Make the bird fly — even when dreams die.

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“All I ask is a tall ship…and a star to steer her by…” You could feel the wind at your back, about you… the sounds of the sea beneath you. And even if you take away the wind and the water, it’s still the same. The ship is yours…you can feel her…and the stars are still there.”

I have spent the last seven years of my life building something.

And that something is about to be thrown away — for, essentially, false ideas of economic sensibility and stupidity.

I have been accused, by those who have never met me, of being self absorbed, self referential, and unempathetic.  Also, unengaged, politically — you know the type.  The person with big passions who never goes anywhere.  Never protests.  A keyboard kommando.

This despite the fact that I believe in things deeply, and as far as empathy goes, I am and have been the kind of person to spend my last dime on helping a friend.  I suppose my lack of empathy, my soullessness, as I have been accused of recently, has to do with not being interested in donating to this political candidate or that, or voting for this supposed Democrat or other because Republicans are worse.

In a general sense, I want to believe I care about my fellow man.  Politically I am a socialist.

I believe, generally, that people who work to make a better life for everyone, who care about their society and labor to make it better, deserve to have a leg up when times are hard.  And, in general, what liberals believe, myself among them is, you shouldn’t have to go to a church or a synagogue or a mosque to receive charity while professing faith in a god in which you don’t believe — or even a god in which you may believe, but that your belief or your faith isn’t the point.  That benefit is yours BY RIGHT — by living in a society in which everyone is in the same boat together.

As an atheist, I especially believe this.  Justice for a lifetime of societal contribution, when a person falls on hard times does not deserve as a response, spiritual warfare.  

That a LIFETIME of work, of dedication, of heartache, deserves some recompense when times get bad.

But, what I feel, too many people who espouse liberal views don’t understand — that feeling that everyone deserves the basics of health care, food and clothing, that general empathy — means nothing unless you actually EXHIBIT it in your own life.

Even if you demonstrate politically, even if you genuinely care about everyone, for example, people being able to go to the doctor when they’re sick — that belief translates into NOTHING if you don’t actually live the values you espouse when times are hard.

It translates into nothing because it doesn’t matter if you espouse it or believe in it, demonstrate it or even call your congressman about it.  It doesn’t matter if people see you believe in a thing, if you cannot or will not show that same spirit to the people around you, in your own life.

Anyway (and I apologize for being roundabout about this) I have worked for many years on a project into which I’ve poured my life, my heart and my soul.

And this is the nature of who I am, people being different.  

The nature of my life, and how I have defined myself is this:

Make the bird fly.

The kind of person I am, “make the bird fly” is, in the end, all that matters.  And it is that, in the end, that has led to my present and ongoing destruction.

I am the person who will make your bird fly.  I am the person who will actually bring dreams to fruition.

And I will literally kill myself to get it.  Get the bird to fly.  Work myself to death.  .  It’s this, and my general autistic nature, that leads to people accusing me of being unfeeling of others.

Yes, I am that rare creature, that almost 100% of Americans have abandoned – your garden variety monomaniac.

Perceived as unfeeling.  Even uncaring.  On places like blogs.

You can say I’m unfeeling — even, when I help people I love when I know that’s the most important thing.  While I hold the fire of Prometheus in my hand.

I have written things, in the past decade, that would make people gasp.  Not that they couldn’t be done, but that one person could do them.  

I have written CAD programs.  I have written databases.  Graphical user interfaces.  Middleware. Client server engines.  One person.  But this does not make me exceptional.

This makes me a foolish person in America — one who has pride in his work.

I have built a ship.  The ship economically serves other people, but the ship is and has been MINE.  I can FEEL her. I built her.  I built her.

Not some soulless army of a thousand disinterested programmers from India.

Over seven years, singlehandedly, I built a cluster of programs that collectively, function as a single software STARSHIP.  Made by a single hand.  My hand.  The hand of Prometheus.  The hand, in my limited human sense, of God.  Perhaps this is what the ancient Viking worship of Thor was like.  The God of the Hammer.  The God of the MAKER.

I am an anachronism.  Caring about what one does for a living is gauche.

And not an ancient piece of trash even inasmuch as it took seven years to build.  Something that was called, as little as two weeks ago, an astonishing improvement over the software of a competitor that has 10 times my resources.

It has taken a long time — a LONG time.  But she flies.  SHE FLIES.

I am a 21st century Skunk Works.  All by myself.

And, at long last, I am going away.  I am one of the last.  At least, one of the last private, independently employed ones.  To find ones like me in the future, look to your feudal lords.

But most of all I am a worker.  But I am not a “worker”.  I am a worker with DREAMS.  Not about a white picket fence and a spouse and a dog — but of the plane that you build for seven years that FLIES.  Flies better and stronger and faster than anything that came before.

This is JOY to me.  This is joy beyond sex, beyond admiration, beyond any material reward — to BUILD something that is MAJESTIC — something that WORKS and FLIES and is BETTER!

And, actually, it doesn’t even matter what it’s for or who commissioned it.  All that matters is that it’s an IMPROVEMENT and that YOU built it.

It’s not the loss of a job I fear.  It’s the loss of my WORK.  And, it’s not my job that is being destroyed.  It is my work.  My work that, for one brief moment — FLEW.

And, all the while, I have tried to extend, as best I could, a helping hand to friends and family — the people I know best, when I was slightly more fortunate than they.

We talk about things that politicians understand.  But while America and the short term profit motive of the wealthy is destroying jobs and the poor, it is destroying DREAMS as well.

And it is the loss of dreams, ultimately, that will kill us all.  Not the loss of money.  You cannot define the soul for any person, all people being different — and when the soul dies, nothing else matters.

When seven years of your work are thrown away for a both foolish and ultimately wrong profit motive — to trash a bird that flew because those of short term thinking don’t understand what things cost — you realize there are no dreams in America anymore that corporate America will save.

It is a sad country where people believe in the value of work — but ascribe no value to WORKS.

To me, works of the heart and true commitment and talent are MAJESTIC.  This is what so-called American exceptionalism could be built upon.  But, no more.