Ideas That Come to You, and Those You Chase

Your stay up late.You get up early and drink coffee 'til noon. You read dozens of newspapers online from all over the globe. You read a few journals. It's right wing. It's left wing. It's insane wing. And sometimes it seems the less you read the more you learn, because, when you are reading, someone is always trying to sell you an idea. It doesnt matter who it is; maybe it's me. I will tell you. Get your eyes a little closer to this and read this idea. It could even be a ridiculous idea and you might think, Why do they let such a radical idea out of the box to wander around freely and screw with your head? To which I would reply, It's just an idea. Newspapers, specifically print newspapers once had a monopoly on ideas.

As a reporter, you wrote your news story, which by its very definition was off limits to ideas and anything that might be seen as an opinion or editorial. You didn't write them.The old men in the suits wrote them. They wrote mostly about their own interests, or holdings and ways to protect their high positions in life. And then a technological marvel came along called the Internet and they bought out all the printer's contracts like minor league baseball players and they shut down a few presses, because the circulation had taken a hit because of on line newspapers like this one. The men in suits had sold their power to other men in suits, who tried their best to keep a lid on that box of ideas. The bloggers opened it though; it was bound to happen. And from the box flew shabby butterflies and moths and then almost like magic a few exotic specimens began to emerge, ideas that had not been seen in these parts for quite some time. These are the ideas you chase.

But they are out of the box now. If fact, ideas are everywhere. You have to throw them in your wastebasket or stack them on your desk. Some of these ideas are so exotic as not to be believed. Local idea: A man who could not make it as a small town cop is appointed to a $110,000 a year sheriff's job. It is such a crazy idea. And it is heavy, too. Other bad ideas cling to it like children to a mother and yet it still attempts to fly. Actually, it doesn't fly.

Domestically, the good and bad ideas have their own sort of clearinghouse called the Tea Party. Some of their ideas are so faulty as to be laughed at, like the new one I heard recently that slavery was abolished by the Founding Fathers - most of them who "owned" slaves their entire lives. That idea was outrageous, I guess you could say, with the Civil War and the century of Jim Crow that followed it. Like the Holocaust deniers, trying to manufacture from thin air ideas that simply can't stand on their own. There are a lot of those around: fictional ideas -ones that have already been tested and proved to be false. Facts are used to test ideas, and just naturally there are many more ideas than there are facts. So you might say, we have to keep our facts busy, especially with the Tea Party.

The entire Middle East seems filled with bad ideas at times. And an astoundingly small number of facts. Mubarak was a terrible idea for Egypt, for example. But it looks like he's drowning in facts at this point.

There are so many U.S. backed dictators around the world. So many bad ideas out there. Where do they come from? Is there a Bad Idea Section at the State Dept. that oversees this zoo of crazed personalities? Maybe we should discard that section. That might be a good idea. We could use a fact section in the Middle East.

In the modern history of ideas there are two individuals who simply can not be over looked. They are Thomas Edison and Nicholi Tesla. Edison was an idea man, but he wasn't very good at putting his ideas to work.That is just a fact that has been covered over with piles of bad idea-garbage for centuries. Tesla worked for Edison at one time, developing the whole theory of alternating current electricity and building a working generator. But Edison didn't like that idea. Edison's really dumb idea was to go with direct current electricity. In other words, every few miles or so there would be a power station sending electrons out like marching armies, all going in the same direction. Very expensive system.

Edison was also big on public promotion, so he had his technicians build the very first electric chair and use it to kill a condemned prisoner as a way of displaying its efficacy. All it proved was how dangerous it could be. The electricity we use today in nearly every part of out life does not come from one of Edison's ideas. It was the idea of Nicholi Tesla, who didn't have an entire publicity department following his every move. So maybe you don't know who he was. He was a man of many ideas. Even the light bulb and some of Edison's other inventions, are more properly called ideas, because Edison always kept a roomful of low-paid scientists around to take his ideas to the next step. Naturally, he kept the patents.

Today I have too many ideas. You have had mornings like that. You awake and the room is just buzzing with ideas. This is the human condition. It is why we talk to one-another, it is why we argue. It is why some things are done and others are not. It is a life of ideas.