A World Without

I sometimes engage in a thought game where I imagine how different the world would be without one thing.  I’m not talking about missing big and abstract stuff—like a world without war or a world without any form of religion.

I mean something more elemental.

At one time, I tried to bring others into my game.  If an inordinately long silence developed between me and another person while driving down the highway, I would blurt out: “Hey, what do you think the world would be like if glass had never been invented?”

The stock response was something like: “Why do you have these thoughts, Mitch?” 

The other day, I started thinking about what the world would be like if beer was never invented.

Would the absence of beer mean God doesn’t love us?  Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

How would my father have hydrated without beer?   What would all the smelter workers in my hometown of East Helena, Montana, have done after work if they couldn’t stop at one of the local bars for a beer after putting in a shift?  Could we survive without beer butt chicken?  What kind of cans would we be melting at our Aluminum Beer Can Melting Guild functions?

And consider what Frank Zappa wrote in his memoir: “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. “It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”

—Mitchell Hegman