edit

GIANTS

Posted by Erik Frey Tue, 24 Dec 2002 06:49:00 GMT

If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the backs of giants.

- Sir Isaac Newton

it’s frustrating to me.

every person born in the world makes the same damn mistakes, made billions of times before, by billions of people.

we learn the same lessons over, and over, and over, and over again.

it’s such a glorious waste of matter and energy.

but it’s like a critical mass. like air-popped popcorn. the level keeps rising. we make enough of the same mistakes, learn the same things, and one day, someone has enough random fodder, enough time and pressure, to learn something new.

ingenuity is born.

too bad we can’t just stick a DVD into the back of our heads when we’re young. a DVD entitled “everything you need to know up until about the age of 40” and just get all that crap out of the way. it would give us all a chance at actually having an original thought or two in our lives.

i wonder how many truly original thoughts i’ve had in my life? thoughts that were at the top of the air-popped popcorn level? a thought that went past all the others, and left a tide-mark up on the shore.

enough to count on one hand?

three? two?

one?

probably none.

these thoughts went through my head the other night at wal-mart, looking at a mid-40’s woman, who ran up to me at the checkout line. i didn’t have anything in my hand, and so she decided i wasn’t actually in line. “excuse ME!” she threatened, rather than asked, and pushed the cart towards me like she was trying to push cattle out of the way.

i politely aquiesced, and watched her push past me with a scowl. she pulled items out of her cart onto the checkout table – diapers, christmas wrapping paper, frozen chicken… she hurriedly pulled out item after item, scowl still in place, as if someone might try to usurp her coveted place in the checkout line.

civilization started 12,000 years ago, when the first open woodlands with farmable crops appeared in the western foothills of the zagros mountains in turkey.

12,000 years. that’s about 250 generations, give or take.

250 generations of collective wisdom, culminated in this woman, with an expression uglier than any face i could try to make, hording cigarette cartons and baby formula like it was the end of the world.

technologically, we may have come a long way. but morally, philosophically, theologically, we sure don’t have much to show for ourselves.

on the backs of giants, indeed.