Wanderings

I have increasingly gotten into the habit of just thinking about stuff while I do the portion of my work that doesn't involve talking on the phone or handling people eye to eye.... Yeah, I know that it's not that constructive, but right now I'm pretty much waiting on callbacks for other jobs that possibly won't keep me stressed to the point of freakout, and, let's face it, there's not a lot that I really can do to save this place from its inevitable demise at the rate things are going. C'mon....the owner had to leave and get a job in a factory to support his family; getting struck by an ocean liner in the Sahara desert shouldn't be as alarming as that little tidbit of knowledge...

But I digress from my digressions....

Some thoughts: In many Eastern cultures it is customary to greet a fellow humans with a bow; this is to aknowledge, and show mutual respect for, the devine spark within. However in Western cultures we greet one another with the customary handshake, which came about as a nonverbal way of stating the pleasant greeting, "Hey, I'm not holding a weapon in my hand either!"

Which got me to wondering, 'How many other things in our day to day experiences came about as a function of the white man's desire for conquest and domination of the rest of the world and each other?'

Spiral staircases generally wind upwards in a clockwise helix, so as to give the right handed dude decending the stairs an advantage of swinging a sword or club to better effect than the determined ascender with his weapon in the same hand.

Men's shirts and jackets have the buttons on the right hand side,
with the left overlapping, so we may unbutton them more easily with our left hands while reaching in with the right to retrieve our handy ginsu pigsticker or, later in history, our gun.

Exterior doors, on houses and the like, traditionally swing inward, so as to not leave the hingepins exposed to be plucked out by thieves or miscreants.


And so on to the destructive nature of greed:

Didya know that in the late 1800's an inventor by the name of Hiram Maxim was annoying the piss out of Thomas Edison?
With more than 200 patents to his name, who could blame him, after all, who was the famous inventor here anyway? So our boy Tom gets another of his great ideas, decides that he'd best be rid of the competition, and bribes Maxim to go to Europe, which he does.
After a little while there he winds up going to the Paris Exhibition to show off some of his handywork and runs into a guy who gives him a little advise; "If you want to get rich, you should invent a better way for these Europeans to kill each other."
Maxim takes this to heart and invents a little thing he calls, "The Devil's Paintbrush". Better known as the Maxim Gun, the world's first fully automatic belt-fed machine gun is immediatly snatched up by the British, Maxim is knighted, and countless millions of native people in Africa, and other places in the empire, that were standing in the way of Britsh progress and expansion are mowed down while defending their homelands with spears and clubs.

Not that we should blame Edison...

It would seem that our human nature, and our spark of creativity, go hand in hand. So much of what we know today rests on the bones of our ancestors that simply wanted to get ahead, and really didn't see anything wrong with busting some heads and kicking some asses in the process. Besides the obvious fact that we're living on land that was once inhabited by another race and culture there are some, perhaps less obvious, things that we take for granted that came about because of war:
1) The domestication of the Hamster (brought home as pets by
soldiers)
2)M&M candies (chocolate energy food from WWI)
3)Kleenex (originally these were gas-mask filters, hence the handy
pop-up dispenser box)
4)Space exploration (the Germans weren't wanting to send a man to
the Moon, but they got pretty good at building rockets)
5)Pasta (a good way to transport food, just boil and eat, because
bread gets moldy)
6)The digital computer (To crack codes and calculate trajectories)
......armor, guns, bigger guns, metal ships, the internet, and on and on until we all learn to get along, simply anihilate each other or run out of the resources we need to build things to kick each other's asses.
I, for one, hope we all just learn to get along. There will always be some screwed-up individuals that want to blow shit up to get their points across, whether they're Al-Quada, or some redneck militia in Michigan. But by and large, I think the Idea of "conquest and conquer" of one nation by another for the glory of its King and desire for resources will eventually come to an end.....hopefully soon after the next presidential election.

Well that's about all I can come up with, see ya Monday.