MARASCO: The 46 percent

Every now and then, I hear a statistic that gives me substantial pause, such as the fact that there are more than 1,000 chemicals in a single cup of coffee, or that vending machines commit double-digit murders annually.

But I especially can’t shake a statistic that I first heard in a biology class my sophomore year of undergraduate study: 46 percent of Americans don’t “believe” in evolution.

Now, I’m not sure I really understand how one could believe or not believe in something like that. “I don’t believe in milk either! Or baseball cards!” See what I mean? It’s sort of an invalid stance. But nearly half of this country takes that position.

That statistic disorients me. It disturbs me on a very deep level. I’ve literally lost sleep because of that figure. And what I’ve continued to wonder is why evolution? What is it about evolution specifically that makes people put their hands over their ears and go, “La la la la! Nope! Didn’t happen!”

I’ve never met someone who denies the existence of gravitational pull or an atmosphere or takes the position that the moon is made of cheese. But I’ve heard entire “arguments” from people against evolution. There are lawsuits going on over whether to teach it in science classes, and there are governors who publicly say they don’t “believe it.” And far worse, hordes of Americans voted for these governors.

I find, overwhelmingly, the issue we have with evolution is personal.

“My great granddaddy wasn’t a damn fish-frog!”

We don’t like the idea of it. Humans like to look at ourselves as better than other living things. We can talk. We can play the oboe. We even poop in fancy marble chairs. People don’t like admitting the fact that they’re primates. Very advanced primates, but primates nonetheless. That would be beneath them somehow.

This same ugly, arrogant way of seeing the world manifests itself in the thing I’ve come to like least about Los Angeles. There’s a certain materialistic hierarchy here that people like to fancy themselves as part of in this city. Some almost seem to revel in the idea of looking down at others.

An overt air of, “Look at me, I’m better than you,” gets emitted around town, whether it’s at restaurants, nightclubs or even innocuous places like fuel pumps — “I don’t put regular gas in my Porsche.”

There’s also a subtler form of snobbiness that seems to creep into the hearts and minds of otherwise pleasant people. “There is no reason to ever go to East Los Angeles,” I can recall reading in my welcome brochure the day I moved here. That was listed under “tips.”

This love affair with trying to prove we’re better than others is like a virus that has mutated into its ghastliest form here in LA. I can see it in the arms race of rims and wristwatches made of Aztec gold on Wilshire Boulevard. I can taste it in my cocktail in West Hollywood as waiters are given undeserved grief by flashy patrons. I can hear people on the Walk of Fame deciding that comrades asking for help don’t deserve their attention — “They’ll probably just spend it on beer.”

It infects our mind in the same way that we can seemingly be brainwashed into not “believing” in something like evolution. All it takes is an idea that somehow we are better than those around us, or that the whole universe was planted here with us, and only us, in mind. Then we support our hypothesis with scissor doors, bottle service and enough cologne to kill a small pack of rhinoceroses, until finally we’ve convinced ourselves that we really are better than others.

This epidemic is responsible for a graveyard of fatally wounded souls here in Los Angeles. Once this nasty disease reaches the bloodstream, you begin to lose touch with the world around you. You buy $90, plain white t-shirts. You refuse to eat sushi in certain neighborhoods. You mention in passing that, “there are too many homeless people around here.”

There are some dark nights when witnessing this virus really gets me down. It can seem unstoppable, especially here on the frontlines of materialism. It makes the world feel heartless and void of all redeeming qualities. But then I remember that 54 percent of people don’t say evolution is a lie. That team is standing their ground, and they’re winning.

So, maybe that means the materialists and down-lookers aren’t running around unchecked. Maybe there are people who will stand and fight and say, “Having your nickname spelled out in diamond letters doesn’t make you better than your waitress.”

Frank Marasco is a first-year graduate student in Los Angeles. He can be reached at fcm820@bu.edu.