Airplanes and Attitudes

I was recently reading about aircraft naming conventions. We here in the US have chosen what seems to me a very solid system – aircraft are named for their function. Thus, an F-16 is a fighter, a C-130 is a cargo plane, a B-2 is a bomber, and so on. In Russia, however, they’ve chosen a different convention – instead of naming a plane for its function, they name it for its maker. For instance, the “MiG” of Hollywood fame is actually a category containing many different planes, all made by the same manufacturer: Mikoyen Gurevich.

Names are a funny phenomenon. Beyond being a sort of short-hand way of referring to a thing or group of like things, they generally are (or were at one point) descriptive of what the thing is; so couches are places where you rest, refrigerators keep things cold, and a car is a vehicle. That being the case, the above conventions become rather more interesting. While politics and bureaucracy go into such government systems, is it not intriguing that, to us, the best way to describe what our planes are is by what they do, while for the Russians, it is who made them that is most descriptive?

If this were only the case in the world of airplanes, that would be one thing, but, for better or worse, we generally treat people the same way. Here in America, you are what you do. In our democratic culture, family name and place of origin do not matter so much as what you individually contribute to society. If you ask who someone is, you’re likely to get the answer, “That’s John, he’s a lawyer/mechanic/professor/etc.” Certainly, down through our history, this focus has led to plenty of good “doing” by anyone who had the inclination. Yet perhaps we are sometimes too driven, irrationally concerned by our performance in the workplace, and missing out on the good things in life that we are ostensibly fighting for. Perhaps there are days when we need to slow down and see our world – and fellow human beings – through more “mystic,” Eastern eyes… For no matter what we do, for good or ill, we all bear the image of the same Maker.