The world has always been a complex place. Parents have always thought that their children suffered from having it too easy because of technological advancement. Children have always thought their parents were out of touch with the happenings of the day. And historically, most cultures of the world fail to consider should they do a new fangled thing versus can they do a new fangled thing. There are always people who resist change. I am not talking about them even though they represent a group that also fails to consider the consequences of action or the lack of action. This group of peoples behavior is fear based and while fear plays an important role in survival, the beauty of being a human is the ability to control the fear response when it is irrational, or worse, irrelevant. As Frank Herbert says in his Dune trilogy, Fear is the mind killer. Advances in technology are sometimes driven by the curious. They ask whether or not a thing can be done and go about trying to achieve that goal. In its purest form, this is an exhilarating intellectual pursuit. Card carrying nerd that I am, I have an appreciation for this kind of advancement because it is fun. The challenge of it all is titillating and the rush of triumph is unspeakable satisfaction. But, then what? Then, someone who knows how to make money with the idea sells it. Whether they sell it to a government or consumers at large, they get out there in the marketplace and create demand. Even as adults, we are behave like children. (And, not in that good way.) A child will eat his favorite sweet until he is sick if you let him. He does so because he wants to. He doesnt think at all about the importance of balanced nutrition, or the capacity limits of his stomach or the predictable pain of overindulgence. Thats why children have parents. To advise them of unseen dangers and compel action from unheeded warnings. Forgive me for being provocative but who protects adults from the analogous challenges to their ability to choose between what is desirable and what is prudent? Adults come in varying and divergent levels of maturity. That diversity is a good thing, otherwise, the United States might be a nation comprised solely of cowboys, firemen and presidents. Somebody has to run power plants and design buildings. The free market place of capitalism is a rough and tumble place. The predominant focus of marketing is on our reptilian brain, the part of us that responds based on unabridged emotion. Sure, there are mature great thinkers among us. They consider the pros and cons, the probable versus the improbable and the good versus the bad versus the catastrophic versus the just plain wrong. The history of mankind tells us that historically when this people speak up and give the rest of us a clue, we kill them. A lot of times we give them a chance to recant instead of dying but pain of death is usually the way we go. To be fair, sometimes we say mean things and just stop talking to them. I apologize for only being able to reach back so far into human history but this is the best I can do. Lets start with Socrates who was killed in 399 B.C. Basically, Socrates argued that there were some things that were either good or bad no matter what your culture was. I think an appropriate example of this might be murder. Its pretty universal that killing people because you feel like it is bad. (Wait! I know what youre thinkin. What about the cultures that believe women are chattel? Even in those cultures you cant just kill a woman. You have to have a reason. Granted, it can be a stupid reason but you gotta have one or there is gonna be trouble.) Well, that kind of talk resulted a cup of hemlock with dinner courtesy of the citizens of Athens, who voted that Socrates should die for all that kooky talk. In 1885, when Gottlieb Daimler developed the prototype for the gasoline engine, do you think he could have imagined that the fuel for it would be the excuse for the death of tens of thousands over the coming centuries? Do you think that maybe Nikola Tesla might have had an idea that there was a long term problem with the way gasoline engines functioned so compelling that in 1931 he conceived and executed a black box that powered a car for a week on alternating current with no external power source? During that week, Tesla was able to attain speeds as high as 90 miles per hour. Because of the evidence of success, Tesla was much maligned for practicing black magic. By 1943, Tesla was dead and the documentation for his work had vanished. Oh well, it must not have been that important. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." Do you think when Henry David Thoreau wrote those words he might have been thinking that the materialistic portions of life might obstruct our ability to live our lives? Only the most esoteric of folks know him by his work. Some time after participating in the underground railroad, he was jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax as an act of civil disobedience. The mainstream public has always considered him a little odd. As adults, we are in charge of the long view. Granted, in the scope of things, our lives are short. But, each of our minds has the potential to reach beyond what we are. We can grow beyond our desire for the latest and greatest and reach for the thoughtful and prudent options. We live in a complex world of relationships. While all relationships are valid at one level or another. Some relationships are sacred and deserve our most reverent attention. Our relationship to the resources we consume and the planet that we steward is one of them. Our relationship to our progeny in perpetuity is another. It has always been true that children pay the price for the mistakes of their parents. As parents, it is our responsibility to mitigate the damage we do. Our ecological responsibility is our social responsibility. In short, (I know its a little late for that) as parents we are charged with guiding our children into maturity and part of maturity is self-control. We cannot teach them values that we do not live ourselves. |
