Never Walked In High Heels

Last night I watched on a whim a film titled, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Which recreates the tale of a modern man who was forced to play it safe in the name of family. But still, given his preternatural instincts, wishes to go out and continue to steal chickens from the coup.

I see the entire movie as a badly needed commentary on masculinity in our current society. I remember once my father saying: “women marry men thinking that they’ll change, men marry women hoping that they never will.” And in truth, both expectations are unrealistic. People do change but maybe not in the areas that we desire to see that change. I remember being woken up by a newly engaged friend of mine one morning in college. She came to my room later than usual and when I enquired about this she explained that she was up all night cleaning her fiancé’s dorm room. I was a bit shocked. She was the most independent young woman that I had met up to that point. Her dream was to go live in huts in Africa, and yet here she was confessing she had lost sleep by doing something her able bodied fiancé could have accomplished entirely by himself.

“Don’t worry, when we get married things will change.” Why would she say that? Why would she insist this when there is evidence to the contrary, that all of a sudden with a wedding band on his finger and a double income in the bank account he would ever change? Right there, still lying in bed in my dorm at the age of twenty, I could see that my father was absolutely right. People will often marry others absolutely convinced that after the wedding, everything will change.

Mr. Fox was by nature a chicken hunter. Simple. People often have in their very nature habits that aren’t particularly pleasant. My friend’s fiancé was not particularly neat. That was a characteristic about him that as far as I see evidence right now, has yet to change. By saying “Oh, he’ll change”, wasn’t my friend ultimately saying, “I would like to change him”? And if you love someone, do you want to change them? Can those two philosophies ever come together? Can you love someone while still wanting to alter any aspect of their character?

Mrs. Fox said it best when later in the movie she admits: “I love you, but I never should have married you.” It is a plague on modern masculinity that we seek to change it in the name of safety and security. Taming the modern man to live under a mortgage and go to the same place of work day after day after day is ultimately conditioning men everywhere to be afraid of freedom. I look at the male friends I have in my area of London. A large percentage of them are single, substantially older, and of course they live on boats or carry out some other form of adventurous life.

I love my friends dearly, even though I have my scuffles with them. The point is I can’t imagine altering any of them a fraction. They are warm and friendly and they carry out there lives for the most part exactly as they intend to. That doesn’t mean not living in safety simply because that isn’t what they want. It means weeks on boats waking up in the wee morning hours because the boat next door is on fire. It means not having a plan and living comfortably with the idea that at any moment life can change. I think about them and all I wish is if their lives unexpectedly change, tragedy or great joy, they aren’t forced to change who they are for any reason. Unless of course, they become more like themselves.

My cable breaks down all the time. I’ve stopped buying magazines because, quite simply, they depress me and as you already know by the first of this year I made a conscious choice not to follow the news. These three things , combined with the fact that I don’t fit into the traditional mold of what a young woman ought to be, means that most days whenever I walk through the shopping center to get to work I feel like I am on the outside looking in at the world rather than the other way around. The funny thing is, people actually can’t stand those of us who are able to watch the world go by. They want everyone to be caught up in it and whisked away in some weird combination of lust and greed. The truth is, we live in a world which craves cultural homogeny. Everyone should want what we want.

This is the point in time when my political science creature would step up and make some sort of philosophical commentary about the state of the world. The truth is you could blame capitalism for this rat race fueled by advertising and big companies wanting to sell more, thereby making the rich richer. Or you could blame socialism, fueled by an unattainable ideal that everyone would not only be equal but also the same, have the same items, want the same things, and not lack any of the same necessities. Someone could probably find a way to blame every political philosophy in the world should they want to, but it doesn’t change the fact that every single one of us wants the world to operate our way. And every single one of us thinks deep down that our way of seeing the world is the best way to do so.

We are adept at filling the silences in our mind with the sound of things which we don’t have and the craving for those things that we want. Humanity, as a whole, excels in creating idols of ourselves and being prepared to seek whatever we desire at all possible costs. The cult of homogeny means that deep down we are unable to understand why we don’t have everything we want, but also why we want these items in the first place. Furthermore it means that we cannot begin to comprehend the idea that maybe not everyone wants items such as the strongest army in the world, more wealth, more land, or simply more food. But also it means that we can’t even begin to see why anyone would see the world any different than we see it. After all, when an individual sees himself as the center of the universe, there is only one way to look at each individual object in relation to him.

Looking at the world from the outside, being unable to run around in high heeled shoes, incapable of grabbing the latest mocha frappuccino in a Starbucks cup and refusing to have any contact with the popular hysteria brought on by the news means that I do have to see the world differently. There are moments where I catch myself standing in line at a checkout counter trying to decipher the headlines on a magazine cover and having no idea what the lingo is referring to. I have to say, I might not like it when I have no idea what’s going on around me, but I do enjoy it when I don’t feel obligated to sit with the entire pasteurized culture that I am surrounded by.

I am told by my friends that sometime soon, I will have to be sucked in to what they now call the “Two Percent Culture”. That is a place where only two percent of all real people actually honestly sit in. The rest of the people skim themselves off the top or try to be caught up in a whirlwind of frenzy. But based on cultural centrifuge which somehow acts as a great equalizer, so that they too can seem to belong. But the truth is I never think I will fit in there. Moreover, I don’t think that I want to.

My cousin is trying to help me walk through his sunken living room. I am tiny and still trying to get my legs under my hips. Most days that fight is a losing battle. He is a foot taller than me and attempts to wrap his arms around me so that I won’t fall. Of course this constriction is too much for my body to bear, and I end up on the floor. My aunt comes to the rescue.

“Don’t help her too much, there is such a thing as helping someone to such an extreme degree that you wind up smothering them and doing more harm than good. Just hold her hand if she needs help walking sweetie, that’s enough.”

Fast forward twenty years and I am watching the very same words come out of a friend’s mouth. She is on TV speaking about the adoption of orphans worldwide. Programs set up by the government are failing these children right and left (it doesn’t matter which government: state government, federal government; Russian; Chinese; they all seem to not be providing for children in desperate need of homes). Individual action needs to be taken, she says this over and over. If half the churches in America would have one family that would adopt one child, we could give a home to each child in America this year. I am shocked. Just one family in half the churches in America? That’s all it would take? Really? I stare blankly at my computer screen doing the math, wondering what would happen if some churches would find three or four families that would want to adopt and fully support them. The calculations in my head are rolling and then I immediately make the leap: What if we started a government program that would take in all the orphans? There are so few of them, surely someone in Washington could come up with…

And now we’re back to the original problem that programs, it turns out, just don’t work and that children don’t need anymore programs, they need individuals willing to step up to the plate and be a family.

When there is a problem of any kind, why is it that our instinct moves immediately towards a programmatic solution, instead of individuals taking initiative? I don’t believe that most people are lazy. After all, many problems we face are so inconvenient to everybody that perceived laziness is sheer naivety. It’s that the lazy solution turns into a much more complicated problem.

Living here in the U.K, I am often struck by how many individuals consider money as a form of charity. Is that it? Is it simply that we feel we are doing something by throwing money at a problem? Government money, our money? But do we really think a simple check can solve all of our problems? In this way of course, writing a check or forming a large program which we support financially but take little direct action in sometimes doesn’t do a whole lot but line the pockets of bureaucrats.

It’s easy to talk about improving the world in comfortable leather armchairs when we have our noses behind thick books and talking about items such as programs in theory. But money, although it has a great deal of power, is also hugely impotent. If you literally were to just throw money at a problem nothing would happen except that there would be a pile of money on top of the problem. A problem with a large amount of financial pools never gets to the core of an issue, changing the hearts and minds of people. It always takes individuals doing something directly, whether it comes from using money appropriately or taking some sort of physical response in order to find a solution. And what are the chances that members of a government who meet behind closed doors and drive Mercedes actually know how to solve a problem when they have never faced it themselves? Not very likely. The fact is my aunt was right. Mothering a problem is not the same as solving it; it just suffocates those who have fallen underneath and are already suffering to begin with.

Recently it was my birthday and I started to think about what it was I wanted out of life during my tenth birthday. I don’t know why, but being a ten year old always seemed to be a special time for me, like it was the prime of childhood. All the books I read and movies I watched growing up, with characters I admired always seemed to be ten year old girls finding secret places that were especially their own. I looked back to a diary I kept during those days to see what exactly I wanted. See, I believe that each of us are built with desires and dreams imprinted on our hearts. These are the goals we are meant to reach for. These are the goals made for no one else but us. When we are young and unaware of the challenges set before us. This is when we are most aware of what it is we were meant to accomplish. As we get older, and things change, then racing for our dreams becomes less simple and we substitute what we were meant to do for what the world expects us to do.

A while back I lost a friend who informed under no uncertain terms that my aims in life were “unrealistic” and “It’s time for you to grow up anyway.” And it’s true, any dream you have as a young woman with a disability today is still highly unrealistic. There is no job field I can enter at this point with no typing skills and manual labor being next to impossible, where my lifetime career would be simple, straightforward, and predictable. Add to the fact that I work in the arts and the entertainment industry, which, according to him, is one of the most shallow industries in existence and you have a road map for someone trying to reach the moon without a rocket ship. He didn’t know it at the time I don’t think, but what my friend was asking me to do was to deny my dreams simply because the world wasn’t ready for them. Is unpreparedness ever a good reason to move on, particularly when it’s unpreparedness not on your behalf but on the behalf of the rest of the world? Would it be appropriate for an African-American fifty years ago to say that wanting to get a graduate school education at an institution like Vanderbilt was not a worthwhile dream simply because the school was located in an area that was still full of racial tension? Are we morally obligated to change our ambitions just because they might be difficult to reach or impossible given the current state of our society?

I can appreciate if someone has a child that is dependent on them or other obligations the strategy changes. Certain sacrifices must be made, particularly when it comes to earning a supporting those who are reliant on you.. But those of us who are able to get by and still repeatedly try to break down the walls we choose to leave standing might not necessarily have the sociological standard course of action. After all, if no one breaks down the walls that are obstacles in our own culture, they will never come down on their own accord. Rather, they will stay as imposing obstacles waiting for someone in the next generation to tear them down. And so, walls are made until someone is determined to make a ruckus and carry through with the demolition process fully.

Dreams are by nature just out of reach, and if they were easy to grasp and lasso down to the floor, would they be worthwhile dreams or just perpetuating the status quo. It is never acceptable to pass on your dreams simply because they are too difficult to accomplish. Difficulty is never a strong enough reason to quit anything.

There was a time when I was very very small, and I did not realize the limitations plastered on the wall. What I did realize was what my dreams were. At about the same age, I would go to sleep and not understand that the things I did after I went to bed and the images that came across my mind were not reality. The next morning I would ask my mom if she remembered flying over the moon with me or dancing with flowers on fairy dust patches. She would look at me and say “That didn’t happen, you dreamed it. It was a dream.” But it all felt so real to me, even after I woke up safely in my bed.

It’s the most vivid dreams, which no one else can see, that inevitably forces you to reach further than anyone without that dream would ever recommend.

Recently I’ve taken up baking every Saturday morning with my neighbors. They file in with their dishes and types of specialty tea, one of them bringing eggs, another flour, sugar, recipe book. We catch up on the news of the week as we mix and enjoy one another’s company. I am always slightly ashamed when I bring up my “baking club” to people. I’m even more ashamed when I think of the stereotypes of the craft. I do love this time when we bake together. To me it brings up images of 1950s housewives and the pastel icing that is so perfect it screams never to be eaten. I worry now that I appear like one of those domesticated goddesses who seem to know everything about the kitchen and nothing about the real world. I worry that people think that I take my shoes off when I enter my own house.

But in actuality I’m not baking in order to become this feminine ideal or even make beautiful cakes which everyone will love. I don’t bake to become the heroine of the kitchen. I bake because I am learning so much from the experience.

I bake so I can enjoy my neighbors. It’s actually becoming the equivalent of the Saturday morning cartoon watching ritual when I was a kid. The ladies pile in full of ideas and laughter and I am reminded how much I miss them throughout the busy week. We are forced to watch each other and give opinions about the meringue or marriage. Most of the women are older than I, and so hearing them speak and listening to their responses regarding issues that I am currently struggling with is a good comfort. With our Saturday morning ritual comes a dedicated time when we all come together and escape the busy world to get to know each other and what we need in our lives, better. Today in London I don’t know many other opportunities to do exactly that.

I bake because it forces me to make the best of a situation where there is no script. Inevitably something will go wrong; we run out of flour or someone puts in too much milk, the egg yolk won’t separate and it’s our last egg. All of a sudden five women have to put their heads together and figure out what can be done in an effort to counteract impending culinary doom. For once in life the problems are small and we are able to laugh about them. The cake may not rise, despite our best efforts, but we are able to fail in that limited way. While the cake may not look the way it did in the photograph, it still tastes good. Problem solving skills therefore become like a clever game rather than seeming like a rendition of a modern day Sisyphus.

I bake because it truly opens up a world of skills that I was never exposed to growing up. In England, not only do they measure things in grams, but we actually use a balance scale to tell just how many pistachios to put in the macaroons. For the first time in my life I feel exactly what bread dough needs to feel like before it is placed into an oven. In the past, women taught each other these skills in exactly the same way I am learning them now. They would come over and have the community cook a meal; allowing the younger generation to experience all the details required to perfect the meals well before they reached the helm of the kitchen. Most days we choose recipes by Nigella Lawson who is in a matter of speaking, insanely old fashioned; making everyone whip eggs by hand or blanche almonds themselves. But from this crazy insistence on ritual comes clear traditions passed on within the community from woman to young woman so that she is never isolated even when she is stuck in the domestic realm of plainly perfect housewife.

I love Saturday mornings. It’s my favorite part of the week now. Some mornings I can here the laughter from down the road as the women meet up with each other before entering my flat. Ease and perfection isn’t always considered standard, and simple things are really exciting. I will never fit the perfected housewife mode, I don’t want to. I have other dreams and goals for my life so it’s ok when we make lousy mistakes and burn the pavlova. Real people sometimes get to talking so much about life that they forget that the pudding is still in the oven.

For some time now, my friends have been begging me to join one of those internet dating sites. “You are a busy woman, you can’t waste time going to bars and looking for the ideal match.” “Things aren’t like how they used to be, everybody is super busy and that’s OK. We need more direction in looking for romance. It’s completely normal to have a profile on one of those sites.” It seemed for a while that no matter where I was there was a Match.com advertisement promising a match in six months or my money back. This of course, I thought, meant that my money would at some point have to end up in their bank account rather than stay in my own. How wrong I was.

So finally, on a cold evening when I wasn’t feeling in the best moods about myself, I decided to give the advice of my friends a go and signed up for a service which will as always when I have to use proper nouns, remain nameless. I signed up, filled in my birthday, my gender, my age, my email address and hit “OK”. Only to be faced with a form of over two hundred absurd questions. What did I think about Smoking (Strong dislike, moderate dislike, dislike, like, moderate like, strong like, no preference)? Religion (Strong dislike, moderate dislike, dislike, like, moderate like, strong like, no preference)? Performing arts? Financial planning? Dogs? Cats? Small rodents?

And to be honest, some of these questions I had no idea how to answer. After all, how can any woman in my position ever tell if her dislike of, lets say, naked sacrifices of chickens is something I am “moderately” opposed to or “strongly” opposed to? What constitutes a moderate support as opposed to simple support? I was about to give up when I finally reached the holy grail of dating sites, that is, the end screen. I waited for the little rainbow pinwheel to stop spinning on my computer in eager expectation as they calculated my matches and results. My credit card was ready for the six month money-back guarantee. I had it all planned out, I would go into a coffee shop to meet with the guy and my girlfriend would be in disguise at the next table. That way, if he wound up trying to kidnap me she could take action in her little five foot two inch, 110-pound sort of way.

“We’re sorry, we feel that it would be inappropriate to use our services given that your results fall outside of the standard deviation of a majority of men who register with us. Thank you for trying our dating site.”

So, apparently there are standard deviations in online dating. I immediately went back to my junior year stats class where we talked about standard deviations and Z factors for a review of what this could possibly mean. Take your typical Bell curve: Ninety-nine point nine percent of the individuals must fit within the bell. The other point one percent are just out of luck when it comes to looking to romance it turns out. I, with my answers of strong likes and moderate dislikes, am a member of that point one percent where it is apparently so statistically impossible to find me a match that they won’t even bother to take my credit card number.

Beyond the entire absurdity of the whole situation (I am apparently unmatchable) begs the question, can human emotions ever be broken down into standard deviations and mathematical equations? At the risk of sounding too much like an excerpt from Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City”, I don’t think there is a standard deviation when it comes to romance.

I have had friends who are absolutely driven to pure militancy when it comes to finding a boyfriend. Why? There is one individual I met who told me that she was determined through one of these online dating sites to be married within the year. Her strategy was simple, she would go out and meet a guy at Starbucks, and if in ten minutes they didn’t click she would immediately say “I don’t think this is working out”, offer to pay for his coffee and then leave. Within nine months she was engaged, and I guess her clear-cut organization and decisiveness coupled with on the spot thinking worked to her advantage.

But it always seemed to me that half the fun of dating is not knowing what will happen next, like any adventure in life. If a guy walked into where I was sitting with a big neon sign above his head that said “I am the one”, then I might be giddy for a moment but then that excitement would completely disappear and I suspect I would feel completely shackled.

Scientists have struggled and eventually discovered a massive amount of hormones and chemical reactions that go into establishing a good relationship, but there are some aspects of human interaction that science is anywhere near explaining such as true self-sacrificial love. Where is the evolutionary self-preservation in that? If there is any, I’m not sure I would want to find it. There are some wonderful things out there that have been going on for centuries which scientists can’t even begin to explain. These are omens, interactions, and emotions that should be celebrated because they all help create the adventure inherent in the unexpected. After all, as Dr. House indeed said “If the wonder disappears when the answer is gone, there is never any wonder to begin with.”

“Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” –James Madison

The 188 pulls up to my stop and lowers its ramp. The nervousness in my stomach disappears for the time being and I am momentarily at ease. In my experience there is about a fifteen percent failure rate of bus ramps not opening up. Now I just have to worry about the bus ramp opening up when I want to get off.

“It sure was nice of them to put those ramps on buses so you can use them wasn’t it,” a little old Irish lady says to me. Nice? No, actually, it isn’t nice. It is the law. When people with disabilities chained themselves to buses as a form of protest, it took years for the lawmakers to take action. It wasn’t until five years ago that all buses were required to have ramp access before leaving the depot. And even with that rule in effect, I still can’t get on a bus a large percent of the time. Call the accessible transit situation in London frustrating, hellish, difficult, or even unfair if you’d like. But you cannot call it “nice.”

I’m always a bit bewildered by people on either side of the Atlantic who insist that disability legislation is something nice for lawmakers to come up with. I’m with Madison on this one, it is not the role of the government to be charitable or nice. Establishing justice and securing the blessings of liberty and well as promoting the fact that all men are created equal is not merely something “nice” to do. One is baffled why the subject of disability rights is seen as an as issues hand-outs rather than justice.

President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army to Little Rock High School to escort nine African American children into having the same education as their white peers. We do not look back on that event and say that Eisenhower was being “nice.” We do not give women the right to vote because it is a matter of social grace. Nor should we promote equal access to public transportation because it can act as a form of alms. Perhaps it is a statement about our society’s views of individuals with physical limitations that we choose to see such issues of inaccessibility as a form of inconvenience rather than social injustice.

The bus stops in Russell Square when myself and the woman alight. I again feel a sense of relief once I reach the pavement and turn to get to my appointment, smiling at the woman out of trained politeness. Looking behind me I see her walking away slowly, dependent on her wooden cane. I can’t help but wonder, as her body becomes increasingly uncooperative with age, if notices that her world is shrinking as well. Perhaps she doesn’t even realize that growing older and loosing stamina shouldn’t result in a smaller world.

Recently, my friends in the UK have been inundating me with horror stories about health care workers taking anything but a patient’s best interest in mind. Yes, I realize that malpractice occurs in America too, and no, this isn’t another health care reform article. My conversations relating the experiences of my mainly able-bodied friends began to make me think about how we, as a society, treat not simply ”the disabled,” but simply the sick, the injured, and the aged as well. Its something even the “experts” can’t seem to get right.

If the mark of how advanced a civilization is how much we have evolved away from barbarism, then surely one definitive measurement of this progress is how we treat the most vulnerable in our society. This, of course includes not only the smallest and the most impoverished but also those whose bodies have turned against them due to either time or condition. And yet, even in our modern age, this level of civility is a standard that has yet to be reached in all but the most exceptional of cases.

This breach of advancement becomes even more despicable when one considers that a breakdown of the human body, in one form or another, is inevitable in all of us. By ignoring or disgracing those whom this breakdown has already occurred in,

what exactly are we trying to accomplish? Perhaps it is that we are afraid to acknowledge that human frailty is everyone’s fate, and the feebleness, the pain, which we see in the eyes of the man lying in front of us from his bed will someday be our own. When we are all faced with our own vulnerabilities, it is within our prideful nature to behave in the worst way possible, particularly when it is embodied not within ourselves but someone else. And so, we go on creating a world which will surly be unprepared for even our weakest days.

For decades, we have made health and caring for those in need of physical help an issue of politics rather than an issue of humanity. Even if we did have universal healthcare throughout the solar system, it does little to care for people in imperfect health outside of an institution. In this way, would the world outside of hospitals and urgent care center be fairer, or would it simply be cheaper to institutionalize the frail who inconvenience us to be dogmatically watched after? If we mean to fix all our health related issues with improving our respect for the frailty of the human condition, both the politicians and the doctors have fooled us into we our much more evolved simply by keeping our weaknesses out of sight.

Of course the words ‘integration’ and ‘rehabilitation’ are words that we hear those dressed up as reformers on the news shows spout out as well, but there are little visible effects of an attempt to improve the quality of life for individuals who don’t have the most cooperative body. Even the most compassionate health care which costs nothing cannot alter the fact that even today, even in the richest and arguably the most advanced and compassionate nations in the world, some schools still refuse to open their doors to disabled children and architects choose to put steps rather than ramps outside of new buildings because the former “looks more traditional.” This says nothing about the countless small issues of discrimination and even hatefulness that occur at the checkout lines or railway platforms.

If we consider ourselves an advanced society we are grossly mistaken. If we think any sort of government act will force us into being more progressive or charitable, we are lying to each other. Those are the changes to a culture which cannot take place by asking doctors to see more people or even handing complicated issues over to experts so we can keep our hands clean. We do a terrible job taking care of people who we find inconvenient in life specifically because we have built a world where their life is inconvenient. But all to often, by the time we realize how inconvenient the human condition actually is, is the time we’ve succumbed to it ourselves.

Being an individualist is not terribly popular these days. There’s a lot of talk about what someone can do for society, how to help the faceless “others” who are less fortunate than you or even how to help charities of this nature by making a tax deductible donation to X. Theses are all good actions worthy of some (albeit often minimal) praise on some level. But even with the best of efforts to move towards utopia, something insidious almost always creeps in, and here is no exception.

Perhaps I simply see this because I am an American living in London. But recently it seems as though there is more attention given to the ‘toiling masses’ rather than the individuals who are either in need of help or those who can help. The power and the preciousness of the single human being has been replaced by concern for a faceless mass who seems to always be in need of help and never getting any. Charity has become an impersonal act of the bank account rather than requiring eye contact.

But the ‘faceless mass’ way of thinking has done more damage than simply disguising taxes as alms. We have forgotten that each of use are created and not generated. This fact has little to do with any sort of deity and more to do with just how many fingerprints and events it takes to form a constantly evolving person. Our current popular views on biology and society, taken to the next logical step, teach not only that life is random but also that each of us are not particularly unique. If we are nothing more than cells and labels, existing for eighty years or so, then the value our impact for the history of man is small, we can do little to change the world, and there is a vast amount of feebleness in any of our actions. Often when I talk to people is seems as if they refuse to hold their own sprit, the part of them which has yet to be defined by any scientist, dearly. The willingness to compromise to things which insult the soul for the security of feeling others standing beside us is rampant within ourselves.

If we stop recognizing the value of the individual and his unique spirit, we cease to acknowledge the most powerful natural resource in existence. It is not enough to try and help in order to ‘do good’ in the world, like everything else ‘doing good’ can quickly become yet another form of legalism. But when you look the individual, be he servant or the one in need, you begin to value that person until it is impossible to generalize a person back into a faceless mob. Looking at a person means understanding them, their conditions, and valuing him for it, rather than expecting him to relate in predetermined way which ultimately casts him back into obscurity.

Less and less people want to live forever. This is not to say they don’t want to die, they just want to go on surviving as a biological entity rather than being themselves to the greatest of their ability. A group of such people no doubt make a homogeneous mass which is easy to define and then dismiss. It is the unique individual who understands that he is fearfully and wonderfully made which makes the conditions of society better; it has never been the other way around. Most people who cannot acknowledge their own value, simply as people who will never again exist are content to live simply at the status quo. If you look at every civil rights movement in history and think of where it would be without the individuals associated with leading it, it doesn’t take long to see the value of the human spirit who sees people living rather than a group surviving.

Each person has value because man is an end unto himself. He needs to be nothing but himself to the best of his ability. Even if you don’t believe a part of you lives on forever, your own individual uniqueness acts as a form of accountability simply because you will never exist again. In some way, a person by being himself has value because he is one, and with that single man, he can only reach people by seeing what each person is.

I’ve seen the commercials. The male announcer almost teases you with the idea that all your problems will be solved if you only buy the correct application for under a dollar. And from the stance of creative businesswoman, the App Store for the iphone is enthralling. With no overhead, a constantly changing storefront and boundless creativity, this is, without a doubt, the correct formula for the next stage of entrepreneurship for the new frontier.

If only that ‘boundless creativity’ would come in the form of faster evolution.

After all, what exactly is the use of a program which is an alarm clock on a device where one is automatically build in. Better yet, how about coming to and end of a fine dinner and being unable to calculate the tip without the help of your trusty technological companion. Or there’s always the program, that tells you about what other programs have come out and which other programs you need. (This one, much to my surprise, was not created by Apple.)

I bought an iphone in hopes to make my life as a disabled woman easier. With life in this position one is dependent on barons of industry, invention, and software to make life not simply more convenient but also simply livable. To say that my iphone has changed my life would be an understatement. But I was also one of the first people investing in voice activation all the way back in 1994, and have since thrown money at nearly every piece of assistive technology conceivable. In the case of adaptive tech hardware and software, it really doesn’t matter what sort of resources you have, if can’t be sold to the mainstream population the software will not advance.

This is how we get over 200 software developers which create alarm clocks, and no program that will actually call a London black cab. After all, my friends argue, its easy to hail a cab off the street. But figuring out what fifteen percent of your dinner bill is… that’s a real challenge.

The App Store illustrates to me that the leaders of industry are few and far between while those who have the programming skills but lack the imagination are well in abundance. It’s proof that just because there are lots of hands which can make the industry move forward, without the brains there is little guarantee of it doing so. Looking at what sells today will only show you what you should’ve been selling yesterday. And so to hop on the ‘alarm clock bandwagon’ only serves to tell you where the industry is. As with any other form of progress the market has to look to the needs of people who are not in the mainstream to figure out what comes next.