I Learned It from Watching You
I learned from a documentary that some of the first tools that humans taught each other to make were stone spear-tips. Did you know that too? The earliest spear-tips predate spoken language. People taught each other to use them to hunt food and to fight each other.
Later: spoken languages
Later: written words
Later: books
Later: instructional videos
When my son was born, we received a pressure cooker as a gift. ‘Use it to jar your homemade baby food.’ It came with links to instructional videos. We learned how to use the tool to make family food. Later, a pressure cooker was used to make a bomb in Boston. Then they were bombs in New York.
It sat on our stove, suspect, making beans.
I have seen the videos that teach you how to cook with pressure cookers. Rice, Lentils, Chicken. I learned from a news report that the bomb-makers watched instructional videos from an online magazine.
It reminds me of when I was younger and heard about a book called The Anarchist Cookbook. No one I knew had ever actually seen it, but people told me that it was full of dangerous information. I heard that the person who wrote that cookbook changed his mind and fought to get the publisher to stop circulating it — to erase that information. Look it up on Amazon. On Kindle for $9.99.
I learned that there is Dangerous Information. There are Secret Family Recipes. Uncommon Knowledge. I learned that the tools that nourish also destroy. I learned it from watching you.
