loser’. The proof for that fact is that tomorrow I am alive and you are dead, dead, dead.

  “Back to your questions. A headhunter, a cannibal if you will, stumbles onto a missionary. He cuts off the head and stews up the meat. He carefully dries the head and creates what for his culture is a beautiful object of art.

  “For the moment, we will leave the cannibal’s culture out of this discussion. By the standards of today, especially in our country, that cannibal has committed a crime. He is neither a ‘good’ guy nor a ‘moral’ person. At least, that is the kneejerk reaction you would get from those who believe in things like ‘every person is born good. Every person wants to help others innately. There are no winners or losers’.

  “Let’s look at the cannibal more closely. Let’s say he provides, to the best of his ability, for his woman, his children and his whole family. He fished, cultivated land and hunted game animals. Supported his village. So at this point is he a ‘good’ guy, before the missionary, that is?”

  “When you say it like that then I would have to answer; he is in fact a ‘good’ guy.”

  “Still applying the philosophy of the moment, does his killing and eating the missionary keep him from performing all the actions we talked about like providing for his family, his village?”

  “No…..no I guess it doesn’t,” Al had to admit.

  “Then would you say he was both a ‘good’ guy and an immoral one at the same time?”

  “I see your point. One does not necessarily preclude the other.”

  “I agree. A lot of people would say I used a specialized set of circumstances to force you to answer in a way I wanted. I would have to agree. What I don’t agree with is that just because it was specialized, the results are any less true.

  “Should you find yourself in a discussion with the folks who believe in the ‘innate’ goodness of mankind, ask them how they explain concentration camp guards, or truck drivers delivering their cargo of humans to the gas chambers. Like all blanket statements, one that claims all people are born good or all people want to help others, can’t be supported by fact and they are unworkable as a long term philosophy.

  “Next you are going to think, ‘sure, a blanket statement is dumb, but most people are good and want to help’. Perhaps, but how does that idea fit in with the people who followed Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge? The Khmer Rouge were responsible for the death of over 2,000,000 Cambodians.

  “There are bad apples in every group, right Al?”

  “I’m not touching that one, guy!”

  “Good, because my next question or statement if you prefer is; how many bad apples do you have to find to help you kill 2,000,000 people?

  “Would I like to believe that all people are born good and want to help others selflessly? Of course I’d like to believe that. The reality is, you can’t support that idea with facts.

  “No my friend, people are born, people. What they become isn’t governed by some cosmic entity creating an assembly line of ‘good’ and ‘moral’ people. With the exception of some type of bad gene, what people turn into is added to them after birth. Whether it is bad genes or bad upbringing, a percentage of people just turn into varying degrees of monsters. Some hide behind a veneer of civilization, others lose the veneer and become serial killers.

  “What truly frightens me, what keeps me up at night and haunts my dreams is; what will people become when there are no police, no army and no government to threaten them enough to keep them inside that veneer?

  “As to whether we are good guys or even moral ones, that depends on a point of view. Have we, or do we intend to steal the bread out of the mouths of widows and orphans? No, we don’t. Do we plan on shooting people for the mere sport of it? No, we don’t. Will we hold on to the food to feed our family by any means possible, will we shoot anyone threatening that family? You betcha!

  “So my answer to you is, from our point of view, we are both good guys and as moral as we can be. If you need more of an answer than that you better find someone in the family smarter than I am.”

  “OK Madd I can live with that. I can even see what you mean. There is one thing you said though that makes me curious. You said ‘whether we are good guys or even moral ones depends on a point of view’. Not ‘our point of view, just a point of view. What does that mean, exactly?”

  “You are determined to give me a headache, aren’t you Al? OK, here goes.

  “In all that discussion we just had, the one subject I avoided was, is there such a thing as morality or a moral imperative.”

  Holding up his hand palms out, Madd fended off any verbal reply from Al.

  “I am not going to involve us both in some freshman philosophy class 101. Those that want to claim there is a definable thing called morality and that it fits inside of a very narrow set of parameters have to drag an all mighty, all knowing superior entity into the conversation. Without a higher authority to point at and claim we will all be punished by it; their narrow view of morality is unsupportable.”

  “You are saying there is no such thing as morality?” Al sounded a little uncomfortable.

  “No, I am saying that there probably is something one could define as morality. It just isn’t the kind preached as being punishable by a higher authority. That viewpoint is too narrow. If you were to look up morality you would find a description something like this; ‘A particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person or society.’

  “Ultimately, that is just too narrow a parameter to encompass the human condition. To be worthwhile, morality must encompass the species as a whole. Something that threatens the long term survival of the species as a whole is immoral. Take our cannibal, for instance. If taken to the extreme, cannibalism is immoral because it threatens the existence of the species.

  “Take the ‘no winners, no losers’ theory. If you can’t get ahead of others, in essence, win, if there is no real reward for winning, what is the point in trying harder? Say that idea took hold and it spread worldwide. How long would it be before everyone stopped trying to ‘win’, since there would be no reward that differed from every other person’s reward? How long before there was no new innovation, no new creations? Soon you would have a world of non-achievers sitting around slowly growing dumber and dumber, because after all, why bother working hard to go to school if there is no reward, no ‘winning’? That idea has to be classified as immoral.

  “The only truly moral thing is a thing that continues the species.”

  “OK, fair is fair, now I’m the one with the headache.”

  Al didn’t mind that they laughed at his expense, it was the kind of laughter where people are laughing with you, not at you.

  Chapter 5

  Madd and the cousins headed to Roy’s and found the outbuilding that Itsy and her crew were working in. What they found was amazing. The building had been cleaned out and most of the interior walls removed. Every surface had been cleaned and painted to within an inch of its life. An open space approximately 30’ by 40’ had been created. On the side walls and entrance wall were workstations set up with computers, phones and various supplies. Not as fancy as some modern big corporation might have, but very functional. There were 12 work stations in total, set up with equipment. The back wall had a sturdy double door that led to another room. On each side of that doorway were set up printers and shelving holding office supplies.

  Through the double doors could be seen another room approximately 30’ by 40’ arranged with a conference table and chairs. Tables could easily seat 4
0. With the addition of some folding chairs, double that if necessary. The back wall of the room had been divided into 6 cubicles, with partitions, and set up in a similar fashion as the workstations in front. All of the workstations and furnishing were obviously used but in good condition. Itsy must have combed the used office furniture stores in Denver to set this all up.

  Soon as they walked in Itsy and her crew turned and looked, Itsy got up and by way of greeting planted a big kiss right on Madd’s lips.

  “I take it that this is your crew?” asked Ivan.

  “Yes, I think you may know some of them,” laughed Itsy.

  Others laughed along with her. Each cousin was represented by at least one of their immediate family. They all wandered over to their girls’ station to speak with them and to see what they were working on.

  “I felt I should build our work force on the families of the council members.”

  Itsy grabbed Madd’s hand and gave him the grand tour.

  “We are hooked up to the internet via satellite, not my preference, as it can drop the signal at times. It mostly happens in bad weather so it isn’t too bad. As you know, we are too far out in the country to get cable. Our phones are internet based, they work well enough but sometimes they have issues. Actually, they work better than I thought they would. Every workstation’s computer is hooked up to the printers you see along the back wall. We have our own data storage separate from our computers so that we don’t have to worry about losing any of our work to some glitch.” Itsy was glowing as she showed him around.

  To one side of the printers was a girl working on a computer feeding a high quality, high speed commercial printer. Not the kind you would see in most offices but something you would see where perfect quality, no-acid paper copies were needed. There was a continuous stream of paper coming out and going into a 12 position sorter that bundled them. As the girl removed a bundle the copier would start filling the next space in the sorter.

  “What is going on with that printer over there?” asked Madd, pointing at the girl and her printer.

  “We are printing up all types of information that will be lost if we should lose the internet. Open source and classical books. All types of free books. Also, any e-books we thought would be valuable were purchased and are being downloaded. All kinds of information from how to make homemade soap to medical journals. Just about any subject you can imagine is being looked at and if it seems worthwhile it is sent to that computer, which queues it up for printing.

  “Not all the workstations you see here are used for ordering material or communicating with suppliers. Every day several people are online researching information and deciding how important it is that we keep it. We keep digital copies burned onto disks, but just in case we are not able to access that, we have made hard copies,” said Itsy.

  “How do you determine what subjects to pursue online?” asked Madd.

  “We got them from you and all the council, along with suggestions from our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations. Plus, the whole family has been making lists for years of subjects and reading material they felt was necessary.”

  “OK, I do remember you asking me about what I thought was important to save before I left last time.”

  “If we have time and the money I would like to purchase a quality book binding press so that we can make books out of the most important information,” Itsy told him.

  Itsy took him into the next room.

  “This is set up for the council or any type of meeting you need to hold and you have your own door to the outside. You can shut the doors between these two rooms and never have to go through the computer room to get here. I didn’t think you would want to continue having council meetings at Uncle Roy’s or the community center any longer.”

  “Good call, sweetness,” said Madd.

  Walking past the conference table, she took him to see the cubicles.

  “I set these up with computers and everything you could need for you to have your own space to work from. The others are for the cousins. You working from home and them working from their homes is too inefficient, so I created a space for all of you.”

  Madd grabbed her and kissed her until she was out of breath.

  “Wow, you big hunk of burning love, that made it worth the effort!”

  The cousins wandered in and were shown their personal spaces; they were impressed with the whole operation and told Itsy so, until they had her blushing.

  “Itsy, can you set up a couple more workstations in this room?”

  “Yes sir, we have the connections on the right hand wall to set them up.”

  “Great, I think you should call Dek and tell him what you can provide for him. If he is working from his home office the space here might be a better solution for him.”

  “Certainly, one of the other girls can help me get two more desks and computers, one for Dek and one for whoever he is using for a secretary. We have extras in our storeroom. It will only take us about 20 minutes to set it up,” said Itsy.

  “Soon as you get that done and tell Dek about what you can provide, we better break this conference table in. You can bring us up to speed about what areas we need to be working on. That will let you concentrate on the projects you are familiar with.”

  As soon as they were all settled at one end of the conference table, Itsy began her presentation. One of the computers was hooked up to a big screen TV on the wall and she started by showing them a table of organization for the council. Madd was at the top with the 4 other cousins running left to right directly below him. There were additional boxes to add more personnel on that line. After finding out from them who all the permanent members of the council were, she filled in the appropriate boxes. Next she put a number of excel spreadsheets on the big screen. It was divided up into categories. Transportation, farm equipment; on and on it went. Two hours later with their heads splitting, Itsy had finished.

  Ivan turned to the cousins and said, “Should we make a mutual suicide pact now, or in a week when we’re really, really overwhelmed?”

  “That won’t work,” Hey told her, “I’m already too far gone. The next step for me is a coma!”

  Tink responded with, “Anyone got a hammer?”

  “A hammer, Tink?” asked Itsy.

  “Ya, at least after I hit myself in the foot, I can stop, then it will feel real good. What we have been looking at is going to last a lot longer than any pain from a hammer.”

  Itsy couldn’t help herself, she started giggling at them with a big smile on her face.

  “Ok sweetness, why don’t you get back to your work and we will try and sort this out,” said Madd.

  Looking at Madd, Ivan wanted to know, “You sure surviving the apocalypse is going to be worth it?”

  “If it was just us five, heading to the hills with rifles and a trailer of supplies, it wouldn’t be sounding that bad about this time,” admitted Madd. “However, we have people depending on us, so let’s do what our old instructor told us. Suck it up and solider, soldier.”

  “You guys are going to have to enlist your dads and anyone else we can think of that has experience and some time to offer. Real and Tink, you guys were always into rebuilding old trucks and farm equipment. I want you to start buying up pre-electronics trucks. Check with the older guys who are into the same thing for the trucks that best suit our needs. Buy up anything reasonable from Texas to Arizona. You will have to start with that garage you set up in your dad’s barn, Tink. Get with the same guys who give you suggestions and get them to start using their rebuilding facilities to refurbish what you buy. Don’t worry about what they look like, just buy ones that are either in good mechanical condition or can be made good.

  “Hey, you are the most knowledgeable when it comes to farm equipment. I want you to survey any farming equipment that we have direct control of. It won’t amount to much so you are going to have to enlist some of the old timers to help you look for anything that is good enough to use or can be made
usable in short order. We need to get men and equipment out to the new fields as soon as we can. If there isn’t enough good stuff to be had, look for auctions and see what can be picked up reasonably.

  “Keep it in the back of your heads when looking for motor driven equipment that at some point we are going to need to convert as much as we can to use natural gas.

  “Ivan, we looked into this in the past but it’s time to give it another look. Our families have collected all kinds of equipment from the 1880s to the 1930s. We need to concentrate on equipment that can be pulled by work horses. A lot of it is in rough shape, but they are fine examples of how it was done then. Let’s get some engineering help and find out if we can improve on the designs. In the past we worked up blueprints on more modern designs using lightweight materials. We are going to need to really get up to speed on every type of horse-drawn machine or device a farm needs to be productive. We need to start manufacturing our own equipment. If we need fabricated parts that we can’t make at this time, draw them up and get them to some fabricators that can. Make sure that we know how it is done so that at some point we can acquire the equipment to copy them.

  “I’ll work on making sure we are going to have a wide variety and good supply of many types of farm animals, with emphasis on working horses and their needs. I’ll get with the family vet and pick his brain about anything I don’t know or things I am not knowledgeable about. I’ll also work on finding us equipment to create a fully equipped modern machine shop, with lathes and all the attendant machines. I’ll get on the internet and see if I can find a shop or shops that are going out of business or whose owners are retiring.

  “Be sure and give me a holler if you need some hands to help out. Each of us is going to have to recruit some helpers. No way are we going to have enough time to run here or run there every time we need to pick up a gasket or some lumber. We need people who can carry out orders and get the jobs done. Real, Tink, we are going to need some of those trucks ASAP. People have been getting by using their personal vehicles and paying for the fuel; as we pick up the pace, that isn’t going to cut it.