Perhaps the most evil thing about humanity isn’t our propensity for malevolence but our ability to get distracted.
The other day we toured Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, and Henry Ford’s replica of Menlo Park — where Thomas Edison created history in the form of invention after invention and gave me the artificial light by which I write this blog post.
At the Village, I discovered that Edison and I could be friends; near the historic buildings they have character actors playing the parts of these fantastic people, and Edison seemed like the kind of guy I could get along with (assuming he was even close to still being alive). He was apparently intense and passionate and never, ever gave up. And… he was just a little crazy.
Yeah, we could definitely be friends.
So, during all this, I wondered where the light bulb of today is; I mean, the light bulb was completely revolutionary, has impacted the entire planet, and honestly hasn’t changed all that much in the past 125 years. Where are these new ideas? Of course, I’d probably put computers and the internet in this category, but cars and airplanes — they were invented back in Edison’s day, too.
In any case, my point with the whole distraction comment above is just that I wonder some things: if people wouldn’t get distracted so easily by the pursuit of dollar signs, if the greatest minds on the planet could be harnessed to better mankind instead of dis-integrate it, if we could somehow look past ourselves and think about somebody else once in awhile…
I think we, as humans, find a lot of ways to distract ourselves. This idea probably doesn’t sound too ridiculous if you stop and think for a moment — I personally think about what things really make me smile and the fact that I rarely spend much of my day doing those things, and I realize that humanity — particularly western “civilized” humanity — has created an entire ecosystem of material distraction. It makes me sad, because what comprises the entirety of one’s life can be almost nothing but a series of distractions from what’s truly important to that person. Now I hope and pray that at the end of our lives, this situation will describe neither you nor me, but I know a lot of people that already live in this place.
And you know, I’m sorry that my writing dwells so much on the sadness of life; sometimes I wish I were a more happy, carefree individual. But there just seems to be something hardwired into me that sees the world through these darker tinted lenses of mine.
Maybe that’s OK…?
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