Obscurity

All in all, it is humbling.

People achieving great things, moving in powerful circles, living enviable lives, dying and fading into that great leveler of all things: the obscurity of Time.

What does it take to achieve notoriety? Is any legacy of deed even possible? It may be the intention of the deluded unfortunates who make violence on innocents, firing guns into crowds and classrooms, hoping to achieve in death what they are unable to manage by living: the attention of the public.

What were their names again?

Sorry, I’ve already forgotten.

In an age that churns out “factoids,” every event is reduced to the minutia of that constitutes the tidal wave of information, and a sniper is merely another droplet of data.

The time for lasting fame is long past. The sun has long set on the age of Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Alexander Graham Bell, Michelangelo, and their ilk. Memorable lives. Achievement. Legacy.

Quick. Who invented the atomic bomb?

Too late.

You had to stop and think.