by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 15, 2009

Ideas are the most powerful thing on this world, more powerful than guns or nuclear bombs, more powerful than governments or corporations or even the internet. And though other ways have appeared to spread ideas it his traditionally been the writer and will continue to be the writer who can most fully spread the types of ideas that change the world.

It is for this reason that so many say that the most important invention of the last thousand years was the movable type printing press. Consider so many great inventions from the automobile to the cotton gin, yet the top honors goes to a printing press.

Examples throughout history of the importance of ideas are clear and at the center of so many of them are writers, but perhaps the most exceptional is the formation of America, one of the first countries founded not on boundaries or nationality but on an idea and at the center of that foundation were writers.

The first of those writers was an Englishman by the name of Thomas Paine who wrote the pamphlet Common Sense. This small pamphlet at the time had the highest circulation of any book in American history. It stated in a clear way why America must become an independent nation at a time when this idea was not yet the popular choice. He then donated all of the profits from the book to the revolutionary army.

The second of the revolutionary writers is Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps the most famous of the founding fathers to not be president Benjamin Franklin made his name and his fortune as a writer and publisher of newspapers as well as the publishing of Poor Richard's Almanac.

The third of these writers was Thomas Jefferson and though he did not alone write the declaration of independence he was the primary author and on that page he wrote the line that has defined this country more than all the wars, arguments and mistakes since. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are create equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Wars were fought after these words were put down but it was the ideas, the words written down and given form that served to drive men forward. We live in the world created by those ideas and though they have not yet been fully realized they are still changing us.

And so, they still can. We are not a different people than the great men of history. We are not a people incapable of change and there are new, better ideas and we as writers should charge ourselves with the goal of seeking out ideas that can change the world, that can change societies and presenting them in the best way possible. We should take up the mantel of Paine, Franklin and Jefferson and so many others and change the world because if ideas can't do it the only thing left is the gun.

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