Revolutions

The age of Aquarius has supoosedly brought the American Revolution, Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and perhaps, again, it brings revolution in Egypt.

Revolutions are scary. With few exceptions, they're not peaceful and result in many lives lost. However, the voice of the people are heard.

I remember talking to my host dad in Ukraine about revolutions, specifically the Orange Revolution and my desire for a revolution to occur in America. He got very furious with me, and told me never to say that. He had lived through many revolutions with the break up of the USSR and the events that followed. I realized what I wanted was more of a paradigm shift--this begins with value changes.

I suppose revolutions are a culmination of a lot of factors, but usually it involves a change in leadership. American change in leadership needs to change through value changes in Americans--not through revolutions. Sarah Vowell, an editor for This American Life on PRI, describes what this might look like.

"I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's 'Two Sleepy People,' Johnny Cash's 'Five Feet High and Rising,' and 'You Got the Silver' by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on the earth dealing with the most complicated problems of the world--poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office Computer, and one by one decrypt our woes."