The slow creep of injustice
When toxicity grows gradually, we get used to it. But we don't have to.
The quality of cabin air is a growing issue for airline passengers. Pilots delay starting the engines until minutes before rolling away from the gate, which is good for saving fuel but hard on passengers, who have to sit in an unventilated aluminum tube as the cabin gets hotter and air quality falls. Interestingly, travelers are often unaware of how much air quality has deteriorated, because the changes occur incrementally.
Louis Pasteur, the brilliant French microbiologist, once conducted a classroom experiment to demonstrate how animals adapt to dangerous conditions. He placed a bird in a closed container for six hours. The bird grew sluggish and inactive as the air quality diminished, but it did not die. When Pasteur introduced a second bird of the same species into the polluted container, this new bird died immediately. The sudden immersion in toxic air was a shock it could not survive.
I don’t know exactly what conclusions Pasteur presented to his students that day, but his experiment prompts me to think about our human adaptivity to dangerous environments, especially ones in which the toxicity has increased gradually. In America, for example, we’ve grown accustomed to public school teachers spending significant sums of their own money to buy classroom supplies, because we’ve underfunded the proposition that a decent education is a right for every kid in the country.
