“Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream/Wave upon wave of demented avengers /March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream”-Pink Floyd, 1977, Sheep

Ideas are what drive human progress. But what happens when people start to question the ways of life that they have been accustomed to? This is what we learned about in Humanities: revolutions! 

According to Crane Brinton in “Anatomy of a Revolution,” a revolution has four distinct stages. The first is Incubation, where everything is set up for the perfect storm of discontent. The next is Moderate, when people, fed up with the way of life, begin to do things like peacefully protest. The third stage is Crisis, where violence increases and radical are in positions of authority. The final stage is Recovery, where a new government is formed and life goes back to “normal”.

To show that we understood our revolutions, we created Rube Goldberg machines to present at the winter exhibition. A Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated series of events to complete a simple task. 

The revolution I chose to make a Rube Goldberg out of was the October Revolution of 1917. This was when Bolshevik forces overthrew the government to create a Communist state in Russia. However, I also made a resource guide to a bunch of revolutions that you can see here. 

Together, our group worked to complete our machine before the Winter Exhibition. At first, it was chaotic and disorganized; nobody knew what to do or where to go. But, as the project went on, this happened less and less, and we started to collaborate more effectively and fall into our places. 

The day of the exhibition was quite busy. We moved our machines into the library, and set them up, and made our stations look pretty. I was nervous because we only had a couple of complete run throughs and we still had to troubleshoot a couple things. My connection in particular was still being a little finicky and wouldn’t work 100% of the time.

In the end, the exhibition went very well. My group wore babushkas to transform ourselves into old Russian women. We had two successful runs of our machine! Even when it failed, nobody really cared, and so I was a lot less nervous when presenting. Overall, the Winter Exhibition, along with the project, was a great experience.

Ideas are what drive change. People with ideas of a better life in an unjust society are the catalyst for change. As the ideas spread, people realize that there is a way to make the dream of a better life possible. Implementing these ideas changes the political, economic and social landscapes of the country and alter people’s lives.

“A world like this where the masses toil for pennies while a tiny elite grow rich seems so obviously unfair and unthinkable to us today, we can scarcely imagine what it must have been like.” -Cunk On Earth