....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I got to wondering the other day what would happen if humans were ever to return to the Garden of Eden. In case you don't remember that was the garden spot actually located just east of Eden on your Thomas Brother's, were Adam and Eve spent their first millennium cavorting about in innocence and nudity, where there was no pain, no death and no guilt and where Eve, oddly enough, did not bear any children.
0h, sure there would be no taxes and no arguing over vacation scheduling with your fellow employees. But would we be happy with a perfect world? I don't think so. Face it, human beings are basically unpleasant whiners. It's a wonder the rest of the animal kingdom puts up with us.
If you had been alive in 1960 (I was) and you had prayed for a better world (I did), your prayer might have gone something like this: "Dear God, please end the cold war before we blow ourselves up. Please vanquish communism and destroy the racial segregation that exists across this nation. Please cure cancer and end the famines in foreign lands. Amen."
Well, the cold war is over and we won. Monolithic communism has folded its shabby tent and today survives only in living museums like Cuba and China. We still have nuclear bombs but we have much better control over them than we did in 1960.
Racial hatred survives and always will, but government sponsored and enforced segregation is dead and gone. Cancer still takes a toll every year, but a woman diagnosed today with the same breast cancer that killed my mother twenty-five years ago has twice the chance of surviving the cure than she did and will live a much better life while doing so.
Famines are still brought on by hurricanes and earthquakes but most years we actually grow enough on this planet to feed everybody, which used to be considered impossible. Most people could eat better and I could eat less, but still, today, if a human starves to death it's a crime. It used to be just the way things were.
It has taken us forty years to achieve all of this and that's not very long. It took us almost a million years just to stand up. Most generations, like the one of 1960, seem to be able to solve most of their problems just in time for the next generation to start groaning under the burden of a better world.
Oh, there are some complaints that never do get answered, or maybe we just don't like the answer we get. "The nation is sinking into a pit of moral decay." Humans have been repeating that one since they decided they had a moral to decay from. Either the pit we are sinking into has no bottom or maybe the impression we're sinking is an illusion. "Criminals have all the rights and victims have none." That one was originally written on a Babylonian clay tablet. And if chopping the head off of every camel thief didn't prevent grand theft auto it just might be that rehabilitation is the best we can hope for.
Except for a few old standbys then I think I can promise you that forty years from now today's litany of complaints will be pretty much solved. And do you think people forty years from now will appreciate the effort? Of course they won't. We didn't, why should they? They will complain just as loudly and just as often as we do. It's called progress.
I think that is the real reason God threw humans out of the Garden. Adam and Eve bit the forbidden apple and Adam held it up and asked God, "Does this taste a little sour to you?" I would have thrown them out, too, if it had been my garden.
Kimit Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. His other work may be read in the Los Angeles Daily News.