If I were to suggest a hobby to the under-60 generations (plural), it would be to reacquaint yourselves with how how frequently, even in the space of your minuscule time on earth…or even mine, 70-plus…the term “New” has been used to describe an event or invention in history. It’s marketings #1, favorite word.
Use Google to make a list of the past 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, then ask Google to tell you how many “new” people…each of them representing a brand new individual “reset”, have been born to this earth in whatever of the above time frames listed above, from 1960 to 2000.
Then, something your generation rarely if ever does, consider how many of those “new” people are of the Third World living in conditions not unlike some Americans as recently as 100 years ago. (That would be 1920 or thereabouts).
Consider this:
The population of Earth is around 7.8 Billion.
For most people, it is a large figure . However, if you condensed 7.8 billion into 100 persons, and then into various percentage statistics the resulting analysis is relatively much easier to comprehend.
Out of 100:
11 are in Europe
5 are in North America
9 are in South America
15 are in Africa
60 are in Asia
49 live in the countryside
51 live in cities
12 speak Chinese
5 speak Spanish
5 speak English
3 speak Arabic
3 speak Hindi
3 speak Bengali
3 speak Portuguese
2 speak Russian
2 speak Japanese
62 speak their own language.
77 have their own dwellings.
23 have no place to live.
21 are over-nourished.
63 can eat full.
15 are under-nourished
1 ate the last meal but did not make it to the next meal.
The daily cost of living for 48 is less than 2 USD (US Dollars).
87 have clean drinking water
13 either lack clean drinking water or have a water source that is polluted.
75 have mobile phones
25 do not.
30 have internet access
70 do not have the availability to go online
7 received university education
93 did not attend college.
83 can read
17 are illiterate.
33 are Christians
22 are Muslims
14 are Hindus
7 are Buddhists
12 are other religions
12 have no religious beliefs.
26 live less than 14 years
66 died between 15 – 64 years of age
8 are over 65 years old.
If you have your own home,
Eat full meals & drink clean water,
Have a mobile phone,
Can surf the internet, and
have gone to college
You are in the miniscule privileged lot,
(in the less than 7% category)
Amongst 100 persons in the world, only 8 live or exceed the age of 65.
If you are over 65 years old, be content & grateful. Cherish life, grasp the moment.
If you did not leave this world before the age of 64 like the 92 persons who have gone before you, you are already the blessed amongst mankind.
Now, I’m not going to ask you to do anything as heady as thinking that each of those births is in itself “a reset”. But it is…a blank slate, a tabula rosa, which must acquire the knowledge to survive, even reproduce, in whatever environment they find themselves born in, knowing that only 5% of them are on this continent, or that a still uncounted number of those on this continent live like this:
Now, if you’re under 40, I’ve already gone over 500 words, and haven’t even gotten around to talking about the historical nature of “great resets”, so for the benefit of the under-40 crowd, I’ll begin with a great reset you may have run across as a kid, watching fantasy films, or even reading those book.
You see, Sauron was an early example of J R R Tolkien’s Great Reset, as the great Power who, after having been defeated by the combined forces of Man, Elves and Dwarves, and their assisting clan of Wizards, returned what he believed was his hundreds of years later.
But Tolkien was no mere fabulist, for his four-volumes were only set in the last days of “Middle-earth” as the Elves and Dwarves (and Wizards) would pass away handing the world over to Men. (That’s us.)
But the name “Middle-earth” invites the suggestion of an even older Earth, millennia before the time of Hobbits and Men. Tolkien-the-scholar was a leading expert on the old Norse sagas and much of his fables came from those sagas, which had been passed down “God-only-knows” how many centuries (since oral legends can never really be dated…and which modern science both hates and looks down its nose toward any group of folk that puts any stock in them.)
After Tolkien died his son published his manuscript The Silmarillion, which told the history of the Creation of the World and the world’s First Age, covering thousands of years, a period involving only elves and dwarves, long before Man.
But of course, what did exist before even the Elves was the principal antagonist of the Creator (who Tolkien named Ilvatar), and his name was Melkor. The Sauron of Middle-earth that you all know was Melkor’s lieutenant. And Melkor was one of the principal members of the choir (of angels) who composed beautiful music for the pleasure of Ilvatar…only Melkor, a hard-rocker, liked a different kind of music that would definitely make my ears bleed, certainly not befitting a Mozart or Chopin, but more like Jimmy Hendrix.
Eventually, Melkor would be cast out of the heavenly choir and orchestra, sort of like Lucifer, in a stand-alone chapter called “Ainulindale”, which was a lyric story of the Creation. (You can read this in PDF by searching “Ainulindale, images.pcmac.org/…/Documents/Ainulindale.pdf”. As fine a piece of prose you will ever read.)
The Silmarillion is not a bang-up adventure story like the Lord of the Rings volumes, it’s a more sober telling of the Creation, and the rise of Melkor, and the Elves, who would be his first combatants.
So even before we even get to The Hobbit, we get major resets, even in mythology. In folklore you will find this to be standard fare.
Now, since I’ve reached your absolute outermost word limit, (950 words), I’ll ask you to look into to the next chapter, to see why all history, from world history, to national history, even natural history is all about resets.
