It was becoming a rather stressful Saturday evening. Classes had not even begun, and that graciously nihilistic utopia of Keystone Lightland was just a few hours away, but things were a mess in the apartment. Not that multi-tasking is a bad thing, but attempting to cook minute rice, while compulsively checking one’s e-mail, while getting dressed … it all adds up. And to top it off, I was attempting to shrink the plastic insulation onto my leaky Collegetown windows with a hairdryer.
You see, upon returning to Ithaca, I had greeted my windows the only way one can greet windows, I guess, which is to say, “Oh my God, guys, how was your break?”
“It was sooo good,” they said. “But it got really lonely here, especially since we are all on separate walls and can’t see or hear each other. So we passed the time the only way we windows know how.”
“How?” I asked.
“By letting in as much cold air as we could possibly find!” They shouted rebelliously, like middle school kids in detention. They slapped hands, or panes, or whatever.
“Why would you do that?” I asked angrily, as angry as one can get at windows. “Heat gets really … expensive.” The heating bill for the month we weren’t at school was already pretty high.
“What does that mean? That word, ‘expensive’?” one confused little window asked.
“It means it costs a lot.” I said.
“A lot of what?”
“A lot of money.”
“What is money?”
“It’s something made-up that we use to reflect the values of real things like coal or gold. They used to use gold as money but they ran out. So now they just pretend. But all the humans are still really obsessed with gold, so now that costs a lot.”
“Like oil?”
“Yeah, but let’s get back to the point. Why would you let the cold air into my apartment, you silly windows?” I brandished the hairdryer threateningly.
“Well, we’ve been windows for a long time now — all our lives really — and we’ve learned something about the natural world. It’s that energy is shared. Molecules that have a lot of energy (which makes them warm molecules) naturally tend to transfer that energy to molecules that have less energy (cold molecules).”
“Well, humans share energy too!” I shouted indignantly, hairdryer in hand. “We pipe oil from places like Iraq to wherever we want to. And if the ones sitting on the oil won’t share it, we make them!”
“Ah, but you do not share. You buy and sell! It’s different. Especially since that means the ones with money get energy and the ones without money get … less energy. And money, you say, is actually the made-up thing, while energy is real. So the made up thing determines whether you can have the real thing! You’ve got it all backwards.”
These were smart, if frighteningly Leftist windows. And to top it off, they were physicists. “You could learn something from thermodynamics, you silly humans, you! Especially the ones studying Anthropology. It ain’t only humans out there, boss.” As if to mock the social scientists he spoke of, the window now lit up a cigarette.
“And the worst thing,” he continued, “is that you fight so many wars over energy, and then rationalize them with sterile phrases like ‘economic interests’. But really, you’re just bad sharers!”
I thought that was probably enough from in-animate objects for one night, and I could probably continue my thought processes alone over my minute rice. Which was really bland, by the way.
Then the fuse blew, and the apartment lay in darkness.
I went to the sketchy basement and flicked random switches until the electricity came back, and our very short, very unserious humanitarian crisis was over. There was mirth and gladness on Delaware Avenue, and we partied the night away.
The next evening, the power went out in Gaza City.
This was due to the blockade imposed by Israel, whose border town of Sderot has endured ceaseless rocket attacks by Palestinian militant groups. (One of those militant groups, Hamas, plays the awkward double role of firing those rockets and then having to talk about preposterous things like cease-fires with E.U. ambassadors.)
On the other side of this border, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “We will not permit, under any circumstances or conditions, a humanitarian crisis to develop,” promising the children and hospitals would not be neglected. “But there is no justification,” he said, “for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south.”
At least Olmert is clear that this war is about each group denying everyday life to the other. So he turned the electricity off in the Gaza Strip.
So we have two absurdities here.
One is well pointed out by my trusty windows. I realize you might think I actually talked to them. But I didn’t. *Promise!* Despite our assumption that modern civilization is perfect — and self-flushing toilets are cool, don’t get me wrong — it is by no means perfect. For one, we can’t share energy. Or land. Hence the oafish foreign policy of Israel, Hamas as rocket launcher and peace-talker and this insane misery of 1.5 million Gazans.
But the other absurdity is right here in this dizzying comfort. It is all over the U.S. where suffering means this: watching our own wars on TV.
And those absurdities really hit you when you juxtapose them with little utopias on the Hill, and you really read the news, not carefully or economically, but humanly. Or, thermodynamically.
It is probably an unfairly loaded question, then, for the man who talks “change.” Senator Obama — have you talked to your windows lately?
Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com [1]. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.
Links:
[1] mailto:jsiegman@cornellsun.com