They say that survival is left to the fittest. Well, I beg to differ. Survival is left to the lucky. Forced natural selection? I don't think so! Last Wednesday I went under the knife for the first time (well, wisdom teeth doesn't really count). Yes, I was a patient who elected to have maxo-facial surgery. This means that while my bite could not be fixed adequately with orthodontics, surgery could easily 'close the gap' (literally!).
Without things like corrective lenses, surgery, antibiotics, and any number of things... a lot of people would be a lot less desirable and some would be a lot less living. Now, I don't subscribe to the view that we should let nature take it's course. I am not a Christian Scientist. I believe that God gave us the resources we have - like intelligence- so that we may use them to both better ourselves and to care for the world. This means that when we know how to make and use corrective lenses for myopia, we make them and use them. It's a pretty straight line from A to B. The problem comes when certain groups of people have more access to these resources than others. Then the deciding factor of who lives or dies becomes money in a bank rather than the person's worth as a human being.
Suddenly natural selection is not 'natural' but rather 'socio-economic.' Whenever I think about issues of class I repeatedly come back to thinking of a friend of mine who considers herself to be middle class, yet, she is by any standard I know of, operating in the context of generational wealth. This is because those people who DO have access to these resources don't want us to KNOW they do. If we KNEW they had access to all these resources, to life when others around the world can only choose death, can you imagine what would happen to those resource saturated persons?! It would be Bastille Day all over again!! Yes, I believe it would stir some class consciousness. We wouldn't want that, now would we?
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