Writing Wednesday: Stealing Ideas

I read a post over at Beth Revis's blog about critique partners.  One fear she addressed was, “What if someone steals my ideas?”

Her answer boiled down to a real writer will be in love with their own ideas and less in love with yours. Which is true.

My answer is, “So what?”

Orwell and Huxley shared an idea of post-war governments using technology to control their citizens. 1984 and Brave New World are radically different books. The only ideas worth stealing are so big they can be shared and turn out vastly different.

So here is an idea worth stealing:

This last election showed that the millennial generation are a huge political force. Cynics point out that the Baby Boomers were a force in the sixties and went from extreme liberal positions to extreme conservatives. I don't see that happening again, they aren't going to turn into the next robber barons. But something more interesting might happen.

The millennials have really shrugged off racism. Going to diverse schools they look at other races as people. In twenty years racism in America will cease to exist. Largely because the white majority will no longer be a majority.

They are also tolerate of other religions. Right now the old Protestant majority is either barely a majority or the largest of all minority religions. Some where around 48% to 50%. In twenty years it will be around 30%.

This all sounds great, but the millennials will also inherent the largest military force in the world. It might finally go through some contractions, but right now the US military is roughly the size of the rest of the world's military combined.

In order to make world peace it just makes sense that all military forces get smaller, the US has the power to “negotiate” arms reductions with every nation in the world.

In twenty years America will be a place that truly believes in equality, and will have the force to make other nations believe that as well.

America has never been an Imperial Nation, not because Americans didn't want an Empire, but because we have been racist dicks.

We could have taken over Mexico after the Mexican war. Instead we only took the northern, whiter half.

We could have annexed Japan after WWII. Giving us total control of the worlds largest ocean. But it was filled with Asians.

The rise of the millennial generation means America won't have that restraint. In twenty years the most diverse and tolerate generation of Americans will be controlling the most powerful military ever built. They won't be restrained by racism, they will truly believe in spreading real democracy and equality.

And there will be nothing to stop them from spreading equality from the end of a gun. The 30s idea of Pax-America shall rise again. The idea of Peace through American rule.

That is world of 2030.

Feel free to steal that idea. A hundred writers can use that idea and come up with a hundred radically different stories.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE