Rumbly Race Co

As the creatures who run my brain are reopening the long closed off parts of my brain that I need now that I’m going back to school apparently they found my motivation somewhere in the dusty backrooms.

anyway here’s this

A Big Fleshy Megazord

We stand, undeniably, on the shoulders of giants but it’s not one set of shoulders or even one solid form. It’s more an amalgamation of humanity coming together like a bunch of racoons in a trench coat, or those fish that swim in a formation that make them look like a bigger scarier fish, or when the power rangers combine their individual ships into one big robot but in this case it’s every single power ranger form every single iteration all combining into as super massive insane looking super-Megazord. The shoulders upon which we stand are a roiling combination of the people that came before us, people who lived and died, learned and failed, stepped onto the shoulders of those before them and in turn helped others onto their shoulders. I stand as much on the shoulders of my grandparents as I do on the shoulders of the artists who inspire me or the people who discovered penicillin. Its exponential, every shoulder we climb upon is connected to someone standing on the shoulders of those before them and so on . There is and incredible lineage of inherited and learned knowledge in this fleshy Megazord. through the successes and failures of those that came before us we can now see just that much more of the horizon, gaze just that little bit deeper into the cosmos, and understand just the tiniest more about ourselves.

But as we climb onto these giants there are those who would toss us from these shoulders. People who want the view from the top all to themselves or simply don’t believe there is enough room for everyone not realizing that the more people allowed up the broader, taller, and stronger the shoulders get. By barricading the way all they are doing is making sure that the giants stop growing. Restricting people from knowledge effectively halts its development. The more people with education and access to resources the more people we have furthering their fields. Without new perspectives, without diversity of thought everything stagnates and the giants, as mighty as they are, can grow no taller. The attacks on the department of education, the defunding of and litigation against public media and higher education, and the ever more restricting costs of colleges and educational materials is an active and malicious strike against humanity. Restricting and outright barring people from learning, challenging, and iterating upon the work that got us top where we are today only only guarantees that we will never go any further. The people willing to sacrifice progress and the pursuit of knowledge for temporary power and control are nothing short of villains.

These giants, their shoulders, and the heights to which they provide us vista are also under threat from those who see it as their duty to maintain the “purity” of the giants. The great heights that they can reach is thanks to the multitudes that they contain. The diverse and contrasting masses that in combination and conversation with each other push the shoulders higher and higher. Those who seek to remove from the multitude everything and anyone they find offensive only cripples the giants. These people cut and slide hoping to shape the giants into an image that pleases them leaving the giants weak and wounded, shrunken and stooped by an ignorant scalpel. Shunning research that goes against your ideas, not critiquing it or testing its hypothesis but simply casting it into oblivion for its contents not only halts any growth that could have come from it but removing it shrinks the body as a whole. There are plenty of papers and projects that lead to false positives or were done in improper conditions that led to bad results but they are still valuable to the conversation. Failures are educational and the ability to test and retest ideas is what creates breakthroughs or dispels popular but incorrect theories. Censorship, book banning, and litigation against all opposing ideas only creates a duller and dumber world. These actions limit our ability to develop more effective medicines, improve infrastructure, care for our friends, families and communities. These people will tear chunks out of our giants to make sure they don’t have to look at anything they disagree with.

I probably lost the thread somewhere in there but the gist is we are where we are today because of this massive legacy of learning and knowledge. The more people we can learn from (dead, alive, or fictional) and the more of their shoulders we can climb upon the better off we’ll be so go to the library, talk to a wierdo, argue, disagree, debate, and learn because the future depends on it.

Love,

Joseph