We are a nation, a generation, a people, a world becoming. For centuries, the now nameless visionaries of countless human civilizations labored their lives away in the hopes of building something greater, something deeper, something... More. And they did it quite well. Remarkably, I'd say. They did it so well that nobody knows who they were. Their contributions to society and the world, however, still linger on to this day.
Take a moment to consider the piece of furniture nearest you. What did it take to build that desk, that chair, that bed, that table, or that filing cabinet? How many people sought and thought and fought their entire lives so that you could have that piece of furniture which now stands before you? Remember the difficulty you encountered when you tried to put together that IKEA bookcase? It was a real nightmare, wasn't it? But you didn't die. You (hopefully) left the experience with the same amount of limbs and digits with which you started. But somewhere along the way, you can bet that at least one (more like thousands or even millions) of people died for that very bookcase.
Some of you probably know where this is going, and to you, I doff my invisible cap.
The creation of the IKEA bookcase involved three primary elements: design, production of raw materials, and transport.
The bookcase had to be designed by a person. The bookshelf didn't just come out of the air and magically design itself. The design of the bookshelf was based on the design of a previous bookshelf. The previous bookshelf was based upon the design of an even older bookshelf and on down the line until someone, somewhere decided to create an elevated surface on which to hold a certain object or objects. Perhaps it was in the sod dwelling of one of my ancestors that this brilliant idea came to pass. "What?" Someone thought, "What if we don't have to scatter our things all along the floor but could create some stand on which to hold our objects to make them easier to access." The they were faced with a new quandary.... How to create it.
And this person who decided to look for a way to keep their belongings off of the floor, THIS person, my friends, was the predecessor of the very IKEA bookshelf designer whose name you do not know, but who you cursed so virulently nonetheless.
Yet the IKEA bookshelf designer and the designer of the original "raised place on which to put objects in place" have their similarities in that they both sought a way to improve their conditions.
I often think of the simple tools (lever, wheel and axel, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw) and am utterly baffled at how we came to figure out how to use them in the first place. Let's go back to the first shelf builder. This person had a great idea, but had to figure out how to make it work. Somehow they did, with or without the help of one or more of these simple tools (Or they just said "To hell with it" and employed plain old brute force to get the job done... Just like you did when making the IKEA bookshelf). But eventually, more complex methods of construction were developed and new shelf making materials were discovered, and the simple shelf became a part of everyday life.
So who was this visionary? Who was this brilliant thinker who recognized the problem and worked to find a solution to it? Nobody knows. Nobody really cares. We're grateful for the shelves and all, but we don't care what your name is....
And in a perfect world, maybe that's how it should be. And who knows, in another 5,000 years the names of Edison, Tesla, and Galileo may be lost to the ages as people just take for granted that these inventions have always been there.
We are a nation, a generation, a people, a world becoming. We are evolving at such a fantastic rate that we don't know what to do with ourselves. We log on to the Internet with our phones and watches, for Christ's sake. There are even appliances that use Twitter, and cars that... Well, forget it, cars can do almost anything these days. The only problem with cars anymore is the people driving them are so distracted that they hardly remember to look at the road.
We are a butterfly emerging from a cocoon in which we've been trying to work our way off of for 5,000 years or more, deepening upon whom you believe.
We can create incredible things, marvelous buildings, glorious monuments to our own magnificence, and weapons which could, in mere nanoseconds, destroy all of this progress we've made over countless millennia.
Where are our visionaries? Playing Candy Crush? Blogging at 5:15am on a Friday? Sleeping in the basement of an abandoned building somewhere in the northeastern United States dreaming of a simple meal and a hit of crack.
What does a visionary look like?
How can you tell whether or not the person next to you has the secret to curing C-Diff?
Do they look a certain way? Is there something about their height or weight? Is their skin a special color? Are their toes certain lenghts? Are they left-handed? (Actually more visionaries probably are left-handed because southpaws see everything in the world as a challenge, a riddle which must be solved. Give a standard pair of children's scissors to a left-handed 4-year old, and watch what happens if you don't believe me.)
But it's the challenges that bring out the visionaries. Whether it's how to create an elevated place on which to store objects so they don't clutter up the floor, or it's trying to determine the Absolute Origin of the Universe and God, the visionaries are all around us, waiting for their moment to contribute their part to enrichment of the human experience.
But what are we doing? What are we really doing with all of this? These years of labor, these lives sacrificed for the sake of human advancement, what did they all mean? Currently, more people have immediate access to more information than ever in the history of humankind, and that information is growing on a daily basis. A single person cannot watch all of the videos on YouTube in a lifetime.
And we've got this great opportunity now to give everyone in the world a chance to better their lives and broaden their intellectual horizons, and what do we get??? What do people look for the most on the Internet? Kittens? Long lost lovers? Porn?
We've evolved to such a point that new relationships can be forged within seconds over the Internet, tearing down cultural and religious barriers which have kept us at war for so many years, and how do we use these channels of communication ? Do we use them to introduce radical concepts to the world? Do we use then to compose music with complete strangers? Do we use these tools to make virtual visits to places we'd never physically be? Certainly!!! But what do we do most with this incredible tool? We show our penises, vaginas, buttocks and breasts to each other.
Well, at least we've evolved in some ways.
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