This I Believe
Time is very important in human history; for without Time, there would be no History. Just after Thanksgiving Day of the recent prior year in The United States, the economy of our country was nearly bludgeoned to death by rapacious and greedy Wall Street investors who sought to “beat the clock” within their shady and complex deals involving the so-called ‘derivative instrument,’ which most of us would not even know how to track, much less care to.
Now almost everyone in the country is suffering, thanks to these same ‘investors,’ some of whom are now or will soon be serving a substantial amount of time in prison. The hackneyed phrase, “Time is of the essence,” could never be more true right now on Capitol Hill; journalists’ interviews allow the rest of us to listen to these politicians whom we have elected make their unanimously-held views known: “The United States economy is in the worst shape which it has ever been in since The Great Depression. . . . Job loss has never been more severe since the end of World War Two,” and so on.
History is the collective memory of Humankind. But we as individuals do not have iron-clad memories which can house limitless amounts of information—far from it. We are all finite beings living in a finite world composed of finite elements and raw materials. The warm sun, which we may see rise and fall each day, truly the only ultimate source of re-newable energy, inspired our very primitive forebears into Worship. The sun was one of the principle gods for the Ancient Egyptians; Apollo, the Greek God of War, piloted his fire-luminous chariot across the skys each day. And the single life-giving orb itself, at some deep psychological level I would now wager, had something to do with the inspiration for the most critical of all human inventions, Monotheism.
The invention of an idea is not quite like the invention of some new gadget or even some extremely complex machine like the linotype, a hulking device which transformed lead-ingots into moveable type while the “compositor” typed away at a rather large keyboard. This particular trade, which once conducted protracted training periods for its apprentices under the auspices of The Typesetters’ Union, no longer exists. The machine which men with progressive lead-poisoning once sat in front of for twelve or fewer hours a day can now only be found in very antiquated print shops or museums.
Not so with the notion of monotheism. No, not so with the notion of God; particularly in countries like The United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. . . . But cannot even the invented concept of monotheism at some point in the Future fall into, shall we say, disfavor? I do not know; but I believe that it can. And this, this, is what I believe.