Again and again, people have made choices that eluded others and the impossible has become possible. A human footprint on the moon, the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of apartheid, a computer on every desk, living with another person's heart beating in one's chest.
We're defining, all the time, what's possible for society, how high our aspirations are, and what we believe is desirable and good. As a result, even ideals once dismissed as "utopian" are now widely shared: parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, freedom of speech and religion, public education, full employment and social security, rights for women and minorities.
Perhaps most astonishing, in recent years we have taken responsibility for the entire Earth and all living things. Like so many of the greatest advances, that one has crept up on us so slowly that we're hardly aware of it.
Likewise, we rarely pause to notice that human cooperation on a global scale, once considered an idealistic fantasy, has become a reality.
The eradication of smallpox, just a few decades ago, marked the very first time people organized at the global level and accomplished the seemingly impossible. At one time, smallpox was so widespread that most experts believed it couldn't be controlled. (Indeed, more people died from smallpox in the last century than died in all of its wars.)
The successful effort was founded on a bold, even extreme idea: to completely eliminate the disease from the face of the Earth. The director of the campaign, Dr. D.A. Henderson, was called naive and utopian for taking that stand, yet that very boldness was crucial to the success of the whole endeavor.
The campaign against smallpox appears to have been brief: The World Health Organization launched the effort in 1967 and declared the job complete in 1980. The real story is how long it actually took to come about. Smallpox thrived for nearly two centuries after Edward Jenner demonstrated the potential of a vaccine. It took much more than advances in medical knowledge to eradicate smallpox. It took social architecture--the design of a complex, global human system. Nearly a quarter million people coordinated their efforts, from researchers and politicians in big cities to health care workers and volunteers in remote villages.
And it took one man's belief in what could be.
Today, we take this and other equally amazing accomplishments for granted, as we hurry to the next contest.