Opinion/Editorial
IMAGINE
By James Strauss
“Imagine no possessions…I wonder if you can…No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…” I didn’t write those words to that song, John Lennon did. He was way behind and ahead of his time, depending upon how you want to view the three and a half million years humanity has occupied a place on this planet. Step into the Air and Space portion of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. and you will understand what that means. How many slips backward, from every forward thrust of advancing culture, does it take to reach a ‘tip-over’ point where all likelihood of a descent back into a groveling pre-industrial and pre-agricultural era might disappear?
The Air and Space Museum ably and graphically demonstrates how these ‘slippages’ in culture can come about without there ever being a mention of the fact that such a thing might or did happen. To walk into the front door of the museum is to go back forty years (if one has been so lucky as to be able to visit the place twice in such a period) and realize that there is nothing new throughout the exhibits lining the walls and filling the vast rooms of the entry area. A keen observer will feel, from such a concurrent revisit, a distinct pull backward, yearning for a technology seemingly dead and gone. Where are the smiling vigorous and laughing astronauts? Where are the next generations of advanced equipment invented, built, and used by succeeding generations of space farers? The only real modernistic and constructive change in technology that appears to a museum entrant is the single huge monopolistic MacDonalds assuming complete dominance and control over what was once a diverse bunch of independent food service operations. Ownership has overcome us. Our own brilliantly designed structure of controlled capitalism has reached right into the guts of our culture, and the cultures of all other modern societies on earth and jerked them right out. No great causes can be dreamed up and followed, no adventures thought of and pursued, no grand projects overpowering the ability of any small group of individuals to empower them may succeed if a species unwittingly decides to ‘cash in’ a majority of that species mental and monetary liquidity to live introverted selfish lives of protected comfort.
Space as the next frontier has become space, a place where we spend little capital to send robots into orbit. Education for all has become an exercise in teaching people that education lacks real importance and that educators are composed of social predators playing the system for their own purposes. Science is left with a measure of respect better accorded to waste management processing, with creationism argued as a potentially factual part of our developmental history. A searching, reporting, and vigilant media has sold itself out in totality to the ‘comfort’ set, and then gone along and joined it.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one, I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.” John Lennon, again. We cannot succeed in breaking through to another level of advancement if we remain selfishly fractured, broken into tiny elements of hording ‘comfort’ specimens and then a great remainder of the rest of the species. Only through sociologic enjoining and exhibition can we hope to amass the mental and physical assets it will take to truly set us free. Where no combined effort is found to have been continuously pursued you will also find ruins. Our planet is filled with the ruins of societies that rose up and then floundered as success, in the form of selfishness; comfort seeking, and elitism overcame them. Rome committed suicide by success, not because the Mongol hordes came down and defeated them. No hordes from the steppes could have conquered the Roman Legions. It took an unwitting internal decision on the part of an entire culture to rip the guts out of that mighty empire. Imagine what we can do, if only we will.
Again. Imagine.
