What Makes Us Different
Posted by Mad Rocket Scientist | Filed under Guest Authors, Liberating Liberty
(Guest blogger: Mad Rocket Scientist from Afternoons With the Mad Rocket Scientist)
My friends M & A were visiting The Wife and I this weekend, and before they came up to The Secret Lair, they spent a day in Seattle. M & A are both well educated and have traveled across Europe quite extensively. They also both speak German fluently, so they tend to spend a lot of time in Germany and Austria. Hence, they are both well experienced in the culture.
They were recounting a tale to us of finding a coffee shop downtown and getting Lattes from a German Barista who was very proper, and clean cut with a short hair cut and round-rimmed glasses, and spoke impeccably, and did everything exactly right. As M was telling this tale, he made this observation:
The great thing about America is, people here are not afraid to make mistakes. In Europe, everything is so focused and proper and attention is paid to appearances, and getting it right all the time; and here, we just go full bore ahead and if it works, great, if not, we try something else.
I could not agree more. Our whole “Fuck It, Let’s Do It Already” attitude may have resulted in some incredibly spectacular failures in our history, and some of them have cost us lives, but I think if we look at the trends, we’ll see that that self-same motivation/determination
Don’t misunderstand, I LOVE safety, I live it. I drive safe cars (5 stars all around) with my seatbelt on, I ride a motorcycle with a full suit and a helmet. I wear ears and eyes when doing loud things that may create flying debris. Safety is important, but so is putting it all out there on the line. The trick is to find the balance between the two. Whenever practical, I look before I leap, but I am not afraid to leap.
Because sometimes, there is not time to look, or you have to leap without being able to truly see. Sometimes ya gotta take a chance. If you spend all your time making sure everything is safe, all safety nets are in place, every contingency is accounted for, by the time you get around to leaping, the audience has gone home, or they already leapt ahead of you, or you went broke and no amount of leaping will get you your money back.
From Serenity:
Sure as I know anything I know this, they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better.
And I do not hold to that.
So no more running. I aim to misbehave.
And that is what makes the people, not the government, of America so great, we aim to misbehave. And we often come out ahead because of it.
To paraphrase the feminists:
Well behaved people rarely make history.
Tags: earn it, patriotism
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