The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [15]
Lockley and her unborn daughter survived, as did three other injured shoppers sent to area hospitals. But the man who saved her life, thirty-four-year-old Jdimytai Damour, was killed. As paramedics attempted to resuscitate him, shoppers continued to jostle past; then became irate when officials announced the store was being closed.
The only son of Haitian immigrants, Jdimytai Damour was a very large but gentle man who enjoyed watching football and talked about being a teacher one day. The reason he was there that morning was not to buy, but to work. Because of his size—he was six feet five inches tall and weighed 270 pounds—he had been assigned to the front door. But he wasn’t a trained security officer. He was a temporary worker, a subcontractor, hired by Walmart to help them help us to consume more stuff during the busiest retail season of the year.
Far less tragic—and certainly less attention-grabbing—was a second, very profound event that also happened in 2008. Its exact timing will never be known, but at some instant during the year, the number of people living in urban areas grew to briefly match, for a few seconds, the number of people living in rural areas. Then, somewhere, a city baby was born. From that child forward, for the first time in our history, the human race became urban in its majority.
For the first time ever, we have more people living in cities than out on the land. For the first time, most of us have no substantive ability to feed or water ourselves. We have become reliant upon technology, trade, and commerce to carry out these most primitive of functions. Sometime in 2008, the human species crossed the threshold toward becoming a different animal: an urban creature, geographically divorced from the natural world that still continues to feed and fuel us.
What does the awful death of Jdimytai Damour have to do with our transformation to an urban race? Aside from occurring in the same year, what connection may be drawn between these two events?
From a macroeconomic perspective, the frenzied horde that killed poor Mr. Damour was, in its own mindless way, helping to build cities all over the world. Most of the items for sale in the Valley Stream Walmart were made overseas, by urban workers in the hundreds of Asian towns and cities churning out the cell phones, flat-screen televisions, netbooks, and other essentials of twenty-first-century life. Cities around the world have participated in the process of getting those products onto Walmart’s shelves.
A global supply web was needed to transfer the raw materials and components to manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou, and Bangalore. Then, the finished goods were sent to the United States, very likely in freighters and steel shipping containers built in places like Geoje (South Korea), Nagasaki (Japan), and Ningbo (China). These vessels were unloaded in the American ports of Long Beach or Los Angeles before being trucked east to Gloucester City, New Jersey, for redistribution. From there, they were trucked once again to Valley Stream, New York. Financial transactions between New York City and Hong Kong, as well as Chicago, Tokyo, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Seoul were taking place. So every time a new flat-screen TV is sold by Walmart, urban agglomerations around the globe all win another little economic boost.
These invisible