Should Crazy Be In Our Vocabulary?
You may have noticed my unusual absence. I did too. I got caught up in other projects, and couldn’t get back into things. Well, here I am, back to write every day, and I couldn’t have come back at a better time. Tomorrow we see the latest iPads, Macbook Pros, and (maybe) even an iWatch! We also get a peak at Nokia’s newest Windows phones, and with that, we see into the future of Microsoft as a whole.
Today I’m going to write the first in a (hopefully) continuing series of feature pieces. These new pieces won’t necessarily be focussed on a recently released product, but will instead focus on some interesting topic, or discovery. Without further ado…
Should Crazy Be In Our Vocabulary?
While watching videos of Detective Munch, the law and order character who just ended his 22 year run last week, I came across this fascinating scene from the show “Homicide: Life on the Streets” in October of 1994, exactly 19 years ago. For those of you that don’t know detective Munch from the 10 different series that he appeared on, he’s noted for his conspiracy theories. In attempting to Munch look a bit crazy, and “out there”, the writers correctly called that “soon there’s going to be like 500 channels”. Munch continued “there won’t be any books, or newspapers, or telephones. We’ll only be able to communicate with email, and QVC. We’ll all be interactive”. Characters have a habit of calling him “crazy”, just as you might call someone crazy today, if they suggested that in 50 years we’d all live on the moon.
Sure, we don’t communicate with QVC, and we still sort of have newspapers and books, but none of these things exist in their current state. Digital communications, like “email” has indeed replaced phone conversation. Regular phones have been replaced by smartphones. Newspapers and books have been digitized to death. Each and every one of these mediums has changed dramatically in under a decade. It seemed crazy two decades ago, but it happened, and it happened quickly
I think we should eliminate crazy from our vocabularies. We should eradicate the use of it. Think of the things that just a decade ago were unimaginable: Touch screen, high definition computers that fit into our pockets. Cars that drive themselves. Reasonably affordable cloning devices. We live in an era of reckoning, where millions realize how very wrong they were. Crazy can have other meanings, but often it’s simply a poor substitute for “visionary”. The crazies are those who envision our future without cling to fears that we’d be stuck in the past. Here’s to the crazy ones.
