Good From Evil: An Essay on the Effects of Economic, Nuclear, and "Natural" Disasters

Just a little something I wrote for an SAT essay class.

I personally believe that every event, good or bad, will always have a positive consequence. Today’s complex socio-economic society can turn anything into a good thing. The global oil shortage in 1972 may have started people thinking about energy conservation, but think of the other consequences, like forcing people who didn’t have gasoline to walk to work, either making them more fit, or weeding them out of the gene pool as physically unfit for survival. Even war can be turned to good, as it also weeds out the slow, the weak, and the mentally incapable, as well as cutting down on demand for various products, while the supply stays up, which drives prices down, ensuring more stuff for those that survive.

In 1972, when the world got down on its knees to beg APEC to produce more oil, several New England cities were reduced to savagery because of an inability to get to work and insanely high tax rates. They were reduced to a hunter/gatherer society, similar in many ways to the Native American tribes before England decided to colonize the Americas. The men were suddenly dependant, not on their brains as before, but raw, unfettered brawn. The strongest, whose name was Charles Liverwort, dominated, leaving the weak to die in the now-barren suburban wasteland. As a result, the next Yankee generation was put through the filter of brawn over brain, and their IQ’s have suffered for it, but they are more likely to survive the next nuclear holocaust. Thus, good was accomplished through disaster.

Eight years later, in a Soviet model town in Ukraine, it was a poorly-publicized fact that the T-virus (known for killing the host and reanimating the corpse to infect others) was making its way through the population. To save the world from extinction, the Chief Engineer at the nuclear reactor ordered that the safeties be removed, one by one, until meltdown was inevitable. His last radio transmission gave his regards to the Politburo, saying that he’d be happy to see them in hell, and said goodbye to his family. The explosion at Chernobyl and subsequent radiation wave, which killed hundreds, is single-handedly responsible for preventing a world-wide T-virus outbreak. Thus, good was accomplished through disaster.

When George Bush sent Hurricane Katrina to invade New Orleans, and everyone was running scared or looting the snot out of local Circuit Cities for essential supplies, like 52” plasma screen TVs, the weak (in this case, people with bad hand/eye coordination) were weeded out, resulting in the next (but limited) generation having excellent hand/eye coordination and immunities to various corpse-eating bacteria, ensuring that, come next hurricane, they would be the ones who survive. They would have their genetic material passed down to the next generation, and also ensure the better survival of the species, so long as the survival of the species does not involve a moral compass or overly liberal use of compassion. [Thus, good was accomplished through disaster.]

Therefore, in the long run, any event may be turned into an overall benefit for the species, no matter the current cost, so long as some surviving remnant is left. [Or, with regards to the Chernobyl incident, as long as the threat to the species is successfully obliterated.]