Thursday October 8th, 2008. Today the national debt clock ran out of numbers. Some quick thinking by the folks of the Durst Organization (the organization that commissioned the debt clock and maintains its accuracy) quickly eliminated the “$” to the left of the debt and replaced it with a “1″. The organization plans to “upgrade” the clock over the next year by adding two additional digits bringing its ability to remind us into the quadrillions.
Do you care? Can you care? Does this have any effect on us? Can we really grasp a million dollars, or a billion, or a trillion, or 56 trillion (the current amount of unfunded liabilities the government has…..before the weeks of bailouts I might add). I don’t mean to be accusatory here, but using the example of my own life it seems as though the bigger the numbers get, not only do I feel weaker in my ability to affect change, the more challenging it becomes to even grasp at what it means.
Learning helps, but is it enough?
- $700,000,000,000
- $56,000,000,000,000
As the visual artist Chris Jordan puts it, America sometimes seems to be anesthetized by the largeness of our country, our culture, our world, and the effects our decisions have. Anesthetized to a point where we become disheartened, or demotivated, or simply to a point when we don’t care any more. We have lost our sense of outrage, anger, and grief.
“As we try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information we have to work with are these gigantic numbers..numbers our brains just don’t have the ability to comprehend.”
Can we translate this information, this data, into something we can feel…something that matters to us….
What started as primarily visual and artistic forms of human communication, have evolved into the logical, analytical, and structured forms of today. With the enormity of our civilization and the ever increasing global impact of every single decision we make, a shift back to those more visual and artistic forms may be required to enable our comprehension of such largeness.
“If we can feel these things more deeply, then they will matter to us more than they do now. And if we can find that, then we will be able to find in each one of us the big question…How do we change? As a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, that is our own behavior.”
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