I feel a speech a'comin.
I think sometimes about the culture shock my mother must have experienced, going from a rural childhood during the depression, poor as dirt, no electricity or running water in the house, trips to town maybe twice a year, all the way to having a cell phone, satellite TV, and a laptop with the Internet on it. By the time I'm as old as she was when she passed, it's possible that my life may have at least tried to bridge that same kind of gap. I have 20 years to go. All of us here, we're of an age to be in that same boat.
Obviously there have been great leaps in technology at many different times in history, and people must have always struggled to comprehend and adapt. For my mother's generation it was no different. My generation and people slightly older and younger than me made a lot of this computer stuff happen in the broader sense - we were the ones who figured it out when it was brand new to "regular" people, did the implementations at work and pushed along the eventual integration into daily life, once the bigwigs like IBM let go of enough knowledge so that people like me could grab some of it. Those of us who couldn't go to college were taught by the ones who could and did, because the demand was there.
Already my life has gone from black and white TV, relatives who still had outhouses in the back yard, huge radios with tubes in them, never eating out, heat in one room of the house and no a/c at all, to a phone that can get me from here to Crystal River, Florida without a map or any other kind of directions to help me find my way. I can pick up a tablet, take it with me when I turn in, and have basically the world at my hands right from my bed. I can pay every single one of my bills without ever writing a check or taking cash to anyone. Do you think about the changes we've already gone through? It's a rhetorical question; previous conversation tells me, of course you do.
What I mean to say is that most generations are presented with unique challenges, and I don't think we can even begin to know what might come next, certainly not 20 years down the road. We'd better hope there are some 5-year-old geeks in the making out there somewhere, because if the US of A is still around, there will be a place for them, to roll out the next level of cultural and technological advancement, whatever that might be. Let's hope it's not just fancier video games.
We'll also hope there will be kids who want to learn how to produce more food out of the same land, how to clean water, how to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria, how to remedy the epidemics of mental illness and drug addiction, and how to purify the atmosphere so that humanity still has an environment in which it can survive.
