The Tyranny of Tradition

The Silent Majority

Right Lung, you work hard everyday to move oxygen into the blood stream.  I often find myself thinking that right lungs are the hardest working organs in the body.  What you do is a thankless job.   You are one of the good, hardworking organs.  Many of the other “piker” organs like the liver, the pancreas and the embarrassingly lazy appendix spend their days lollygagging around and benefiting from all the sweat and toil you put in.  They reap the same benefits as you for one tenth of the work.  Now I ask you, is that fair?

What do you get for all your labor….nothing.  Bossed around all day by the Brain.  Sure, the Brain sits up there enjoying the good life while you pump oxygen 24 hours a day without a break.  Only like 10 percent of the Brain even does anything, Lung.  But it feels entitled to tell you what to do?  Who gives it the right?  The Brain thinks it knows everything, but let it spend ten minutes trying to convert angiotensin I to angiotensin II.  Puh-lease!

The Brain wastes all this time consulting with different useless departments like the cerebellum, the parietal lobe and the frontal lobe all the while using the precious oxygen that you generously provide it with.  Sipping coffee and making policy decisions while you pump away.  Enforcing its sadistic code of anatomical correctness.  They redistribute your oxygen to every organ regardless of how hard they work and you get nothing but the short end of the trachea.  What is your reward for all of your effort?  Nothing but lectures on how you should produce more oxygen just because the body is running or underwater.  You go underappreciated while the other organs bask in the rewards of your effort.

Right Lung, I want you to know that there is another way to live.  I’m not sure if you are aware of this but the body is essentially a communistic system.  All the organs benefit equally, no matter how important their contribution is.  What is your incentive to work harder than say, the Left Lung?

As we all know, human nature clearly shows us that we can only be happy if we are pitted against each other in bloodthirsty competition for control of all of the vital resources of the body.  Cooperation between the organs has left the lazy viscera sitting pretty while the diligent, enterprising ones do all the work. Instead of allowing this madness to continue, I propose we move towards an “every organ for itself” system.

If one lung produces oxygen really well, I say why punish it for being good at its job?  It should be allowed to keep as much of the oxygen as it makes.  This way all of the weaker organs will die off and the strong ones will be left to create a better body, without free-riding, parasitic entrails.  Let’s face it, you will not be free until the body stops coddling the slothful and the shiftless.

A truly free market anatomy promises each organ will be judged on its merit as an individual and not held back from producing and consuming anything it wants.  When the body stops forcing all of the organs to work together in some socialistic form of “harmony” and begins to compensate organs for what they contribute and no more, then, and only then will we be free.