Living in the Best of Times

WE live in the best of times. I don’t harbour the illusion that it is a perfect world, looking at the heinous things happening around us and the many ways people conjure up to destroy this beautiful planet of ours.

Still, I am an inherent optimist and am quite easily convinced that we are fortunate enough to live in a great time, comparatively peaceful and prosperous, and more importantly, with abundant blessings.

I am having my breakfast when this thought comes to me: I just need to look around me to realize that I am living a life beyond the dreams of even the most powerful emperor in history.

And I am just an ordinary bloke with a steady income living in a lower middle-income neighbourhood in Kuala Lumpur. I do not even consider myself rich, just a bit well-off in the sense that I don’t need to worry about my next meal.

I am sipping steaming hot coffee from Columbia, served in blue willow tea set from England with low-calorie sweetener from the United States and reading my morning newspaper with news and useful information sourced from all over the world printed on paper perhaps from Finland.

The indoor environment has been cooled to a constant temperature of 22˚C by an air-conditioner made in Malaysia with Japanese technology.

My celery and fruits from China are being kept fresh inside a Japanese refrigerator, and next to it, sits an oven which can microwave anything in a jiffy.

In the sitting hall, a 29-inch Japanese TV set can tune to BBC or CNN or any satellite TV station to keep me updated on world news while in the car porch, a Korean-made MPV is sitting ready to take me anywhere I want in great comfort.

Want to go anywhere farther away? I can just book an air ticket on-line, pay by using the plastic card and I am quite ready to fly to any part of the world without much hassle.

I just cannot image any of those mighty kings or emperors in the past could enjoy this kind of convenience even though they had the power to raise an army, conquer and plunder any weaker nation which inconvenienced or displeased them.

Those who have the privilege of peeping through dusty glass windows to look at those furniture and utensils used by Chinese emperors at the Forbidden City would readily agree that they did not have a cushy life as comfortable as ours despite their power and authority.

Many of us would not want to swap our air-conditioned houses equipped with all the modern gadgets to meet our every whim and fancy with their stuffy palace with overly decorative and uncomfortable wooden furniture.

A Qing emperor would have had to endure two weeks of bumpy ride on horseback or sedan under a scorching sun on mountain roads from Beijing to his summer palace in Chengde to escape the heat wave in summer.

The same journey today can be covered in two hours in the air-conditioned comfort of a car along a brand new expressway where one can make any number of stops to buy some local stuff or sample local delicacies.

Likewise, when the Queen of a Tang Dynasty fell in love with the lychee from Guangdong which is the best, a relay of couriers on horseback had to be organized to rush the fruits to Xian.

The journey could take weeks and even then, people and horses collapsed and died during the journey due to exhaustion.

Now lychees are plucked, sorted out and air-flown to markets anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, still fresh and juicy.

But lest I lapse into euphoria, I must also constantly remind myself of the ugly things still happening around us caused by nature or the follies of man. The irony is that progress and modernization also bring destruction to the environment and the more we advance, the more stressful and complicated life becomes.

Everything has a price. Hopefully, we human beings are wise enough to manage such changes without killing our lovely planet.