12 MAY 2015 :: How history affects today, and tomorrow.

I find it hard to be motivated in the morning anymore... When I was young I could stay up all night easily.  When I had children, I became a day person.  Now that I am older, I don't have a fixed schedule and take naps on those days when I need them.  I suppose that is the way it goes for most everyone...in general.  :-)

I winder what the world seemed like for people who lived through the industrial explosion... the wars and the years it took to recover from them...  talking movies, electric lights, the first space shot, the sexual revolution, computers... or more than one of these.  Our lives don't happen in isolation, we are part of the history that is being created as we live.

When we look at history as a long timeline, it seems different.  We can't really look at history in its fullness because the different topics (or themes) have so many details in themselves.  For example, looking at women's fashions would be one timeline; education would be another; religion, politics, and crime would be other timelines.  To understand the changes in all of history, in all of society, all over the world, these separate topics would have to be combined somehow. We would need to see how they affected each other, how they affected people (individually and collectively), and how they affected the future of their times.

I guess I am trying to share the way history is created in small steps, in multiple years, in a gathering of events that seem to be separate but they aren't.  Like pollution... it is a combination of air quality, water purity, food production, earth healthiness, manufacturing, shipping, trees and plants, fish, animals, human excrement, transportation, incinerated medical waste, sewage accidents, nuclear leaks, engines, oceans and lakes and rivers, mountains and plains and deserts, refrigeration, stoves, BBQs... I suppose I could go on for a long time.  The point is that all of these things, and more, combine to create pollution in some way...and pollution will eventually kill us, even if we don't see it fully right now.

You would need a timeline for each of these parts of history to understand their total effect on life, on the earth, on today and the future.  It's not easy to see all those details, to see them in context, to make changes that will benefit the world and make the future better.

When we vote, the challenge is to find people who will do the most good for all of us, Republican and Democrat (and other parties), not just the immediate needs we see in our individual lives.

When we make personal decisions, the challenge is to make the best choices available to us... and to keep making better and better choices as time goes by.

I don't think change asks to happen, it seems to arrive and grow as we encourage it. Change can be good and change can be bad, sometimes it is both.  Computers and technology will be changing our world more than we can comprehend right now.  The influence of robotics is suppose to grow exponentially over the next 10-25 years, which is the lifetime and retirement of my grown children and babies being conceived right now.  What we consider "normal" right now will not exist. We have no idea what will be discovered and developed during these years.

History doesn't happen with just one change.  It is a lot of different events that happen at the same time and create a domino fall toward other events.  I hope we can prepare for some of the changes that are on their way....