So What?

People don’t care about what’s not relevant to them. People don’t think about now what we thought about then, that the atomic bomb saved millions of lives. We thought about all the sons and fathers that weren’t going to die. But now that it isn’t relevant. I was young, on the young end of veterans, went I went into the Navy. At the end of WWII. The veterans who are older than me, they entered a year, two years before me. They’re passing away now.

When I was 16 years old I got a job working for the land surveying office. I surveyed out in the Utah Mountains and I was set to find old rocks based on a map that had been given to me. I looked for those old rocks and they were not where they were supposed to be. One day I walked into the surveyor’s office and I thought the lady behind the desk would like to know about where these old rocks actually are. So I told her, and she was not interested. She didn’t want to know, because it wasn’t relevant to her. They were old. People are only interested in what is relevant to them.

One day, not too many years ago, I was hiking in Wind River Range and I passed by a young father and his son. We stopped and got to talking and I started to tell him about how I had been hiking these trails for fifty years and when I first started hiking the Wind River Range you didn’t need any permits. You could light a fire where you wanted to light a fire, bring a horse where you wanted to bring a horse. Now you need permits for everything. But I could see that he didn’t care. He wanted to keep hiking. It wasn’t relevant to him.