Thursday, June 30, 2005

Yes...Flying Cars.

Well...
Yes, honestly...I do think the world would be a better place if we all had flying cars.

I think the problem is that we have lost sight of that type of invention. Like I said...building better bombs and missiles has become the thing. And other things like what to do with nuclear waste have been pushed aside or literally buried rather than being dealt with. Especially since Three Mile Island happened and there hasn’t been a new nuclear power plant built in this country since.
It’s only the hippies and weirdos like me that are willing to toss green mountain energy a few extra bucks every month because they use a lot of wind and solar and hydro power. And as you and I get older we will see more and more of the aging nuclear power plants being shut down and hopefully things like solar energy becoming more prevalent. I met a guy once who made his living installing solar panels on peoples roofs...for ten grand he’d put a system up there that would pretty much take you off the grid. So not only does it pay for it’s self in like 5 years...but it means you are no longer requiring nuclear power plants to be operated. Although a very small portion of our electricity comes from nuclear power...more of it comes from the burning of oil and coal than from nukes. And those are great too...imported oil or strip mined coal being burned and polluting the planet.

But we don’t care anymore. We are like ostriches with our heads in the sand.
And that is what I think has been lost.
In stead of science working towards making the planet better and getting us to other planets...it has become an industry bent on making better killing machines and penis pills (I’m sure there’s a funny joke in there somewhere about ‘make love not war’).

So yes...I was hoping (when I was a small child) that by now (a 38 year old child) we’d be living in a more star trek like reality where everyone on the planet realized we are all on the same little life boat here and we’d all just be working together and being good people.
I just saw the movie The Last Samurai and there was a line in it that really struck me talking about a turn of the century (19th to 20th , 1800’s-1900’s) Japanese mountain village...it was something like this..

From the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep these people devote their entire life to the perfection of whatever it is they chose to do.


And that’s the thing...

Just doing what it is we do for the sake of doing it well. Not for the paycheck. Being a potter for the love of the clay and not for the money the pots will bring. It cheapens them.
Tiling a bathroom because I love putting in tile.


I think we have made ourselves completely insane.
And we’re all gonna be standing there playing the fiddle this time.

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