I came across this entirely by accident while "goofing on YouTube" as I like to say. I don't know anything about this event or when it took place, but it is truly spectacular. Being able to see it is one of the things I love about the modern world we live in. Forty years ago, events in Japan or in places like the Middle East might as well have been happening on Mars for all the info we got about them. Now we can see, as I linked below, music videos from the Middle East, who got the idea from Western culture. It's all part of a coming together of the different people of the world, slowly but surely, despite the efforts of a few rich and powerful people to prevent it so as to earn more money for themselves. They can only succeed in the short term.
I also want to point out that the reason the Japanese in particular can have free national health care, free colleges for whoever qualifies (as far as I know), and still have the ability to produce works of such extraordinarily subtle technology is because they don't spend such exorbitant sums of money on defense. True, they have us to protect them, but imagine if the world was such that these huge standing armies simply weren't necessary, if we didn't need to spend more than the rest of the world combined on our military.
Terrorism is a threat, but as we see in Iraq, it's not the kind of threat you can deal with using military might alone. It takes cunning and guile, it takes espionage and infiltration and diplomacy, it takes a willingness to make the world a better place for everyone, not just the wealthy few, not just the American middle class (what there is left of it), but
all humans. If we do that, the Osama bin Ladens of the world have no reason to exist, and no recruits willing to kill themselves. It could have been done for a tenth of what we spend now, much of which gets wasted anyway. How many billions have we sunk into Iraq alone that have simply vanished without accomplishing anything but fattening the bank account of some corrupt contractor or politician? Instead, we've put ourselves in the position of having to spend (and waste) even more on arms as we create more and more enemies. The only people who prosper under those circumstances are the ones that sell the weapons, and the ones who use fear to get power, and they exist in all countries.
Eisenhower said that "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." How much has been stolen from all of us? Worse, has our future been stolen because love of money blinds us to the consequences of our effect on the environment? Only time will tell.
I see so much going on in this world that sickens me, and then I see something like that robot ballet that reminds me of how wonderfully inventive and creative humans can be, and how we need to somehow find a way to preserve it. And it saddens me that such talk is considered naive and foolish, when it should be obvious to all of us.
