There are lots of holidays; religious holidays, historic holidays, nationalistic holidays and miscellaneous others. For the 21st century, we should add Pi day and May the fourth and not just to celebrate pi and Star Wars.
For the rest of the 21st century and for the foreseeable future, the things that are going to matter and keep us moving forward are STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and creativity and all of those things are closely interrelated.
As Albert Einstein famously said, “imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
In order for science to move forward, scientists must take what is known and apply some creativity to take the next logical step in the research. Technology, in turn, takes science and applies creativity to turn it into practical applications.
It is also clear that it is not just the creativity of scientists, mathematicians, engineers and programmers that matters. Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry certainly drove new technology and new science and technology frequently sparks the imagination of storytellers, as well as the technology used to deliver those stories. Sometimes fiction even contributes to science directly and in really unexpected ways.
Science, technology, mathematics, engineering and creativity are the things, and really the only things, that have the potential to save us from ourselves, to redeem us as a species and to carry us forward to places that the people who launched Labour Day never would have dreamed of.
So to the list of holidays for dead presidents, dead religious figures, planting and harvest days lets add two more, one to celebrate STEM and one to celebrate creativity, about 6 weeks apart. Let’s make them official and lets do them up properly, because they are important to the future and not just remembrances of the past.