The death of imagination

Sixteen years ago I was sitting on a bench at the San Diego zoo with my friend John. "Do you know what killed the dinosaurs, Julie?" he asked me. I'm thinking a meteor, lack of food source, something obvious like that. "Lack of imagination!" John pronounced triumphantly. He was hot on the topic of imagination back then, probably feeling (and rightfully so) that he had an overabundance of it where others had so little.

I was reminded of that moment while watching the HBO miniseries John Adams this week. The brilliance of the Declaration of Independence is not only inspiring, it is awe-inducing when you stop to consider how revolutionary its ideas were in its time. The series got me thinking about all of the incredible leaps that have been made since then in industry, technology, medicine, etc. These thoughts swirled and bumped into each other in my brain until yesterday at 5:30 a.m., while waiting for my scooter to warm up, I considered, "What if all of the great ideas lie in the past?"

Could John, from 16 years ago, be right in that the human race will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs for the very same reason? Are we doomed by our own complacency, our own comfort in what is easy and obvious? I mean, shit, I can't even figure out how to fix a leaky faucet, and yet there are people smooshing three gigabytes into a phone and analyzing your psyche based on your last ten thousand credit card purchases. Are there enough people still out there dedicated to the craft of imaging something that does not yet exist? Or perhaps seeing the connections, and the possibilities of connections, in what does exist and tying it all together to make something even more brilliant?

I just hope that whatever digs up our bones 60,000 years from now will stop to consider how great we could have been. Perhaps they too will make movies where they imagine bringing us back from the dead on a magical island, where we eventually rip them from limb to limb with our enormous teeth and breed without the benefit of a sperm in sight. Perhaps our future is bright, after all.