BORN IN ANOTHER TIME

"Do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time."
 - Hebrew Proverb

“Read not to contradict and confute; 

nor to believe and take for granted; 

nor to find talk and discourse; 

but to weigh and consider."

- Francis Bacon

 Have you noticed how the world is changing so fast and things are not the same anymore

in terms of technology, lifestyle, education and, especially, our social and spiritual lives?

The Californios in the beginning of a small town named Los Angeles thought things would always stay the same for them.

Then, the Anglo bankers arrived and years later, they found they no longer owned their ranches.

For 5000 years, life went on much as it always had for the common man in Egypt ... blood feuds and civil war.

Then, in the 1700's, the Europeans "discovered" the land and decades of blood and fury followed.

Native Americans learned the same lesson.  

The industrial revolution ravaged the countryside and rural lifestyle of Western civilization.

The internet has eliminated music stores, book stores,

coming close to doing it to cable TV& newspapers

and opened the information highway in astonishing ways.

Now, politicians are laying the groundwork for the destruction of the internet as we know it.

In teaching students how to read books, we have them analyze the authors' arguments.

But we fail to connect the process and learning to the students' personal lives. It is an exercise limited only to the classroom.

Huxley’s vision in BRAVE NEW WORLD did not include a Big Brother to eliminate our ability to think,

it was technology that would undo our desire to think.

He felt we would have so much information, that we would become passive in our quest for it. That was in 1931.

Technology is changing faster than our ability to think the consequences through.

Our politicians are playing the same old game, worrying the world's monetary leaders. 

Should the dollar be replaced as the world's standard,

we could find ourselves paying prices 4 times higher for gasoline.

That would destroy the trucking industry.  

Cities could find themselves having to be self-sufficient.  Our nation could very well fragment into city states.

Are we preparing our young to face surprising, unexpected economical, sociological changes?

Increasingly it appears that the NSA knows everything —

(despite recent legislation)

that it has access to all phone calls, all emails, all texts, all tweets, all address books, 

all visited websites, all downloaded photos, all purchases made, all comments posted.

There are no secrets anymore.

One of the potential places that the NSA can steal data is at the transfer station where the undersea cable meets land.

 Apparently Google has its own undersea cables.

How many of you use Google?  The NSA is watching.  With me, they are getting bored!

Was Huxley correct?

I don’t know about you, but the subject exhausts me.

I think I will go watch the minions of Despicable Me for awhile.