WHERE THE LIGHTS ARE
This is an old story. ..but those of you who aren’t as ancient as I am have probably not heard it repeatedly narrated , if at all.
It’s about a drunk who was zig-zagging his missteps from the bar to his parked car on the street around midnight. As he reached an old Chevy lit by a lamp post, he started circling around it , groping on the ground, looking underneath each tire. He did this repeatedly, catching a police officer’s attention.
When accosted as to what exactly he was doing, he replied, clearly inebriated ;
“I’m looking for my keyssh. I mush’ve dropped it when I parked.” The officer, cautiously confirming the drunkard’s intent,
drew closer and asked him pointedly, “Are you sure this is your car?”
The drunk’s immediate response was “Heck, no. It’s the one over there.”,
pointing to a Toyota in a darkened corner of the street.
“ Then what the hell are you doing looking for it here?”,the officer’s voice loomed ominously.
“Becaushh…”, he replied with equal defiance, “Thishh ishh where the lights are!”
Glitter and glare must have been part of man’s primitive stimuli as he evolved since we so readily and instinctively respond to it. It must be the good set of retinas we inherited that made our Neanderthal forefathers pause and stare at their first encounter with fire or even look to the stars and just gaze themselves to sleep. Are there any neonatologists around? Maybe they can even tell us when exactly fetuses respond to light if a lamp passed over a pregnant mother’s womb ?
My guess is that they do it early enough since we see this response in our everyday lives. We wake up to daylight and drowse to darkness (except for that portion of bloggers who have their biological clocks reversed). Behaviorally, though, we may find ourselves with the crowd that uses the drunkard’s same argument and go like moths to candlelight.
Look around . We have office workers whose focus of attention isn’t really where their job is but in the boss’s job. We have corporate people who spend most of their time plotting and dreaming of how he/she could undermine the vice-CEO so that eventually, they could take over. Never mind what they could do with regards to making record-keeping efficient which is why they were hired in the first place. That menial secretarial job can be done by someone else with “less ambitions”. Politicians have been known to spend a major part of their term devising schemes and strategies to raise funds for their next term for the next juicier elective post. Whatever happened with communicating with the people and making the laws work for the people– which is why legislators are voted to office for ? Even the federal and military bureaucracy are saddled with people who scrutinize the superior/commander’s job and forget theirs. No wonder we get all these confusing intelligence information.
The drive to be in the limelight even if we step all over each other is so intense that there is absolutely no focus on one’s capabilities, one’s limitations and one’s work on hand. It’s almost as crazy as the frenzy one would meet with potential candidates if a contest for the next Britney Spears look-alike were opened.
If we take this issue on a global scale, and picture the US as , well, what it is, a gleaming picture of wealth and prosperity on the planet, we see droves of people, specially from the less developed regions of the world, attracted to it like iron filings to a magnet, forgetting that they are part of their home country’s resources needed to attain the American level of development . Much less remembered was how the American continent in its beginnings was thought about by a much older civilization, Europe. They actually didn’t think much of it. In fact , for a certain period, they avoided it. And so it goes.
If we thought of light and shadow as changing sceneries with the passage of time rather than unmoving objects in space to which we either are drawn or repelled by , we’d probably be more appreciative of where we are and what we can do – NOW, than at any other time. We can aim at history using our eyes. But we can make history only where our feet are - firmly planted on the ground. Maybe that’s where we’ll find the keys, and stop looking for it, as the drunkard kept doing, where the lights are.
