Weekend Wise Words

Be Smart! Be Brilliant!

I watched a film this week from 1962. A friend suggested it and was surprised, with my history and catalog of cinema, that I had never seen or heard of it. I was surprised, too. It is a French film called, "La Jetée", from director Chris Marker. I found it is interesting, fascinating, powerful. Film as a set of stills. Obviously a precursor decades later to Terry Gilliam's, "12 Monkeys". A very good film, different, but powerful. That got me to thinking about film directors I have admired for their art over the years. So, I thought some quotes from some of those directors, in no specific order, who thrilled and amazed me through my life, would be in order for this Weekend's Wise Words. Cheers!

I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.
Chris Marker

An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scracth, demolish accepted norms, and rebuild a new world.
Henri Langlois
[Although not himself a director, Langlois was a French film archivist and cinephile. He was a pioneer of film preservation when no one really considered it, and an influential figure in the history of cinema. The development of the auteur theory could comfortably be laid at his doorstep as a natural outgrowth from his film screenings in Paris in the1950s.]

I was the perfect guy to do Harry Potter. I remember leaving the meeting, getting in my car, and driving for about two hours along Mulholland Drive just so angry. I mean, Chris Columbus' versions are terrible. Just dull. Pedestrian.
Terry Gilliam

Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
Alfred Hitchcock

To me there's no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They're all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.
Woody Allen

Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. ... Don’t put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t bet against yourself. And take risk. NASA has this phrase that they like, "Failure is not an option." But failure has to be an option. In art and exploration, failure has to be an option. Because it is a leap of faith. And no important endeavour that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. … In whatever you are doing, failure is an option. But fear is not.
James Cameron

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Stanley Kubrick

Un fatto di sangue nel comune di Siculiana fra due uomini per causa di una vedova. Si sospettano moventi politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano belle. Tarantelle. Tarallucci e vino
Lina Wertmüller

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Ingmar Bergman

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.
Jean Luc Goddard

What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me. [For myself, I find it is hard to frighten me; so when I write something that frightens me....]
John Carpenter

I think that the appeal of real art is to the unconscious and the subversive. Art is always subversive of society. I think that's one of its functions. The relationship between art and society is always uneasy. If civilization and authority are repressive, then art, by appealing to the unconscious, is subversive of civilization. And yet art needs society. You don't create art in a vacuum. And civilization seems to need art somehow as well. They need to go together. It's a strange duality. I think I do my best subversiveness by not worrying about whether I'm subversive or not.
David Cronenberg

All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.
David Lynch

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.
Pedro Amodovar

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.
Alain Resnais

I rather like mysteries. But I do dislike muddles.
Sir David Lean

The cinema is an invention without a future.
Louis Lumiere

We're suffering from saturation, overkill. The market place is flooded by demand, and there are too many films, so everything gets watered down. Demand is the boss and everything bends to that will. Bigger and not necessarily better shows seem to be the order of the day. I can't watch most of them.
Ridley Scott

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.
Francois Truffaut

Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.
Werner Herzog

With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this
Akira Kurosawa

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.
Andrei Tarkovsky

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?
Sergei M. Eisenstein

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.

Federico Fellini

All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.
Luis Buñuel

Institutionalized - Teen Angst

"Institutionalized" (1983), by Suicidal Tendencies is one of my favorite teen angst songs of all time.

I have the soundtrack to the Mike Nesmith (from the Monkees) Executive Produced, and Alan Cox written and directed film, "Repo Man" from 1984. So I've been hearing it from time to time all these years since it came out.

I've been a fan of Mike since he was on "The Monkees" TV show in the 60s. Oddly enough, what locked me in as a fan of his, was him quitting the Monkees and their trying to continue on without him. I even wore a green stocking cap in High School because he always wore one. Mike went on to head Pacific Arts records until they went out of business.

Mike worked on Other films by the way that I liked are, "Tapeheads" (with Tim Robbins and John Cusak, both favorite actors of mine since their start, especially, John, and his sister for that matter), and "Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann". Pacific Arts video was a leader in home video and I still have Nesmith's quite entertaining Elephant Parts (which won the first grammy for music video in 1981) and Television Parts videos.

You might ask, why am I talking about Nesmith in the same space as Suicidal Tendencies. No reason really, I just thought it might be fun to put the two together. Besides, their paths did cross you know and how many people really know that?

Getting back to the lyrics of Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized", here are the relevant ones to my liking it so much:

"I was sitting in my room and my mom and my dad came in and they pulled up
a chair and they sat down, they go:
Hey Mike, we need to talk to you
And I go:
Okay what's the matter
They go:
Me and your mom have been noticing lately that you've been having a lot of problems, you've been going off for no reason and we're afraid you're gonna hurt somebody, we're afraid you're gonna hurt yourself.
So we decided that it would be in your interest if we put you somewhere where you could get the help that you need.
And I go:
Wait, what do you mean, what are you talking about, we decided!? My best interest?! How can you know what's my best interest is? How can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say, I'm crazy? When I went to your schools, I went to your churches, I went to your institutional learning"

You kind of have to hear how that is played out to really get it. But, Hell yeah, I say! If you don't like how I turned out, parents, well? Who raised me? I mean what are you saying? That, this is all my fault?

That's a good point and one I've wanted to speak to for some time, so I might as well do it here.

So, what IS the point?

Especially, this is about parents with a kid who is hard to deal with, difficult to raise, problematic to interact with, or whatever... along that line. Now granted, some people are just bad, but really, I think they are few and far between. Still, you have to ask yourself if you have a child like this: "why are they like this?"

Parents tend to want to say, "Oh, I don't know, he's just difficult." Or, "She is such a pain, I don't know how she got to be that way; her siblings aren't like that, so that abdicates us from any responsibility in her problems." Right?

Okay. Sure. You can take that tact. Uh huh, go ahead, wash your hands of any responsibility there. That's probably not the case though. You do realize that, don't you? You probably had a lot to do with how they got that way. Sure, there is always an exception to the rule, or at least saying that, let's me get on with my argument without too much distraction.

But you do have to consider that if your kid isn't working out so well, not growing up with the ideal you had in your mind of how good you'd be at raising a kid, or how you "hoped" they'd grow up, maybe that is part of the problem. After all, by observing the experiment, you alter the experiment and affect the results.

We raise kids to be adults. At least, that's our job. But so many parents raise kids to fit a form, not to grow into being the person they are going to grow into being. And that is a big difference. And a good way to end up in trouble. On both sides.

Sure you should try to raise them well. Do the best you can. But there are things you can do to avoid their being such a problem, both to themselves and to you.

Like giving them enough, Love, trust, time, attention, and explanations. And decreasing the amount they can get of distrust, annoyance, putting them down, expecting too much, not expecting enough. And forcing them too much into what you want out of them, be it in the way of education, religion (especially, and that is a nasty one), sociability, and inclinations (be it social, sexual, musical, academic, entertainment, whatever).

Here's the thing... basically, do the best job you can as a parent. Love your kid, unconditionally. That doesn't mean you don't lay down the rules, but expect them to get broken. That shows spirit. Americans, have spirit. But if you want to break them, I don't know, you're a commie? I mean, breaking a person's spirit is kind of anti American. But don't break or try to break your kid's spirit. That way of thinking put us here to begin with. Guide your child, don't control them. Control, by not controlling. But that doesn't mean don't parent. People get that confused.

You hear about the "touchy feely" way of parenting. That came to be because people started to realize that the old way didn't work, so they thought an absence of that behavior fixed things. But it didn't, it made things worse. Then parents got upset because kids didn't turn out how they expecated and wanted. What they didn't realize was that they had to rework things, not give up on them.
Geez, people, it's not that difficult. Just don't take the easy way out all the time. Sometimes, sure. I mean, it's easier to say, "shut up, do it because I said so," but that will come back to haunt you if you do it even one time more than you should have.
Help your kid. Don't "manage" them. You "manage" someone at work, or in prison, but you don't have to love them, or live with them, or have them ignore you when you are 90 and can't get around.

There's a line in The Breakfast Club, where the Detention Teacher Vernon, tells the Janitor, Carl:

Vernon: You think about this, when you get old, these kids, when I get old, they're going to be running the country.
Carl: Yeah.
Vernon: Now this is the thoght that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That when I get older, these kids are going to take care of me.
Carl: I wouldn't count on it.

That's something to think about. Yes, you have to raise your kids, make the tough decisions, they're not always going to be happy with you, but they should always love you, and you should always be sure that they know, that you love them. And just saying it, isn't enough; just expecting that they should just know it, isn't enough.

There are a few other songs that I think made me a better parent. One is "Cat's in the Cradle", by Harry Chapin. I love how Harry starts this song by saying: "It's about my boy Josh and frankly, it scares me to death." Yeah, I can relate, I've felt that feeling every time I heard that song and it chokes me up. Partly because I was the son in that song to my father and my step-father.

It tells the story of a typical dad who works hard to make a life for his family and year after year, necessarily ignores his son. After the years pass, the kid grows up, moves away and has his own family. Now dad calls and wants his son's attention and what does the kid tell him on the phone? "I'm busy, and I have to go now, but hey, nice talking to you, Dad." What a horrible moment that would be if you were the Dad. That realization that the kid grew up just like me, and now I'm the one suffering.

Sometimes, it's just that simple, we reap what we sow.

So remember, you aren't here just to put up with your kids. You're here to raise good people, good adults, good citizens of this country, of this world, and yes, think ahea... of this universe.

So if you find that your kids are screwing up and you think it's their fault? Take another look.

Yeah, I love that song....

The Fear of Writer's Block

I'm a writer. I know a lot of writers. I know professional writers, amateur writers, people who dream of being writers and never will, and people who dream of it and are far better than I, but who just can't seem to make it as a professional. In that last case, I saw a comedian on TV recently who said that there are plenty of people out there funnier than he is, but he's the one making a living at it. It takes a special understanding and perserverance to make it as a professional.

Yes, it takes focus and enduring harsh trials but it also takes a wide variety of things aside from the task you want to do. We would all like to just do whatever our passion is. But it takes a capability far beyond that to make it in the real world. Unless you are extremely lucky. I spent much of my life being protected by others who really appreciated what I could do. But that was the computer world. Once I try to break into writing, it's a whole other bucket of fish.

It would seem that the Art world, protects itself with vast abandon toward care and concern, all in order to keep as many away as possible. Why is obvious. If anyone could do it, everyone would do it. Well, not exactly. I mean, some people couldn't care less about the Art world in general. I think this is more true of traditional artists, especially with multimedia types. But we have this in the writing world too. Especially now a days. Every one seems to think they can be a writer. Because we are all taught to write in grade school.

But to turn out a good story, a good article, a book, a screenplay, a poem, takes more than just your basics. To do it right, to do it well. And not everyone can do that. But of those who can, or who are trying very hard to, there is one killer thing they all seem to fear.

Writer's Block-k-k-k-k...(yes, that's supposed to be an echo)...(yes, it's still echoing)....

Mostly this seems to be of concern to new writers, those who haven't been at it that long. Then there is the first time novelist (or poet, or screenwriter, etc.). Especially if they get rave reviews. Then have to do it again. Now, THAT is a block I can wrap my pencil lead encrusted fingers around.

But even they, need to lighten up. That is usually just a lot of pressure people put on them. Agents, Publishers, family, even fellow writers who should know better. This isn't an unusual fear. In fact, David Duchovney is making a good living at it on his show Californication where he plays a writer who wrote one cricially acclaimed book and then froze up, for five years. And so he does anything he can to avoid it through several seasons, sleeping around, drinking, drugging, any adolescent behavior he can come up with to avoid his responsibilities. And his next novel.

But I have a suspecion, as do many of my writer friends, professional writer friends, writers who have been writing for a long time, that Writer's Block, is a figment of your imagination. And, a misperception. Allow me to elucidate....

The first time I jumped out of an airplane, the first time, I repelled down a cliff face, the first time I raced a car along a mountain highway, I was scared. I feared the unknown. I feared, the known.

What if, I can't let go of the plane? What if I do let go? What if my chute doesn't open? What if on the way down that cliff face, my rope breaks, I let go, someone else above lets go? What if I drive off that mountain highway, or lose control and spin out of control and zip, fly over the edge, or into the cliff side?

In jumping out of a plane, it's pretty easy to explain. You are scared. That is sane, that is nature. But there is more going on there. There is not just a mental, emotional component, there is a physical one. And that is partly to blame for much of our woes in life. You can out think yourself, you can out emote yourself, but when your heart is pounding a thousand beats an hour, it's hard to think straight.

But not for the reason you might thing, that's actually kind of slow and you're probably lacking enough oxygen to think straight. If you figure 80 beats a minute and 60 to 100 a minute is normal, that is about 4800 an hour. Still, if you're heart is beating way over normal for you, it is hard to think straight (now we're on the other side). But I digress.

When your heart beats too fast, you get adrenalin coursing through your system, that fight or flight condition starts up, it is hard to think straight, it is hard to have control. And that is frequently misperceived as fear.

So when you are going to jump out of a plane and your mind tells you don't do it, this is stupid, and your emotions tell you the same thing, that's rational and good. Just tell those two worriers that you have calculated the risk and it's reasonable and along with the training you've received, you have excellent odds of returning to do it again and have fun. But if you're body is screaming at you to stop, you have to recognize what is going on.

Fundementally, your adrenalin has kicked in and you are mixing your emotions with your mind and your body is supporting that insanity. You have to compartmentalize at that point. See what is mind, see what is emotion, and most importantly, see what is body. Separate them in your mind and realize that this is not fear, nor is it terror, it only feels like it. It is, exhileration. It is an unusual phenomenon now a days, unless you are in a very out of the ordinary  situation. Being mugged, in a car accident, near a terrorist attack?

If you can separate those three things, you can move forward and do some amazing things. As you climb up forward in the plane, near the open door (if it even has one), and it's hard to hear with the rushing in of the wind and engine noise, you look down and see thousands of feet of, nothing... just breath deeply, calm yourself, separate those three elements and put each in its proper place.

Then go ahead, jump. Now you fall, whoosh! Droppinggggggg.... swimming, maybe trying to get back to the hand hold on the plane, which is not a block away because it's going like a hundred or so. Now the rest is easy, you fall. And there is some other stuff that happens. And if you have an easy landing, under say twenty miles an hour, you may go do it again.

Getting back to writing.

When you think about writing, you have to deal mostly with your mind, your thoughts about what you have to do, and your emotions, your feelings about what you have to do, and your expectations, a blend of those two. If you have pressure on you, if you have over stressed yourself about doing it, or if you have agents or publishers, family or friends, weighing on your head, it can give you an anxiety attack in the worst case. But all you have yot do is, write.

So write.

Thinking about it, whateer it is, sky diving, cliff climbing, writing, producing works you know whill be judged and rejected possibly, can really stress you out. But you can't let it get the better of you.

Okay?

If you feel you can't write, just write, something. Make an outline. Do the easy stuff, get into the swing of things. Prime the pump. Then when you feel into it, jump into the harder stuff, the creative stuff, whatever works for you. For myself I find that literally "tricking" myself into doing what I need to do works very well. Or rewarding myself. If I want to do something pleasant, rather than just do it, I'll hold off and tell myself that I can have it once I finish writing this chapter, or page, or whatever.

I used to do that when I was working on my yard even. I'd crack a beer, and put it ten feet away in the hot sun. Then I had to get ten feet of sidewalk trimmed (I was using a hand tool, I didn't have a fancy stand up and roll it along tool). Gauge your time by your reward and vice versa, whatever works for you. No dinner until you finish this paragraph. Whatever. What is important is you find something that helps you move along.

But writer's block? I don't, and most writers I know don't, accept that it even exists. I know that this way of thinking alone, can stress some people out. But I many of my friends agree with me that writer's block is just a misperception. It's not a block. It's something, and you're not writing, but don't even look at it as a block to your productivity.

I find that 100% of the time it is either that I am doing something wrong, or I don't have the resources I need to continue, or I need a break. I find that last one to be prevelant a lot. I wrote for ten hours on a novel this last Sunday. I had Monday off and after writing that day for six hours, I "hit a wall". I just sat there and couldn't go on.

So I asked myself why, what is keeping me from continuing? And what I found was that I had written a lot yesterday and today and I had just come to the end of the novel. That is a good time to take a break. I still needed to make several passes over the 500 pages of the novel, and I still needed to write the ending, and tie up all the loose ends, which was primary in my inability to continue.

I was tired. I needed a lot of energy to tackle that next stage and I needed time to think about how to go about it and what I wanted to do with it. But it wasn't writer's block. It was me, telling me, I needed to take a break, get some rest, get away from writing for a little while and then come back at it refreshed and energized to tackle some difficult writing. And that's okay. I could come back later in the day, that night, or the next day. I don't have a time table on this project so that's not a consideration.

And when you are on a schedule, then you are dealing with something like test anxiety, only it's deadline anxiety. But again, it's not writer's block. If you can sit and write, you  don't have writer's block. I could have continued, but I found I really did't want to, it was as simple as that. There was no block, I just wanted to be doing something else for a while, replenish my jets.

To be a good writer, or anything for that matter, you need variety. If you do anything too much, you will burn out. And then you need to refuel, reenergize. Pure and simple. So, give yourself a break. Reward yourself at that point, you've earned it.

And if you haven't done anything, well do something. If you truly have writer's block, then you should consider, maybe you don't really want to be a writer. It sounds very romantic, or to some, glamorous, but that is only after hundreds or thousands of hours of hard, lonely, isolated periods of work. Some of it redundant and unrewarding, until you get the credit, kudos, money, attention and such that you are seeking.

So fear not writer's block, because really, for truly, it is just your friend, trying to tell you, you need a break. Listen to it, make it work for you, and never let it get the upper hand. Because there is no reason for it to have that.

Just remember that you and only you, always have that upper hand. And when you can see that, applaud yourself, because you have gotten a lot further than many, many other people out there who are trying and simply may never make it. Simply because they misperceive themselves.

Breaking the rules, not breaking the rules

I was watching one of my favorite shows recently, Fringe, on FOX Cable.

This show kind of being the new millennium's X-Files (some have speculated that Fringe Division took over after X-Files Division were closed down). The Wikipedia article on the show says, "The show has been described as a hybrid of The X-Files, Altered States, The Twilight Zone and Dark Angel." So there are plenty of warps and twists and questioning ethics and physics, for that matter.

So on this one episode, the character of the genius scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop, finds an envelope in the FBI Fringe Division's Special Agent's coat. He is waiting on her to fill out a report and it will influence whether he is sent back to the (Mental) Hostpital, so he has quite a vested interest in what it says. So, he reads it. But then, he says nothing about it to her. Most of you would be thinking, "And so? So, what? What's he going to do? SAY something about it, when it was wrong for him to have looked at it in the first place?"

Well, yes, precisely so. And that got me to thinking.

Super Special Agent Olivia Dunham

Why?

Well, it is implied that to do that, to go into someone's things and take what is there's, and misuse it (that is to look at something confidential, whether it is about you or not), if you break the rules and read it, read something that was for all intents and purposes, in someone else's "possession" (it wasn't in her hand, but in her coat), then it follows that you need to follow the rules from that point forward (related to this matter) as if you hadn't actually broken the rule and read it.

So, any information you discovered, at that point, you are supposed to say nothing about it. Right? Because, if you are going to break that initial rule, then in order to cover up your transgression, you then have to follow that rule as if you broke no rule at all. Right?

So, why is that? "What a stupid question," you think. Right?

Is it?

Well, if you let them know, they know you have crossed the line of reasonable expectation of privacy. If this is a professional, especially, a Federal job, you may in some obscure way (or not obscure at all) be breaking a law. If you are friends, which they are, you have now compromised their privacy in a different way, by knowing what was confidential, and possibly embarrassed them.

Embarrassment. That, can be a killer. The one thing my Ex if anything, could not stand was to be embarrassed. She could handle a lot in life, but to embarrass her, was anathema to her. She would rather die, I think, sometimes, rather than be held up to the light of negative scrutiny in the public forum. She loved the "limelight", but not if it wasn't in the most positive of ways possible.

If you have gone into what is confidential and private, you have broken your "trust" with them. A trust of  various levels. Trust of expectation of privacy, so that is a breech on several levels of privacy. Trust of theft not being a concern between friends, coworkers, and authoritarian and subject. Three things, three levels.

I could probably go on with this train of thought, but I don't want to bore you, or waste your time further than necessary and I think I've now made my point. Whenever you step over the bounds of accepted behavior, you take the chance of breaking something. Not infrequently, many more things than you have given consideration to.

This example from a TV show is minor in the real world, the world we live in. After all, it's between characters who are friends and coworkers in extraordinary circumstances however. Where the Special Agent knows the quirks of the Doctor, of his mental aberrations and unique vision of Life, with special circumstances that extend even beyond our known Universe, and even another known Universe.

So with Walter, she might take it more lightly than if another Special Agent had done this to her. Or if her boyfriend, Peter Bishop, son of the Doctor (depending on which Universe, or in which timeline you are referring), had been the one to break trust with her. But, I think you can see both, how finite and infinite this example is. My point in the end however is that this is really no big deal. Except perhaps, to the characters in a play.

But consider, if you did this in real life, what are the ramifications to your life with your girlfriend, wife, lover, or anyone you have a relationship with? Consider if rather than reading a confidential letter, you broke a trust of emotional fidelity or, what most would consider a far worse scenario, that of physical fidelity. Let's skip going into any detail about the ins and outs of those two minefields.

So to summarize, to break one, small, simple rule, returns not one repercussion, but rather multiple, but also on various levels, with domino like ramifications that can exacerbate yet other things. In some cases, you can bury yourself under a morass of ill feelings and life events until you end up only wishing you could reverse and go back to make the original decision all over again.

So one has to ask oneself, why not just make the right decision in the first place? Yes?

Why are we educating people out of their creativity?

The more I hear about education and corporations, jobs and how people are treated now a days, the more I realize that we are really very screwed up. And we need to do something about it, because continuing on as we are, really isn't a tenable situation. TED had Sir Ken Robinson talk and he really can spark one's imagination. He gives an example that I think is especially telling.

Why you should listen to him:

Why don't we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. It's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this."

"It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats," and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer?" And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that.

"Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of eight -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long." and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

"I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company -- the Gillian Lynne Dance Company -- met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down."

Many of these mistakes we make in life are through ignorance. We didn't know any better. But times are changing. We need to be more aware. We need to notice what is not working, and consider, maybe it's not broken, it's just in the wrong environment, or it's being handled incorrectly for it to function correctly. Or, maybe the "it" is a person, and deserves our time and respect.

What Sir Ken has to say is fundamentally important to the survival of not only the United States, but the state of Humanity. But remember, at some point, ignorance becomes stupidity, because if you don't do something about it, you've chosen, by inaction.