Hope and tomorrow's wealth

If hope is believing in possibility then the dam offered hope in the 1930s. Hope was needed in these times, since these times were harder than anyone had expected them to be. And maybe that's the thing about hope that makes it something we need. When we are faced with the unexpected, when our expectations are not met, we must believe in the possibility that things will be okay when we are scared or unsure about the future. We must believe in the possibility that although our expectations haven't been met, that things will be okay. Hope keeps us standing, keeps us working, helps us endure. Hope leads us into action to obtain what we need, what we will work for, hone skills for, be patient for whatever it is that will help us get what we believe we need.
Is Need also Desire? How related is Need to Want? The workers building the dam needed and wanted the jobs in the beginning because of the money needed to buy what they desired. However the job paid little, though they supposedly got what they desired, food and shelter. Yet after awhile, their needs so met, they began to want better quality. However, once a need is met, the desire for more begins. Believing in the possibility that what one already has can be more and better is the downside of hope.

The men who designed the dam to be built in Black Canyon had a vision of how it was to be done. They needed it to be built in a way that met this vision. They didn't desire to have a vision, they desired that vision to unfold. They were men whose needs of food and shelter had for the most part always been met, their "more" and "better" wasn't just for immediate living needs. The vision was beyond that immediacy, rather it looked to tomorrow's wealth. Yet even the designers needed hope that it would be a successful project, that the workers would do the work to build the envisioned dam.

As the dam was built ahead of schedule, it was because of every man's hope, a production of belief in possibility.

Living for success

A dam in the middle of the desert, a dam to manage the water, dictating where it should go, and to whom, and when, and also using that water for energy, the ultimate in control, accomplished. Yet it seems success is a slippery slope when it comes by way of control. The difference between a demand and a choice.

When the demand for the dam occured, there were many reasons, such as ending the flooding in the Imperial Valley so that this land could be used more effectively for growing crops, as well as to use the hydroelectric energy, powering nearby Las Vegas and outgrowing areas. There was also money to be made by the 5 companies that won the bid to build it, and Southern California could continue growing at its own fast pace. Yet also, the men who were paid the slim wages were now off the streets. It made the country appear as though an economic recovery was taking place.

Yet at the expense of men working a job that went against nature and not necessarily for it? Nevertheless, it was a job that developed character and culture, proving just how mighty men working together really can be, capable of building a monolith.

Presently there's a suggestion to put the unemployed to work on the oil disaster in the gulf. Pay them so much and get as many of them working, and this time, to solve a problem that's gone against nature.

Thus heroes continue to be created, as men continue to work on demand and on behalf of something much bigger than themselves. The rise of success in our post-everything existence, we do what can be done, every one of us, rich or poor, jobless or well etched in a career and we rarely for a moment look beyond the work at hand.

Living for success accomplished with control.

The science of production

Without a product, without production or the making of the product to be used, sold, shared, etc., our lives would be so different. It seems we are all involved in the production of life. Whether life is as we believe it to be, as we build it according to our needs and wants, or merely accepting what it is, according to how it's delivered and received, it is a constant flow. Constant as the Colorado River coming down from the mountains into a varied collection of tributaries, all reaming into Black Canyon to be met with another production--the dam. What life would be like without the dam is hard to speculate, since it's changed so much of the way life is for so many people that rely on this product.
Is there any way we can ever go back to how things once were, ie; pre-dam? Not likely. Even if we dismantled the dam or fed the river a different direction, perhaps towards another dam, once we have produced something, once we've made something into a product, it is what it is.
Is this a warning about thinking through whatever it is we set out to produce? Of course it is. But not by way of a blog named Water by Dam. This is only a space for mirroring the ideas we all share, mirroing them clear as fresh water from the tap...remembering exactly where that water comes from, how it got here in the first place...its value...water as a life-supporting nature-made product...