Opinion/Editorial
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
The pyramids. They built them for thousands of years. Generation after generation of workers/slaves-built edifices out in the Egyptian desert so huge that most of the toilers never lived to see a finished product. The Romans built coliseums, aqueducts, and roads in the same fashion. St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was also constructed over generations, employing stonemasons who only ever worked on one particular part of the imposing structure. A great chunk of those cultures’ populations was kept employed and doing work so demanding and difficult that they had little time to do anything else other than eat, sleep, and procreate. There was no revolution, no protestors, no ‘Occupy’ movements, at least not that we know of. And there was an invention. Brilliant architectural designs, construction techniques (concrete was invented by the Romans before being forgotten about for hundreds of years into and through the Dark Ages), clever levers, pulley systems, and advances in nautical and land transportation we are just finding out about now. These accomplishments were all made based upon intense belief systems, however flawed.
We have no pyramids, aqueducts, basilicas, or stunningly huge road-building projects today. We have replaced this kind of collective magnificence with modern inventions designed to let us talk and write more. Among the top ten inventions of the last decade are Facebook, Twitter, and Google. We have become cultures of discussion. We talk about doing but place little value on actual performance unless the performer is somehow family-connected to the funding body paying for the performance. Our heroes have become people who are little more than scripted actors on Sunday afternoons or evening television. Our war heroes are those who simply travel to foreign lands, much as armed tourists did in ages past. Just going is heroic. What they do there is not reported or cared about. Our highest admiration and compensation go to people offering to allow us to talk and write more. The iPad and smartphone are two more of the top ten inventions of the decade past. You are getting the idea. Based would have thought that the 21st Century would be filled with reports about bases on the Moon and Mars, about the discovery and uses of anti-gravity or fusion power realities. In other areas, years back and looking forward, we might have thought about the cure for cancer or even the common cold. We don’t think about those things anymore, not as a collective culture.
We now talk. We talk about how we might conserve our resources to secure our future. We talk about our death without understanding what we are talking about. We are talking about waiting to die by regressing into ourselves and a deadly self-serving narcissism. Survival of the fittest is not about killing each other, or our competitors, when it comes to this very special and (apparently) select species. Survival of the fittest is about converting the universe to our will, compliance, and instruction. It is about action. Our grand great gifts of self-awareness, comprehension of life, and vastly superior intellect do not come without substantial obligations. We are not here to dominate the earth, or anything else on it. We are here to take responsibility for it and provide love and direction.
And so, too we are responsible for and to the universe beyond. We are not ready. We’ve never been ready. We must raise our eyes high enough to straighten our collective spine and accept this stunning responsibility, whether we want to or not. We must build our own ‘pyramids.’ Our expanding ability to talk must be about how to go about the accomplishment of such triumph and not about how to bow, genuflect, and cower in the face of its daunting challenge.
