If I had a superpower, I would be Lego Man. I would be the guy all the other superheroes turn to when they need a boat, car, or spaceship to defeat the evil villains and save the world from utter destruction. I would build anything; if a superhero came to me needing a submarine spaceship, I’d be more than happy to oblige. And a laser catapult? I might have built one of those back in my youth, though I was careful to hide my secret forever by disassembling it and using its parts to build something equally fiendish.

I’m sure everyone understands what it’s like to be a kid playing with Legos, but few are likely to compare Legos to abstract ideas. But that’s what I’m hoping to do. Legos and abstract ideas are very similar, because they both challenge us to put small pieces together in different ways in order to solve problems. When playing with Legos, the problem is the desire to build an object, but with ideas, the challenge is to take ideas and continually re-organize them as our world and culture changes. Our world is constantly changing, but the fundamental ideas that we use to describe our world remain virtually the same. So we are left with the challenge of continually reassembling these basic ideas in a way that most accurately describes the world we live in today.

We do a good job with the ideas we are used to using, but sometimes we have trouble using ideas that other people have used before. But I ask, would it be logical for me to avoid a specific Lego block because my brother built something with it yesterday? Even if I hated the contraption he built using that piece, should that make the particular Lego block unusable to me today? I don’t see why it would matter, but when it comes to ideas, we are quick to throw out ideas that were once used in philosophies we object to.

And my point is that we aren’t using ideas properly, just as a childhood friend failed to use his Legos properly. Instead of using his Legos as parts for building his own creations, he had his mom help him build the Lego set by the directions. He was convinced that if the box had a picture of an airplane, he was getting a model airplane! And once the set was assembled, he put the airplane on a shelf so it wouldn’t get broken.

And my friend’s attitude toward his Legos is the same as many people handle ideas. We associate specific ideas with specific ideologies, and we put them on a shelf like a model airplane. This attitude was demonstrated quite nicely with the recent debate over public health care, because all it took was the mention of social responsibility in health care to put us back in the cold war, fighting the Communists. Many people concluded that since the Communists were our enemy 20 years ago, and since they were socialists, therefore public healthcare is evil. But is that logical?

In the context of health care, I believe that social responsibility is a noble goal. And it has nothing to do with socialism. We all need to take a step back. The Cold War wasn’t caused by concern for the less fortunate, and Russia didn’t become communist when a band of politicians voted on a national healthcare system. And what’s more, has anyone ever blamed a kindergarten teacher for promoting socialism when she encourages the children to share? It’s absurd, isn’t it? And it’s just as absurd to say that the new healthcare reform will turn us into the next USSR.

So what am I saying? After all of this, I’m just trying to say that if you use a special Lego block to build a car, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the same piece to build a perfectly good airplane later on. The individual pieces really don’t matter; what matters is the way we put them together. And Legos are just a fun way of talking about ideas.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to my Legos. I think I’ll build a space helicopter that shoots laser beams.