I've been mulling a post concerning re-thinking for...well...forever, I guess. But it's just been too big for me to ever go ahead and put anything down. What am I talking about? I'm talking about re-thinking, I'm talking about taking a look at some given in my life, in your life, in this world. I'm talking about examining some concept walking around and totally accepted as akin-to-the-truth when it's really not...
And already I'm re-thinking writing this post...Like I said, it just seems too big to tackle. Perhaps just a bit crazy. The thing is, excluding playing music, most of the work I do tends be done alone. The upshot is that I'm left alone to have conversations with just myself, and the result is a conversation with no real checks and balances system there to keep it in the realm of sanity. I just get going on some concept, some trope, in my head and before long--let's call it mental inbreeding--those thoughts are wandering around in the void of the impossible. But to me, talking to myself as I am, it all seems perfectly rational.
I wanna show you what I mean by re-thinking with two things + one more thing. The first two are cars and guns. You'll just have to wait to see what the one more thing is. But before I do any of tha, I want to give a simple example of someone else's re-thinking that'll at least show that I'm not totally out there. So, let's take a look at the neck tie. The cravat.
I love a good tie. When I wear one I feel dressed up. I like looking at them all lined up at a clothing store, I like the patterns and the prettiness. But I think they ought to go away. Originally, I suppose, a neck tie was a way to keep ourselves warm, but they've lost any real purpose and are now almost entirely symbolic. But to question the necktie--for instance, to suggest a presidential candidate show up for a televised debate without a tie--is to flirt with something like heresy. That just seems like too much power for a simple piece of silk to have.
But back a few years ago someone in Britain did question the necktie. They conducted a study looking at a connection between doctors, their ties and rates of infection. One hospital was the control: all the doctors wore neckties just like they'd always done. At another hospital the doctors were asked to not wear a tie for something like 6 months. The result was that the tie-free hospital's rate of new infection dropped off by some amazing percentage like 30%. What they found was that ties are waving petri dishes. The wearer would say, sneeze on the tie, or the tie would touch a wound during an examination, etc. and then that same tie would go to a new location/patient carrying along what it had picked up. I don't think doctors in Britain stopped wearing ties as a result of this study, but they should have, don't you think?
Okay: Guns.
Today I can walk out into the world with my telephone and call just about anywhere I want to and not be connected to any wires. I can look at a webpage, get directions somewhere, type an email or find out the price of a avacado. And barring drums and smoke signals, two-way wireless communication is only like a 150 years old. Who would have thought when Marconi and Edison were messing with radio signals that wireless communication would change so much in such a short amount of time?
The Chinese invented gunpowder a thousand some odd years ago. A short while later, someone--in China, or possibly Europe--used this mixture of sulphur, charcoal and saltpeter to push a chunk of lead out of a tube with the sole purpose of messing up someone else's body, most likely to the point of death.
And that's been about it. For 800 years that's what guns have done. Cellphones, they aren't. Guns and their same old function has become an unquestionable piece of our daily existence. Four year olds shoot each other with fingers. When we impersonate Robert Dinero we say you lookin' at me? Guns pervade our consciousness so much that in a land of pure fantasy, like where everybody lives in Harry Potter, all those talented wizards still end up shootin' it out like it was the old west. Except they shoot with a wand. Same goes with The Force in Star Wars. When The Emperor goes to kill Luke how does he do it? He shoots him. He uses his fingers, but still he relies on that one-on-one gun-like approach. I mean, the man's got The friggin' Force--couldn't he just think him dead?
It would seem when you have something as amazing as The Force and all that Harry Potter magic one could just wave a hand and the whole thing would work out. Of course, it wouldn't make for much of a story, so our fantasy worlds stick with the gun thing. And in our real world? Well, we stick with the gun thing, too.
Why haven't we re-thought guns the way we've rethought two-way communication? Oh, sure, we've got bombs and stuff, but that's nothing but a gun with an engine strapped to it. What makes one paradigm so stable and one so malleable? If the gun had changed like the telephone has what would it be like? Why isn't a gun something that...well, something that you point it in any direction and when you pull the trigger, it makes everyone within a hundred miles get really agreeable?
Okay. Cars:
At first cars seemed like a good idea, but I have really come to question the value of these things. No, the car shouldn't disappear, but it needs some serious re-thinking and we just keep on micro-changing it. We've put batteries in them, made them run a little cleaner, but a car is still mostly a thing with 4 wheels and conveys a few people at a time from one place to another. But here's what else cars do: They suck up places where trees and people should be. They create enormous amounts of oily runoff. They make our world very noisy. Cars injure us, make us angry, cost us quite a bit of a week's labor to pay for.
How much real estate/arable land is paved over in order for cars to keep going? How many street lights do we really need? How much tax money is spent on maintaining ten jillion miles of road in this country? How much of our atmosphere must we pollute and water contaminate and silence sacrifice for the automobile? How many chunks of lead must we shoot out of tubes and into other people just to keep that car's parts moving?
Wanna have clean water, good air, no beef with the middle east, no more 9/11's, whole neighborhoods back, more efficient local governments, lots more green space, the end of road rage, no more 2 hour commutes, no traffic jams, less death (500,000 americans in ten years!), fewer taxes, and the ability to see the fantastically beautiful night sky again in one fell swoop?
We really gotta rethink the car.
* * *
Yes, I know. I'm being silly. That's not the way the world works. But I think it would be nice if it did. I think it would be great if we could just jump paradigms as easily as skipping a rope. The + one more thing i wrote of up above is the notion of re-thinking what we teach in primary school. Realistically--and I'm not being silly here--I think we ought to be teaching a lot more critical thinking skills. Everyone should be able to read, write and know world history. And we know that as students grow to adulthood they'll gravitate toward whatever field interests them--whether its economics or the law or automobile design or automobile repair or woodworking. But where ever one's proclivities eventually take them, I think every student should be graduating the sixth grade with a degree in creative thought. The Status Quo should be a laughable notion to them.
Instead, most of our schools--all of our public schools--are becoming jails, daycares and places devoid of music, art and the concept of craft. That should not be the case. All silliness aside, if there's one place that needs to be radically rethought it's the education an American kid gets between the ages of 6 and 12. If we could wave a peaceful Harry Potter wand over elementary education and have there be as much interest in teachers as in American Idol, and have a kid learn what it means to really see the object they're drawing, recognize the way certain intervals in music vibrate in harmonious and gloriously inharmonious ways, embrace oddity, understand the power and subtlety of language...
You may say that I'm a dreamer :) but I gotta tell you, I think if we could make our children critical thinkers instead of Memorizers-of-the-Pledge of Allegiance or On-Their-Way-to-College, come 2030 or so, when those kids run the world, they'd take a look at ecological damage and poverty and inflation and warfare and they'd just step back and thoughtfully say, yeah, I think we can make this work....
