Grounded

Being "grounded" might make a good husband, leader or best friend but a grounded bird is devastating unless you're an ostrich or domesticated. Even humans can fly a plane or glider or balloon or other new flying machine coming up. But grounded dinosaurs would be too big and too unintelligent to use any flying machine.

Every movement for something big needs to be deliberate. To be big is a goal of many countries, companies and people in general. We like to make dinosaurs. The bigger the better because they are impressive and easy to sell to investors or fans. Celebrities aim to big by popularity but have to put up with unwanted attention of crowds. 

Like anything with small control center, size is as big a burden as it is magnificent. If what we create is unwieldy to control, like the story of Frankenstein, the well meaning experiment risks taking on a life of its own without humanity. Yet it is important to be grounded and avoid flighty impractical daydreams right?

We are living at the cross roads where the industrial model of nations, companies, productivity, education is inadequate to create enough meaningful jobs for the educated masses. With learning approaching free and always accessible, over time this problem will become worse. Arming the masses with information and purpose is the fear for many leaders who forget that they once supported the education, enterprise, freedom and finance that created the world as we know it. It's too late to go back to illiteracy and masses of robotic workers.

For human curiosity, the resulting knowledge, social systems and technology are what made civilization. Some want to re-brand civility with quiet submission with allegiance to something big like war, a set of beliefs, a team, nation, religion in order to manipulate the masses to blindly follow. 

The paradox is that we need to be grounded. The first time I experienced a 7 Richter scale earthquake was in Tokyo, it was disconcerting as if the world was crumbling. So when the once dependable and wealth producing institutions begin to wind down, many are afraid and wish things would stay still.

We face a choice: be big and grounded or small and develop flight. 

There is also a negative meaning to the word grounded: to be punished by removing the right to go outside. The truth is: many ground themselves.

Tomorrow, my analogy of flying in nature.