Blog 780 – 09.20.2017
Even The Smallest.

Even the smallest space is big enough to make our presence known. A phrase is often more than enough to capture my imagination and start the wheels turning. I wrote that line down in my “Blog Ideas” notes a couple of weeks ago. At first I toyed with changing presence to presents but that would have taken me down an all too familiar path. I saw a movie trailer Sunday for an upcoming movie starring Matt Damon where some scientist has an idea to save our natural resources and prevent over crowding by shrinking as many people as volunteer to about three inches tall, the rest of the body proportional. The preview showed special colonies developed for the “little people.” It is an interesting if funny idea and after Honey I Strunk The Kids and even more vintage movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Incredible Shrinking Woman we all know some of the potential disasters and horrors awaiting the little people.

One of my often used themes is the Jesus quote about how we treat “the least of these” or the little people being how we are actually treating him and ourselves. But I was thinking of taking a slightly different tact this time. One of my favorite all time quotes is from the late CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid who wrote: “The chief cause of problems is solutions.”

I never saw the Firefly series when it first aired on the SciFi Channel but I did see the movie Serenity which encapsulates the main story about the warrior River Tam and the secret she carries in her scrambled brain about a solution gone sadly a rye. Nathan Fillion plays the pirate captain of the small space fighter/freighter Firefly and he and his heroic, if rag tag, crew find themselves on a mission to find out River’s secret and set right what was made wrong and covered up. One of the best lines in the movie says something like, they always think they are making a better world by changing people but seem to always make it worse and no matter how badly they mess up you know they will try again.

So much of what the elite see as progress is really a disaster for the little people. The true measure of real progress is as the Intenders’ proviso after their intentions/requests “For the highest good of the Universe, myself, and everyone. So be it and it is so.” I like that much better than the “Trickle down theory” or the “Rising tide raises all boats theory” What trickles down most often is not progress or TLC but poop and pee (I tried to say that nicer than I might have) and a rising tide can drown those without boats. True progress is measured always from the bottom up not from the top down. Real improvements touch and bless always the smallest first and not just the biggest already well off and rich.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White