FROM THE WILDERNESS

Raider of the Lost Ark

By J. Strauss

Human beings have been trying to bore themselves to death all the way back in time. We know this from translating the oldest evidence of recorded pieces of history.  What is it human’s, almost universally without respect to social groupings or cultures, seek out when they are not required by survival necessities to do something everyone defines as work?  Humans generally seek to sleep, to rest, and to participate in the most laid back of recreational activities.  Humans that have the ability to retire are extremely likely to do nothing at all, except possibly the most trivial of minor pursuits.  This isn’t just true about what humans choosing what to do when not at work.  Wealthy people illustrate another form of remote withdrawal from contact by walling themselves inside great stone chateaus, riding in armored limos with shaded windows and only flying on private jets instead of commercial.  The associates these wealthy examples socialize with become those that are either only of blood relations or paid servants.

While much of the planet’s population of homo sapiens, at least the ones who reach a high enough point of “success” to have leisure time along with enough economic might, want to escape any physical hardship, angst or fear, that same species craves mental and physical stimulation of almost all kinds.  In modern western cultures there is a distinct and very deep crevasse that has formed between those two very different missions in life.  Aboard expedition, cruise and adventure ships all over the world hundreds of thousands of high paying customers sail into areas supposedly to allow them to enjoy adventure and danger without actually being exposed to adventure and danger.  Even under such controlled doses of risk most all the passengers choose to stay on the ships instead of going ashore to quite possibly encounter something new, stimulating or possibly life changing.  The rather sheep-like behavior of many shipboard ‘adventurers’ isn’t relegated to those seeking something by plying the world’s oceans and seas.  Everyone can observe this kind of behavior by simply turning on the television and watching the development, truly the lack of it while commentators say it’s developing, of the U.S. Space program.  Going up and back to a low-hanging station in old Soviet-style capsules.  No Moon or Mars mission of any import.  The space program goes nowhere while it is trumpeted to be progressing.  Commercial airplanes follow the same pattern.  There’ve been no new creative designs for passenger planes that have made it into mass production in almost fifty years.  Yet, because of tiny advances in metallurgy and composites, it’s made by media

What’s going on with modern human beings and where is this trend for holding safety and security so valuable that exposure to new circumstance (the word adventure is being used in this article as a synonym for that phrase) is being ever more limited and when it is experienced, the safety ropes, wires, support personnel and artificial nature of the supposed adventure completely obviates any benefit (other than for the participants to tell other people they experienced a dangerous adventure) to themselves or humanity as a whole.  This kind of ‘adventure’ just cost five humans their lives down at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Adventure may best be defined as follows: doing something dangerous that has a happy ending.  Doing something dangerous that results in injury or death is called tragedy. The question that should be on the table for all modern cultures on planet earth today is one that should be asked of almost all humans participating in every circumstance.  Are you willing to risk to gain?  It is a simple question but the many answers available for answering it, and the course people follow because of acting on such answers is determinant in pointing the way for where the species may be going.  There is no question at all, at all, about the established fact that cultures cannot remain static and survive. Change is as endemic to human life as genetic structure.  Part of the reason for that is easy to understand.  Change comes to humans from the outside as well as from humans making it happen, but the changes coming at humans are not the vitally important ones because they are defensive.  Humans change things and one of those major things currently is the earth itself.  Humans are also changing the universe merely by being present “out there” away from the planet.

There is a personal decision to be made by every human on earth.  It can be made once, and the results followed, or it can be made over and over again.  The decision is about to be a human walled up, protected, taken care of or being a human who seeks to make beneficial changes to everything around him or her.  This article is written in general, but the issue is really almost entirely specific to you, reading this now, and you are alone.  Ask yourself this question:  are you a human who’s simply surviving and waiting to die or are you one of those more uncommon ones that seek to be a Raider of the Lost Ark?