Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Inflection point

Civil rights
Mary Anne — (archived)

Possibly because it was part of the wallpaper of my childhood, I thought of the civil rights movement as a kind of tidal force, a change that was elemental in its heart, not something to be denied, even though people insisted on building levies to stave it off. It was part of the long, long set of changes that raised people up.

The space program has always been tied to the same feelings for me.

JFK's assassination was much more a lightning strike: random and destructive, casting everything around it in a harsh momentarily eerie light before fading into vivid memory, a long-remembered afterimage.

If one thinks about it, every day people do things that irretrievably change the world. Usually, they're doing only what they know how to do, but in a unique pattern that makes the world different. Sometimes they know what they do has the potential to change something important. Growth always changes things. That's why it scares people sometimes.

The kind of change you mean has to do with taking something away or destroying something. It leaves a vacuum in its wake. The question of change then becomes one of watching what is sucked up by the vacuum created by willful destruction.

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