“Eat your turnips. Think of all the little Chinese children who would be only too happy to have turnips to eat. And you’re just leaving them on your plate.”

I never quite figured out what that parental admonition was all about, but it was frequent. Whenever my mother served turnips, in fact. Or parsnips. I once sat with my mouth full of un-swallowed parsnips during a whole meal until my father whomped me on the back and I deposited them in my sister’s lap.

My sister and I wondered about it, though. One day we sought out a secluded corner of the backyard, behind the mint bed, and determined to investigate. With Mom’s gardening trowel we started digging a hole that would take us to China — which we knew was on the opposite side of the globe — so we would be able to meet these Chinese children and ask them if they liked turnips. Or parsnips.

Of course that didn’t work, and we got a scolding for trampling down some of the mint plants, but I have never fully lost the sense of guilt I feel about throwing away perfectly good (even if only in someone else’s opinion) food. I can still see those Chinese children, mouths agape like baby birds in the nest, longing for a forkful of turnips, while I am scheming to slip mine to our faithful Cocker Spaniel, waiting under the table. And the guilt has only extended as I grow older, to include other things than turnips.

What right have I to splurge on a twenty dollar admission fee to enter a museum where I can admire a small square of canvas smeared with time-dimmed daubs of paint for which the museum paid 46 million dollars, while Chinese children (better make that Somalian to keep up with the changing times) are deprived and starving? Shouldn’t I be sending those twenty dollars instead to some go-good organization that will make an honest attempt to get ten dollars’ worth of it past the black market aspirations of some dictator’s cronies and get at least some food into the hands of a desperate mother with a family to feed?

OK, that’s extreme. Not every choice is between starvation and luxury. Some things are about cultural guardianship, the cohesive traditions of established societies, and logistic impossibilities. There is not necessarily an “either-or” here. Society is a complicated thing, with interconnections that tie everything to everything. Museums constitute some of the glue (call it snobbism if you like) that holds together the philanthropic enterprises of museum lovers and enables them to contribute far more than my feeble twenty dollars to a cleft-palate repair fund for Nigerian babies. Without that paint-daubed piece of canvas to rally round they would not be able to walk the red carpet and show off their cleavages or their taste in arm candy and raise millions of dollars for all sorts of worthy humanitarian causes. We have to accept that the structure of society includes both at the same time.

Nevertheless, when I walk the aisle in my supermarket that displays hundreds of brands of dry cereal mixes, each one representing a separate hierarchy of CEOs and CFOs and managers and assistant managers and PR specialists and ad designers and crisis teams (for when a mouse foot is discovered in the box) and salesmen and distributors and stockholders and brand-loyal consumers I do think of those Chinese children. What if we all collectively agreed that there are perhaps as many as five legitimately different kinds of dry cereal and put the duplicated efforts at marketing the others into getting a few sacks of grain to Somalia where they could keep thousands of people from starving? (Don’t be shocked. “Collectively” doesn’t necessarily mean “Socialistically” or “Communistically”; it can also simply mean decisions made by people acting together in the interests of a community — in another word, “society”.

Would we be able to turn some of the money saved into something called “diplomacy”, which might have a chance of holding back the hordes of cronies supported by their crooked rulers who otherwise eat up our modest efforts at providing help for their people?

How?

It would have to be by regulations of some sort — regulations that came from some organized, authorized, recognized body (not a bad definition of “government”). And that body would have to have the support of a lot of just plain citizens. I sympathize with people who already feel hemmed in by too many regulations. Being told that you can’t plant corn because some agricultural subcommittee of some special select committee of congress sitting in plush chairs in a big white domed building a thousand miles from the nearest abandoned silo has so decreed is surely a maddening experience. (So, perhaps, is a rule that you can’t drive a car without wearing a seatbelt.) But they both have the same goal — protecting the individual by restricting his freedom in the interest of the well-being of the community.

There was a recent exchange of letters in one of my favorite magazines between on the one hand some NASA bureaucrats who wanted every particle of every item launched into space sanitized and sterilized to avoid running the risk of introducing bacterial contamination to any forms of life that may be out there picking through our trash, if there are such life forms; and one of my favorite thinkers, a Mr. Freeman Dyson, who points out that this extra burden will raise the costs and delay the arrival of private sector explorations on the basis of a highly tenuous hypothesis, and that maybe the vastness of the universe ensures a level of tolerance that a relaxed view of the value of individual enterprise is more realistic. (That’s not like allowing West Virginia bulldozers to chop off the tops of mountains and stint on mine safety in the interests of making coal company owners richer, although certain people will try to convince you that it is the same thing.)

Everything in life cannot be solved by another new regulation. People have to administer the rules, and they must be given leeway to let common sense overrule the words on the paper when that makes better sense.

Maybe that translates into more NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) with more freedom to act quickly and sensibly than politically hampered formal legislative bodies blinkered by party-driven competition and complicated funding arrangements. On the other hand we have a president who recently reacted to TV pictures of mangled children in a faraway country not by upping his (as yet still undocumented) charitable contribution to Doctors Without Borders but by unleashing 16 million taxpayers’ dollars’ worth of missiles to create still more mangled bodies. There ought to be a law against that. And it needs to be strictly enforced. No deviations allowed.

Why can’t life be simple?