The Fairest of Them All
"... and Narcissus looked down into the pool and, seeing his own reflection, felt as though his heart would burst from such beauty. Hour after hour, he gazed into still water, bewitched by his own reflection. Slowly, the hours became days, and finally weeks. Narcissus grew thinner and thinner, unable to pull himself away to find even food to feed to his starving body, until all that remained in his place was a pale thin flower growing in the moist earth."
I've enjoyed mythology since about the seventh grade, starting with the Norse, Greek, and Roman stories of how things begin and end. Most of them start with humanity being some god's last, favorite, most precious creation, but not all of them. One that really threw me for a loop was the Gnostic version of creation, where Adam and Eve were actually the creations of an evil god and hidden in the Garden of Eden from all that was good, and one of the (several) Egyptian versions of the creation of man essentially involved the same idea as the "girl gets pregnant by sitting in the hot-tub" story, except that there was no girl involved.
It took until Copernicus for man to stop being the center of the universe, and there are still people who refuse to believe that in all the vastness of space there might be some chance that we might not be biggest, baddest, maybe only ones out there.
Why is it that people need to feel as though they are born special? There are over 6 billion people on this rock. You're one-in-a-million? Congratulations! That makes you a dime-a-dozen, with $50 worth of you already in stock. Worst are those who are completely convinced that anyone born 40 miles away from them is ok, but anyone born 10 miles further in the same direction is dirty, lazy, and dishonest because of an imaginary line on a map that changes every 5 or 6 hundred years. There are people who believe that they are superior to those around them because their ancestors were run out of the ancestral homeland a century before those who followed, or because their tans show up more or less at the end of summer.
Different individuals are good at different things. Some are better with their hands, some with their backs, and some with their minds. I like to think of myself as pretty bright upstairs, but if I'm ever trapped under some burning rubble, I would rather the man or woman striding through the fire toward me to be able to lift and jerk 250 than to know the differential of cosine. The world changes, society changes, and individual circumstances change on a constant basis. Long term, the only truly worthwhile trait is adaptability, and the only short term superiority is what you can *and do* accomplish with the tools you have for the problems you face.
You are woman, hear you roar? Shut up. We need someone who can listen and follow orders if this bridge is getting built on time. You are the ultimate man's man, who can bench press 350 lbs and fire a 50-cal one-handed? Great, can you mix the medicine to stop the disease about to wipe out half the east coast?
Give it a rest people. Every one of us may be special, but not all of us can do the same things, and none of us can do everything. Your special is no better than mine.
I've enjoyed mythology since about the seventh grade, starting with the Norse, Greek, and Roman stories of how things begin and end. Most of them start with humanity being some god's last, favorite, most precious creation, but not all of them. One that really threw me for a loop was the Gnostic version of creation, where Adam and Eve were actually the creations of an evil god and hidden in the Garden of Eden from all that was good, and one of the (several) Egyptian versions of the creation of man essentially involved the same idea as the "girl gets pregnant by sitting in the hot-tub" story, except that there was no girl involved.
It took until Copernicus for man to stop being the center of the universe, and there are still people who refuse to believe that in all the vastness of space there might be some chance that we might not be biggest, baddest, maybe only ones out there.
Why is it that people need to feel as though they are born special? There are over 6 billion people on this rock. You're one-in-a-million? Congratulations! That makes you a dime-a-dozen, with $50 worth of you already in stock. Worst are those who are completely convinced that anyone born 40 miles away from them is ok, but anyone born 10 miles further in the same direction is dirty, lazy, and dishonest because of an imaginary line on a map that changes every 5 or 6 hundred years. There are people who believe that they are superior to those around them because their ancestors were run out of the ancestral homeland a century before those who followed, or because their tans show up more or less at the end of summer.
Different individuals are good at different things. Some are better with their hands, some with their backs, and some with their minds. I like to think of myself as pretty bright upstairs, but if I'm ever trapped under some burning rubble, I would rather the man or woman striding through the fire toward me to be able to lift and jerk 250 than to know the differential of cosine. The world changes, society changes, and individual circumstances change on a constant basis. Long term, the only truly worthwhile trait is adaptability, and the only short term superiority is what you can *and do* accomplish with the tools you have for the problems you face.
You are woman, hear you roar? Shut up. We need someone who can listen and follow orders if this bridge is getting built on time. You are the ultimate man's man, who can bench press 350 lbs and fire a 50-cal one-handed? Great, can you mix the medicine to stop the disease about to wipe out half the east coast?
Give it a rest people. Every one of us may be special, but not all of us can do the same things, and none of us can do everything. Your special is no better than mine.