Sunday, January 26, 2025 at 4:42 PM
There is a saying, that if you can imagine something, it can happen. I don’t think that everything imaginable can be realized, but I do know that every invention comes from the fertile minds of people who were born blessed with minds overloaded with creativity and imagination and longings, longings for the impossible and the improbable. Da Vinci, who made drawings of a helicopter in the 1470’s; Galileo, whose imagination took him to the heavens and discovered moons on Jupiter, and craters on our moon, through a telescope; of course, Isaac Newton and Curie and Einstein, all the way down to Steve Jobs! They all imagined the unthinkable, and turned those dreams into reality. Da Vinci’s dream became a reality 500 years later; but still, he saw the possibilities. I have left out a lot of important inventors and scientists and engineers, but they would be too many to mention!
I have been watching two sci-fi series on Apple TV: Silo and Severance. Severance is about a corporation that puts a chip in its employees’ brains that makes them forget their lives outside of work, and forget their lives at work when they leave the office. In other words, they have two selves. Silo is about 10,000 people living in a silo that is self-contained, and so huge that one man hadn’t seen his daughter in 20 years! Wat a ting!
The people inside don’t know how they came to be living in this silo; they know nothing about the outside world, about mountains and rivers and oceans and birds. They know nothing about their history or their beginnings; they know nothing!! The silo is run by a mysterious group who have Stalin-like control over the inhabitants, and everything and everyone is monitored, 24/7!
I absolutely enjoy both series, because they make me appreciate the way I live my life in the world I inhabit! They make me think of those who live under oppressive regimes that brook no opposition, and mete out unequal justice! They also remind me of how fragile our society, democracy, free will, and our rights are! And how sometimes we are careless enough to allow autocracy and oligarchy to take hold and crush our dreams, our democracies, our freedoms!
We are at the point in the United States where in no time we could be living in one of those silos, because of our ignorance, our willingness to let others decide for us, our being dazzled by promises that will never be kept, by immoral leaders who don’t give a f@#* about you or me, just about themselves! As a matter of fact, we are already siloed, in my opinion!
Not knowing or caring about history, not being empathetic, not being careful to guard one’s rights, can lead one to become victim of a cult that promotes the same freedom they dismantle every single day! They promise to protect you from enemies, imagined or unimagined, mostly immigrants right now, but that will change eventually, to the enemies within.
We are living in a time now when we have to decide whether we will be siloed, or be free. Imagine living in a silo where vaccines are forbidden. Where tuberculosis and smallpox and measles and polio are the norm. Where the leader decides the fate of all the other silos, unless they bend to his fevered and twisted wishes. Where you are forced to worship an alien god. Where you have no choice, only those that are sanctioned by the silo.
Maybe it’s too late, but we can never give up, or give in. If we can imagine the world without silos, then it can happen. Power to the people!
Glen