"The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans."
"The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for. It is something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: "One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being." We make it up as we go, and we make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can you do?
Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to which we all belong."
It's rather true, and rather encouraging. More and more people are getting fed up with the incompetency of those we rely on to do our bidding, so we're starting to take action on our own to affect change. (Perhaps it also signals an end to our general laziness that has created the obesity and ADD epidemics of late). Read the whole article here: Looking back at history from 2026
Amusing? Idealistic? Naive? Maybe, but ultimately it's one version of what needs to happen if there's any hope for a positive future. There's still time to ask Santa for world peace (or whirrled peas, if you prefer).
