It is hard to remember the
man who first perceived the need for a road.
By the time his concept has
been born into this world,
it has been dug and smoothed
and
paved and planted and
wound and marked,
and it is hard to remember
the relevance of the
man who first dreamed it.
It is equally as difficult
to appreciate
the man who put the first
hole in the ground
for the first beam of the
Golden Gate Bridge.
I can imagine the perils he
must have braved,
since in his time he
believed the grandiose ideas
of some
visionary
who’d convinced him that if
he
dug that hole,
eventually,
a beautiful thing would come
out of it.
At the time,
I’m sure he was dirty and
wet and
frustrated with being called
a lunatic
for believing any man,
visionary or not,
could produce such a thing
in his lifetime.
Perhaps he needed the money,
like the many road workers
and
bridge builders who
come into the process
uncertain of the investment
of
sweat, tears and life
required to
realize such a thing as a
road
or a bridge when there is
no evidence of either.
None of that matters once
you’re in!
Once you get a whiff of the
aroma of that vision,
the effects are so consuming,
enrapturing, endearing,
that a digger becomes a
producer.
The same is true of the
man who surveyed the ground
on which the Twin Towers
stood.
When we remember that they
fell,
it is hard to also
memorialize the fact that
they had been dreamed and
built by
people who suffered ridicule
that
far outweighed the
praise and glory granted to
the
value of the buildings as
they
existed in the minds of
others.
It was the ingenuity that
made them beautiful,
but all we can recall
is their function in the
perpetuation of the world market,
their causal link to a war
that we have yet to win
against an adversary that we
have yet to soundly identify.
It is better to find
inspiration in the men who laid the foundation,
not the men who mocked their
development.
We have lost sight of the
builders of our generations.
Those who paved for us
inroads to existences we
never could have imagined;
those who planted the first
beams of our brilliance;
who suffered the initial
ridicules of standing behind
nobodies like us…
We were people who had done
nothing remarkable.
We were people who had no
great bearing on the
direction of our worlds.
We were people who started
directionless.
It took the visionaries, the
diggers,
the smoothers, the pavers,
the planters, the markers,
the surveyors, the thoughts,
the prayers, the promptings,
the afflictions and
sometimes even the deaths of our
builders to fashion us into
something useful.
It is important then that we
not get too caught up in the
beauty of our end result.
Rather,
we must vigorously pursue a
full understanding of the
dirt in our past,
and how that dirt relates to
the
porcelain and polish of now.
Only then can we reproduce
greatness.
There must be some
recognition,
some circumscription,
some re-visitation
of the builders’ legacies.
