The Weakly Post
New Ideas
A new idea is a stick of dynamite. It can get you killed, especially in small towns. Little-town memories of my youth include this oft-recited axiom: “A new idea and a cold drink of water, taken together, can kill you.”
Ideas swirl in the Georgia red-clay dust devils that transplant the topsoil. They shimmer in the heat monkeys that rise from asphalt roads that turn liquid in the stifling summer meltdowns. It’s preached on every corner and in every church. Not so much in words, but in the winks, the nods, the habits and thought patterns inbred into generation after incestuous generation.
Ideas are dangerous. Why? Because new ideas step on toes. They change things and tend to upset the status quo, the perceived, predictable and traditional ways of doing things. If anyone is foolish enough to attempt to upset a small-town status quo or the existing power structure, fresh rope suddenly appears. The hapless innovator receives swift recompense administered by local vigilantes.
A hot air balloon rises from a field in France. It’s observed by Alexander Graham Bell and a friend. It floats over some trees, coming to rest in a field tended by peasants with pitchforks. Immediately it’s violently assaulted, collapsing lifelessly in the loess.
The friend asks, “Dr. Bell, now what good came from that hot air balloon experiment?”
Dr. Bell replies, “What good is any new-born baby?”
My mother was always trying new ideas. Like tricking me to eat liver. She pleaded in her best logic, “But son, it’s good for you”. She soon learned that logic is not the best motivator of stupid kids.
Her last attempt to trick me into eating that foul meat went sideways. Its malodorous stench hung in the humid air for blocks in our neighborhood. People fled their homes, gasping for breath. Those horrendous episodes finally broke her will. She abandoned all further ideas and efforts of trickery.
My grandmother had better luck with squash. She baked it in lemon skins, and it was terrific, to which I said, “Jewel (her name, and she was one!), this is the best baked lemon I ever ate.” Like I said, kids may be stupid, but good food overcomes logic every time!
One Sunday, with my mother in tow, I revisited the little Methodist Church of my youth after some 20 year’s absence. We sat in the second row left, near the altar. After the service, two elderly ladies rushed up to me, saying, “We barely recognized you…you were not in your usual place.”
I remember saying, “Uh, where is my usual place?”
“Why, your regular place was always in the back right, not the front left.” There you have it…the status quo, alive and well. I’d now become a revolutionary iconoclast!
Maybe it would have been good to have told them that during my absence I had swallowed a new idea that seems to be working. Repentance is one of those ‘new ideas,’ you know. It always has an Audience. It sometimes takes hard knocks to change one’s mind. Now I sit up front, lower left, as close to the fire as I’m willing to get.
Thomas Edison experimented with over 1,000 gas combinations to find one that worked in the electric light bulb. Before success arrived, he was asked, “Dr. Edison, have you failed?”
He replied, “No, I have succeeded in finding 1,000 combinations that won’t work.” You’re reading this now because his new idea continues to explode in the face of the darkness of status quo.
Historical events often don’t create new paradigms as much as they reveal new eras, pregnant with possibilities. It begs question of what might happen if we swallow some new ideas. History is waiting for our actions, not our words.
The choice is ever before us: nurture the new, or rot in the ruins of a crumbling status quo. We can’t do both. Do you have a new idea? Light the fuse…change history!
Bud Hearn
October 17, 2014
