Stuff

As we end the all the birthdays in the 1900's (21st century doesn't begin until 2001...duh!) I look back and to my amazement I see that all of us have lived through:
Vietnam War (Director's cut with added violence)

• 7 Presidential Administrations
• MLK Jr assasination
• RFK assasination
• All of the Apollo space program, plus Skylab, space shuttle stuff etc
• The invention of personal computing
• Numerous genocides around the world
• The fall of South African apartide
• The fall of the Soviet Union
• The fall of the Berlin wall
• he world population doubling in our life time from 3 billion to 6
  (gigabeings)
• The near total eradication of smallpox

And this is just a smattering of stuff. I have often thought about how much the world changed in my grandmothers life. From a world with no phone, car, radio, movies, tv, refridgeration, electric appliances, pandemic plagues of influenze that killed 40 million people and no reliable drinking warter and sewer to the world of today. If our world changes this much by the time we all start hitting 80+ years. Holy crap man! And right now we are running things so it all seems to make sense. But wait until we are in our fifties and my kids start running the world and inventing stuff and not bothering to tell us how things work. They'll take it forgranted that all of us old folks know everything about the world and how it works; wich we won't. We'll watch 4-d hypervision via the global-mind-net, or whatever, and be mistified by the complexity. We'll fake it for our kids. Pretending to know how we fit into the new world. And it'll work for a while. Until they catch us swimming amoungst changling sharks in our naked ignorance and then they too will wonder about how they will see the world when they grow old and are nolonger at the wheels of control.