Thursday, June 3, 2010

Of Course Sometimes We Need Dynamite

Either building upon or tearing apart yesterday's metaphor of delicate sculpting and patience in changing our lives I cavalierly stated that we don't use dynamite when sculpting our lives because of the debris factor.  Come to find out, one of our most famous set of carved images came to be with the help of dynamite.  Without dynamite, Mt. Rushmore would probably still pay tribute to only a couple of presidents instead of four and Cary Grant wouldn't have had much room to run from the bad guys in North By Northwest.  Ninety per cent of Mt. Rushmore, in fact, was carved using dynamite which blasted the mountain face down to no more than six inches of granite.  Then the carving began in earnest as did the scooping away by hand of everything that didn't look like one of the four presidents.
I don't understand how Mt. Rushmore was created any more than I understand how the David was created.  And while Mt. Rushmore requires a different kind of patience metaphor it took 400 workers and a couple of decades to make the thing happen.  That's still a lot of patience.
However, more than a metaphor for slow, constant focus on change Mt. Rushmore is currently our best and perhaps only example of true bipartisanship.  Washington DC, take note.  Two Republicans, one Democrat and one there weren't parties yet all getting along on the same rock.

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