As I was clearing off my car this morning, I managed to slice my hand three or four times on the surprisingly sharp layer of ice that had formed on top of the snow. After my initial reaction (what the @#$#, you %$#^ing stupid wintry mix), I started to think about it, and realized that the situation here mirrored something very common in life. That is, that under the right conditions, something useful and downright necessary to survival (such as water) can be altered into something potentially dangerous and painful (the aforementioned &#$%#ing ice). Ideas, in particular, suffer very commonly from this trend; instead of being transformed by the physical temperature, they’re influenced and warped by the political and cultural climate that they’re born into.

Inventions also suffer the same fate, where something developed to be helpful gets misappropriated to be used for an alternative purpose, such as the guillotine. Though today it’s seen as a symbol of terror and mass execution, it was conceived initially for the same reason that lethal injection came about as an alternative to electrocution; that is, to be a more humane form of execution for criminals. In an era where execution was more or less universally acceptable, its swift killing stroke was favored over many of the other more drawn out and imperfect methods common at that time. That same swiftness, however, facilitated the public executions of tens of thousands of people. As a result, the name of a doctor (Dr. Guillotin) who was simply trying to take a cruel system and make it less horrible for those being put to death has become irrevocably associated with one of the most horrifying revolutions and series of mass murders in history.

The second lesson to be learned from ice is an important one. There was a solid sheet of ice encasing the sides of my car. The ice on the windows was impossible to remove without a scraper, and took quite a while. The ice on the doors, however, was easy. Since the door underneath is made of flexible material, pounding a fist against it causes the door to flex and the ice, in turn, to shatter and fall. If our world were a solid place of pure black and white, of firm foundations built on inflexible truths, it would be ok to be as rigid as ice in our opinions and our ways of life. However, the world is more like that car door, seemingly solid but liable to give way and warp if enough pressure is applied. As a result, it’s important to be flexible and to move with the changes around us; those that can’t will eventually break and fall (had to thrown in one more, this was too serious otherwise).