It was last Wednesday evening and I had just gotten back from work. The news that our world had changed yet again a few hours back, had not permeated my senses through the deluge of social media posts that had to follow.
So I threw myself on the couch, glanced the clock on the wall and flipped my laptop open. The first thing I saw was a news report posted a few days earlier, about scientists working on a grandiosely ambitious project to bring back to life the extinct woolly mammoths that walked the earth for hundreds of thousands of years.
The next thing I noticed was another report about a 14-year old schoolboy in Dallas Texas who got arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. Let me admit; for a moment I too felt guilty for my brazen revolt against the newly established norms of civil obedience, but still dared to glance the clock again only to make sure I had not traveled back in time. And just then, my cell phone buzzed with a Twitter notification and I was reawaken to the realities of the 21st century.
Ironically, both stories gave an inkling of the jiggery pokery of our advancement into the prehistoric times. Geneticists are studying DNA from woolly mammoths which were preserved in Arctic permafrost, in search for 3,300 years old genes which separated them from elephants so that these genes could be spliced into the genetic code of an elephant where they would function normally — essentially replacing sections of elephant DNA with the mammoth genes.
Of course this doesn't scare us; why would it? After all, the human race has spent centuries traversing the baffling landscape of science to finally come of age in intellect and sagacity. Acceptance of science and technology, if not complete familiarity with it, is what characterizes us as modern homo sapiens — civilized, cultured and perspicacious.
Now, imagine a 13-feet tall woolly mammoth walking the streets of Dallas. Even better; picture a 14-year old school boy bringing one to school. Do you think that would scare the teachers? Hell yeah, it would! The first thing they would do, and rightly so, is to call 911. Safety first, right?
I think we know beyond doubt that humans of sane minds (school teachers at MacArthur High School included) shouldn't have a lot of trouble identifying danger, and their gut reaction would be to do whatever is necessary to ensure safety for themselves, their staff and students. Good!
Before reading the news story, that's what I thought too. I was pretty sure that we all have a common understanding (with some room for disagreement) as to what constitutes danger. And sure enough, homemade clocks didn't feature in the list, because an angry clock wouldn't stomp you under its foot — even if it is in the hands of a schoolboy named Ahmed Mohamed.
So, is it the people assessing the risk who might have mistaken an innocent looking clock for a woolly mammoth? No, it's not the people assessing the threat; it is the person thought to carry the threat that matters.
Scientists at some universities in the United States are busy working on prototypes of what would become cloaking devices. Early research work and prototyping are yielding encouraging results and the world as we see it might change — into a world as we don't see it. The objects subjected to the devilry of the device would become invisible. That could be me, or you, or even that bearded guy next door named Mohamed.
But if you ask me, a 14-year old invisible Adam with a firearm is more dangerous than hundreds of Ahmeds with visible clocks. I wonder how the 'authorities' are planning to handle that; by calling 911 to arrest the invisible boy after he's shot down half the school in a frantic rage of mindless killing? I hope they have better ideas than that.
We have come a long way since the invention of clock. There is a record that in 1176 Sens Cathedral installed a clock. An Austrian engineer Josef Pallweber invented the digital clock mechanism in 1883. That is the early ancestor of what got Ahmed in trouble.
Yet, well-educated school teachers and well-trained security personnel are unable to recognize a homemade digital clock. So in this day and age of unfathomable scientific advances in genealogy, medicine, particle physics, astrophysics and information technology, what remains our biggest fear is — clocks! We are convinced that all our cloning and cloaking sprees can never do as much harm to the human race as a homemade clock can.
I beg to differ.
It wasn't a clock that caused the deaths of 129,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the August of 1945. It wasn't a clock that allowed one of the biggest security breaches in modern history to cause 2,996 causalities on September 11, 2001. And it wasn't a clock that killed 132 schoolchildren in Peshawar Pakistan on December 16, 2014.
If an unwary schoolkid's stab at impressing his new teacher is criminalized, he will grow up thinking of himself as the cause of the world's problems. It doesn't matter how many clock-carrying 14-year old schoolboys we pompously catch to feed our paralyzing paranoia. It wouldn't make the world a safer place. Our imbecile delusion of threats will only make things worse. It will fluster the resolve of the very generation that we must trust to reclaim the global society's lost confidence in humanity.
What would make the world a safer place is letting the future generations across the world embrace education, science and innovation — without discrimination or bigotry. Raising our children to become responsible and self-assured adults whose yardstick of righteousness is how well they measure up to the universally accepted values of human rights, equality and justice, is what will make the world a safe place.
The more we wait, the more our delusion grows, and the harder it becomes. The clock — is ticking.
© Majid Kazmi 2015
Thank you for making time to read this post. It is solely based on my viewpoint on the matter. You have the right to dissent politely. You may read my other posts, Your Legacy Will Outlive Your Fame and The Giving Chain to understand my position on the ideal role of individuals in societies.
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