It’s hard to respond to a world in which Stephen Hawking is
dead and Betsy DeVos is in
charge of America’s educational system. Our better angels must weep.
It’s not for Hawking’s contribution to science for which I
mourn. He didn’t cure polio, unveil the secrets of nuclear fission, or solve
the problem of how we moved from blue algae to a mind like his.. In fact, I
hardly begin to understand the things he wrote about. But he will be remembered
by history as long as we have a communal history. History will remember him for
a life of thinking, imagining, striving to know, and trying make us better through knowledge.
History will remember DeVos as a nobody who spent a
millionth of a nanosecond cavorting around on its wrong side with her group of “merry
pranksters.”
What saddens me is that Hawking had, in addition to one of
history’s great minds, such a sense of humor and charming personality that he
made intelligence and education popular.
We will miss that in an age where an entire political party
sees its future as flourishing in a sea of dark illiteracy. Where this will lead us
is anyone’s guess. A simple extrapolation from the known data would suggest an
H. G. Wells world in which hordes of ignorant masses exist only as sustenance
for a handful of bloated and careless rulers.
As we mourn the life of Stephen Hawking, will we continue to
allow mega-rich families to drag us into a future where the value of a Master’s
Degree will be a job as assistant grocery-stacker at Walmart?
We can only hope, as Lewis Mumford said, that “trend is not
destiny.”
The death of Stephen Hawking caused me to think, on this sad
morning, of a myth I heard once. It involved two travelers crossing the desert
with a load a goods. They had bedded their camels for the night when a spirit
appeared before them commanding that they empty their cargo and fill the
containers with sand.
“If you do this,” the Spirit said, “in the morrow you will
both glad and sad.”
Being both fearful of spirits and burdened by greed, the travelers
only unloaded a small portion of their goods and replaced them with sand.
In the morning, they found that the sand had turned to
precious diamonds and they were indeed glad for them, but sad that they hadn’t
loaded more.
That’s how I feel today as I contemplated the life of a
Stephen Hawking. I’m glad we had him, but sad that we couldn’t have had more.
If the current leaders of our country prevail, will History
look at the shining jewels within America’s story and say, “I’m glad we had
her, but I wish we had gathered more?”
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| A life well spent is a diamond in History's crown. - Me |
well said.
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