Another Way of Life

If you search for "uncontacted peoples" or "unknown tribes" you will find a Wikipedia page all about them. This is pretty funny since they are uncontacted, so what do we know? We, the extremely contacted people, are fascinated by their very existence. Adventurers and anthropologists have sought them out, snapping aerial photos of them living in the densely forested regions of places like Brazil, Asia and Oceania. This reminds me of the old "hippie tours" of the 1960s back in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, when busloads of straight tourists from Iowa and the like would pay money to be driven through the streets and gape at the stoners.

Civilized man's knowledge of the existence of indigenous tribes comes mostly from infrequent and sometimes violent encounters with them, and from aerial footage. Since members of these isolated tribes probably lack immunity to our common diseases, contact with them can kill a large percentage of their people. (How nice of us.)

It's interesting to wonder what those people do all day. Even more interesting is wondering what we would do all day if we did not have shopping, TV, computers, video games, Disneyland, hair salons, movies, Planet Fitness, cars, cruise ships and cataract surgery. That last category has taken up far too much of my time lately and is quite tiresome. I'm pretty sure that if I belonged to one of those lost tribes, I would not be about to undergo another eye procedure to fix the one I had months ago that didn't work. I would likely have just kept my cataracts and my slightly blurry vision. So maybe I wouldn't see that lion coming at me, but for all I know the lion would be my pet.

Mostly I wonder how those tribal people get going in the morning. Do they have coffee? Maybe they have something better. I used to pull up the dandelions that dot our lawn each spring, believing them to be nothing but unsightly weeds. Then my son, wise in these matters, showed me how to prepare them and eat them. What a fool I was.