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Three Wise Men

The story goes as follows ...

Three men met on a flight to NYC. They landed at JFK airport and agreed to share a cab to central Park South where their three respective hotels were located. They got in a cab and told the driver of their destination. The driver asked them which way they would prefer to go. One said take the Midtown Tunnel. The second said, not at this hour, take the Queensboro Bridge. The third said, you're both nuts, at this time of day take the side streets and take the Brooklyn Bridge.

They got out of the cab and argued at length. And though they had a common point of origin, and shared the same destination, they could not reconcile a mutually agreeable route. In fact so important became the route to them, that by the end of their argument they forgot all that they shared.

So they started fighting, and others joined in and defended the route they thought was best. After cursing each other they each got in their respective cabs and took their own route convinced that their route was the only true route. And disciples of each route wrote of the virtues of their respective routes, and convinced others of its merits. They built great buildings to speak of the routes and honor the original route takers.

And they all forgot that all routes started at the same location and led to the same destination.

And now, in year 4010, 2000 or so years since the original argument, after countless deaths and immeasurable suffering as a consequence of differences of simple route variation, they are still arguing ... a lot.

It is fashionable to declare that it's not the destination it's the path that matters. And although that mantra is true enough, it is not entirely complete.

The whole above story seems almost too ludicrous and ridiculous to even contemplate ... that is if it hadn't happened before and wasn't happening now.

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