Syria and Egypt… Turmoil yet CNC businesses survive!
What I really enjoy about about the chat system I have on CNCKing.com is that I get the opportunity to talk to CNC enthusiasts and business owners around the world – sometimes from the most unlikely of places!
With all the turmoil that happened in Egypt during the revolution (however you wish to describe it), I was still able to chat with a guy running a CNC shop there looking for plans to cut for his kids. You see the news and everything is horrible and yet, there is a guy on your chat looking at opportunities to help his business and family survive during this time of upheaval. I got the same experience with a guy out of Iran and very recently out of Damascus, Syria! I figure it’s only a matter of time before I get the opportunity to talk to some CNC shop out of North Korea – I’m sure they exist!
This reminds me that regardless of what we may hear or be told, people are still trying to make the best out of a dire situation… we are lucky in the “West” in that we aren’t in the middle of all this strife and to us, when we turn off our TV, the memories and thoughts for these struggling people are sadly ignored to put it lightly. “It’s not happening to me” means that we can go on our merry way while whole generations of ingenious and hard working people are wiped off the face of the Earth.
Why do I care? I tend to think of each live lost as a lost opportunity – maybe that one kid who, by no choice of their own, was born in a war zone and died for no good reason could have been the next Einstein, have some special passion that COULD have made a massive difference for all humanity. If you look at our history, great advances in the sciences, technology and other area were usually made by a very select few that benefited ALL of us. Each person CAN make a difference, untold numbers of people will never reach their potential – not out of trying – but because they happen to be born or live their lives in circumstances that kept them down when they could have shared insight to bring all of us up.
When I listen to the news and hear about all that’s going on around the world, the one thing that I keep thinking about is “that could have been me” as what we do and where we end-up in life is completely random. I think all humans should take a moment to reflect and realize how incredibly lucky most of us are, we KNOW that electricity will be flowing tomorrow, we know our car won’t be bombed on the way to our job and that we will have a rather uneventful day.