Meditation On The Baby Food Crisis

May 23, 2022
At this point there’s no shortage of commentary about the current Baby Formula shortage in the U.S. but for me it’s also a call for more analysis and meditating on a subject is more than just being trendy.

My first thought jumped to the old Zen aphorism which goes, “Before enlightenment chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.” Meaning in this case: we’ve analyzed this in every which way possible and we’re still dangerously short of baby food formula. We have moved the needle not one micrometer.

So much for thoughts about the shortcomings of Capitalism and so much for the shortcomings of Big Government — Ideologies do not solve problems let alone emergencies. They are a waste of time spent by all Ideology Crusaders but they cannot resist spending part of their lives in angry accusations against “the other side.”

But further meditation on Capitalism produces a shift in one’s thinking. Capitalism is about supply and demand and the failure in this case isn’t because of any fault in that existential fact. (Motive is the sole factor driving the Capitalist System- and completion of the supply side is where the failure lies. It’s not “system” but management.). Management at those Abbot plants failed to do their duty, failed to do their damned jobs despite getting high salaries and generous benefit packages. They failed, not the Capitalist System. The Socialist System also fails — even more regularly because motive (for profit and mutual gain) is absent.

This situation resembles a fire station where all the fire fighters are taking a long nap which is uninterrupted when the fire bell rings. Disaster is the result.

In the words of the Great Philosopher Lewis Black: We are fucked!

The heart wrenching fact is that we don’t yet know how many infants may be injured or killed by these bastards. And the gasoline I’m throwing on the fire right now is that “The Press” has so far failed to provide the names of the Abbot managers responsible for the plant shut downs and “The Press” is also remarkably silent when it comes to providing an exact date when supplies will be restored nationwide.

Will the manager or managers responsible be prosecuted for their very real crime? That’s an answer we must demand or the now infamous “too big to fail” phenomenon will happen to us again!

Also in the words of Great Philosopher Lewis Black: Son of a bitch!

Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us. — Errol Morris