I pulled up to the drive through window and the very attentive and talkative young fellow said to me.
“You, Canadians you like your sugar.” (I had ordered a box of 10 timbits)
He asked, “Is diabetes a problem here in your country?”
I said, “Yes it is a big factor here.”
I asked him, “Where are you from?”
He said, “Sri Lanka.”
I asked him if they have sweet things in his country.
He thought about it a moment and then answered – “Yes, we have sweet things and we like them. But we have them only at special occasions. We do not eat them for Breakfast, Lunch and Supper.”
Wow! He nailed it, didn’t he?
Our culture has as lot of sugar foods, no argument from me, then we also pour it into our coffee, tea, or other beverage and consume it all day long. It is interesting that this was his take away on our country as a new comer – we like our sugar. A part of me wishes I had asked him what other things he has noticed about “Canadians,” but I did not.
Our world is so connected, more so than I think we realize. It is not simply because of the internet – it was connected way before then.
Let’s take the electric car for instance.
We like to think that this is a “new” feature in our world, but alas it certainly is not!
Sorry if that bursts your bubble but the electric car has been around for a long time.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9
Electric cars have been around for well over 100 years, mainly in Europe and in the USA.
Think about that for a moment, that is way before the age of internet where they could share information, yet the electric car was in 3 different parts of the world. Keep reading to see #3.
What first started this for me was that I saw a commemorative stamp from 1917 with an electric car on it and I was quite surprised, and it got me searching for its’ history. I came across the astounding information that as early 1832 a crude version of an electric car has been around. In the 1870’s these electric cars became the practical way to get around.
In 1917 in the USA, 38% of vehicles were electric, 40% were steam powered (originally invented in the 1700’s) and only 22% were gasoline. New York city even had a fleet of electric taxis.
GE made electric vehicles from 1904 to the 1920’s for both commercial and private use. The peak of the use of electric cars was in 1910 and they sold 1,000-2,000 cars per year. WW1 only upped its value when gasoline was in short supply during the war.
The Anderson Electric Company made the ‘Detroit Electric Car’ from 1907 – 1939.
The internal combustion engine became more common and less expensive, so sales started to slide and with the stock market crash of 1929 many companies did not recover.
A Japanese battery company owner imported 2 Detroit Electric cars to Japan in 1917, this is country #3, how did he even know about the “Detroit Electric Car”? He did not have the internet. He used one of these cars as his daily driver for 29 years. How many of our “modern” cars are still running 29 years later?
There have been so many brilliant minds in the history of mankind, what makes us think that we are getting “smarter?” I personally think that if they have to keep pushing AI (artificial intelligence – it is probably because we are not thinking enough), because humans have thought brilliantly for a very long time, they were designed in their Creators image after all. The Creator, God Himself, who knows everything.
In fact in the Bible at the Tower of Babel, thousands of years ago, God saw that humans united together were so smart that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” They had a universal language which they spoke and God decided to confounded their language and scattered them around the world so they would not be able to understand each other. That is why the tower was called “Babel” – God confused their language and today when we say someone is “babbling” it means they do not make sense, we cannot understand them. Check out the story in Genesis 9:1-11.
The Egyptians built the pyramids, we still have no idea how exactly they made them without our technology and our big modern machinery. We also had the Aztecs, the Persians, the Greek philosophers, the Roman Empire, the Mayans, the Incas, have you seen pictures of the Nazca desert airstrips in Peru made thousands of years ago? No one knows how or why they are permanently in the ground, but they are. I know a pilot who personally flew over these and he said as a pilot they looked like landing strips to him. What were they flying?
Picture from Ancient Origins August 25, 2017
Who built Stonehenge? Or Mesa Verde in Colorado? Why did they carve the Moai Statues on Easter Island? We do not know. Consider China and its remarkable history, Chinese medicine has been recorded for thousands of years. Way before big Pharma and the WHO (World Health Organization).
Look at the underground cities under Turkey and Italy and many other countries – totally brilliantly planned and built, again executed without our modern technology. So many momentous achievements by past civilizations pointing to the genius of the human brain.
In my opinion our human brains are being shrunk by modern technology as it does a lot of the work for us, but is that a good thing? What is that old saying: “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
If newcomers to our country have first impressions that what we offer is a sugar addicted nation, and then they see us spend billions of dollars to keep the medical care for those with sugar problems, I realized that I did not feel all that bright when I answered his couple of questions to me. Perhaps I did not really want to know his next opinion of our country....
I pray that we will leave a legacy of some brilliance, but I wonder what will they actually say in the future about our generation?