What Were They Thinking? Did you ever wonder what people were thinking when they did the things they did? Could they have been told what they were going to do would benefit mankind, their families, or their country? We look around this world and we see things that were huge projects which would have required massive human labor and yet some of these projects were actually accomplished. Take the Great Pyramid at Gaza, Egypt as an example. Many thousands of people had to be convinced building this was a good idea. We think religion was the main moving force in its construction, and when people were told to do something by their god, the pharaoh, they did it. It was considered a holy act. The pharaoh might have fooled the people because he wanted to build a monument which would last forever and be the grandest one ever built to perpetuate his name through time. He was never buried in it, so despite all the talk about it being a tomb, it was not. Why did the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer kill people? He was actually asked this question and here is what he said, “The killing was just a means to an end.” It seems he did this so he could dismember, and even eat people. He was one of the sickest and evilest people around. I am convinced when we get more advanced and understand the human brain better, we are going to find out why people do things like this and it just might be certain abnormal areas of their brains control them, which are different from normal people. There was a very famous bank robber years ago. He first started robbing banks in 1925. It was estimated he robbed over $2,000,000 during his career, which eventually landed him in jail with a sentence of 33 years. This sentence had years added to it because of his escapes. There is something called Sutton’s law, because the robber was Willie Sutton and when he was asked why he robbed banks, he said “because that is where the money is.” Sutton had made it to the FBI’s most wanted list. Why would a huge project which would take many years, like Mount Rushmore have been built? One history site states many travelers were going to the Black Hills in South Dakota despite the bad roads, but as time went by the numbers dwindled. The site had an historian who wanted to attract more tourists and came up with the idea of giant statues to Red Cloud, Louis and Clark, Buffalo Bill Cody and others. As we all know today the idea was kept, but the selection of who would appear was changed to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Why do we keep finding buried coins from the Romans and before? This is an easy question to answer. There were no banks around in those days so when people accumulated money, they had to keep it somewhere and many felt it was safer to bury it than to keep all of it in their homes where they could be robbed. As time went by some of these people died without telling others where the money was and it laid unattended for as many as thousands of years. If one goes to Paris, France, they can’t help but see a giant metal structure which holds a prominent place in the city. It is considered a work of art built by Gustave Eiffel. So why was this metal tower built, which took almost 4 years to build and cost 8 million francs? The reason it was built was the French were looking for a great attraction for the World’s Fair of 1889 which would commemorate France’s independence and the centennial of the French Revolution. It was the first object built taller than the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid had been the tallest structure for 43 centuries. Why was the first emperor of China, so unhappy even though he had united seven kingdoms? It turns out Qin Shi Huang, the emperor, wanted to live forever and pressured every alchemist he could find to invent medicine which would make him immortal. The pressure must have been tremendous, and one of them told the emperor he had discovered the elixir of immortality and gave the emperor some to drink. What it really was, was the elixir of death. It was poison and killed the emperor. Everyone has heard about the Titanic and how it sank. It struck an iceberg which ripped it apart. Over the years we have heard stories about defective rivets and bulkheads which didn’t go high enough. What most never heard was the fact it is claimed the lookout who was supposed to look for icebergs couldn’t use the binoculars because they were locked up and he didn’t have the key. The lookout survived and testified the binoculars would have allowed him to spot the iceberg well in advance and save the ship. Sometimes smart people do something so dumb; it is hard to figure out why. Take the case of the former CEO of Savvis a Technology company. He went to a strip club and used the company credit card. This was bad enough, but he charged $241,000 on it. That must have been some credit card. He claimed the bill should have been $20,000 and disputed it. The strip club had him call the credit card company to okay the charges among other things and the credit card company sued the former CEO for the money. This is how the CEO became a former CEO, because he had to resign. Truly, what was he thinking? The Boston Globe was a pretty busy newspaper. Many people took its columns and stories as gospel. One of the most famous reporters for the paper who will remain nameless, had to quit the paper after 25 years. The reason was he had become a plagiarist. The reporter was asked to resign and admitted to becoming sloppy and lazy. Why would a famous reporter ruin such a great career? All this was over the fact he printed jokes from a George Carlin book. Two months before another columnist had been forced to resign for inventing characters and putting them into columns as true stories. All this does make people wonder why things are done. We can look around us and ask this question about many things and even when we get answers, we can’t be sure they are accurate. I guess this is all part of being human.
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