It is common practice for any potential employee to ask the employer for employment benefits. In fact it has become the gold standard, only second to salary and wages, to gauge the ranking of a job position. These benefits often include a retirement package and insurance coverage. When you think about it, it is rather odd that we have built a culture that values getting treatment more than it values the whole process of wellness. That has spun a culture of easy solutions for a long term problem.
That the food we eat and the drinks we consume make almost certain that we will get sick and therefore need the insurance does seem to register and clearly, or at least not enough for us to feel compelled to do something about it. Here is one major predicament that we have that is the quintessential crime on a grand scale. It all starts with the socialization not of losses but the privatization of pleasures. There can be no private pleasure if the loss that emanates from such an act turns into a cost for those who had no say in the act that caused the loss.
I have observed a similar practice amongst the Kenyan community in the Diaspora whereby a person dies from unexpected reason, accident or sickness and the community are tasked with the task of fulfilling the will of the deceased and that of the family to ship the body back to Kenya to be rested amongst his kin or next to a loved one. In a bid to make the will of a person few knew or probably had any relationship of any kind, kindness is born out of thin air steps up to the plate and before you know it, as much as $ 20,000 to $50,000 are raised by members of the Diaspora and the body is neatly dressed and prepared by a mortician for the journey across the sea to where it had begun its journey.
Therein lies the irony is that there are few other wishes that such people would have made in life and without having any resources and have the community show up with such vigor, expecting nothing in return. This is especially the case when you consider just how difficult it is for startups and other ventures to access funds for their new or existing businesses. Why is it that planning for a vacation or even traveling back to Kenya is not too much of an expense that many do not have a problem financing, but become financially destitute whenever pleasure is out and pain is in. The pleasure that such individuals had been enjoying while things were more normal must have been a mirage then. They were having a good time with resources that they should have been saving to cover their own wishes. To miss that point is to court disaster. If a group of people invest more of their social capital in building churches and burying their kin and little in financing startups and businesses that would promote progress and economic and social vitality in days to come, their future is both uncertain and most likely going to be rocky.
Whether one is looking for a job and puts more weight on benefits than on food or one’s culture socializes loss but privatizes pleasure, the one thing that these two groups have in common is that they are indirectly unelecting food. For this reason, and probably many others, food is never such a big issue in the American, much less African, political races. Food literacy is the one solution to this predicament. People who invest in private pleasure but socialize suffering in the face of the global crisis we currently face are likely to face serious problems in the times to come.