Have you submitted your name to be shuttled up to Mars? Space and sea travel or your names on Mars and not marble. This is to show our preference for progress over permanence – technology over religion.
While it’s good to sit on one of the benches with our parent’s names “in memory of…”, it’s better still for our grandchildren to travel in space to look for ours on Mars.
I found my parent’s graves without a hitch. Right here on spaceship Earth.
In the Far East, people want to travel back to where their ancestors were buried (as of this edit, I have just stepped on a bunch of fake dollars, burnt during an early morning funeral).
Thus, “the Last Train Home” documentary about Chinese factory laborers trying to get home for New Year via train, plane or automobile (their version of White Christmas).
Modernity forces huge displacement. South-South movement will be next, not Earth to Outer space (Indian mobile phone companies are buying up Middle Eastern phone companies to cater to fast growing African markets, while Vietel engineers are rebuilding Haitian and Myanmar telecom infrastructure).
When you are uprooted, your sense of identity suffers. One used to be known by his/her relationship in a communal network. Now, with new “ID“, he/she is known by an employee number. Welcome to KFC, how may I take your order.
With industrialization comes frustration (discontent): who is going to move in those Shanghai towers , and who will have to relocate to make room for the 5th-ring highway?
Uprooted dreamers.
No place to go back to. No bragging rights for aging parents e.g. “my son went to the city and came back a millionaire”. Bentley in Russia, Ford in China. Wealth shift. G-20+ (make sure Brazil is included, since they know how to party).
For years, we saw a steady rise of “emerging countries”, but we still resort to yesterday’s play book. (Remember the Yugo joke?).
The poor was materially poor, but not in spirit or intelligence. From a near-zero base, the only way for emerging countries to go is to “emerge” i.e. create better-paying jobs, while union and progress in the West , once a blessing, now a hindrance in this post-Recession recovery.
Darwin was right: survival favors the most adaptive. Instead of fighting for a seat on “the Last Train”, those smart entrepreneurs already built alternate-energy bullet trains. It’s not your names on Mars, it’s the challenge to think beyond the marble which for centuries was the last stop for even the most famous of names. A Roman Emperor once hired an assistant, whose main job is to remind him every so often that: “Your Majesty, you will die soon”. Memento mori.
Thang Nguyen 555 