Dichroic Reflections

the rolling river shores of changes

Lately I've read about more and more silly acts by the government, coupled with growing distrust of them on the one hand (record negative ratings, for one, protests on the other) and alarmist warnings about the coming Holy Wars on the other. I've heard about fundamentalists who believe women should be subjugated (note: I also know fundamentalists who believe in respecting women; the others are just so much noisier that it's hard to tell if they're gorwing in numbers or just shrillness) and secularists who want religion entirely out fo the political sphere. There seems to be more and more religious and political division. What I can't tell is what all of it means or whether it does mean anything at all. It feels like change is in the air, but it could just be useless venting. (Sorry, but I'm too lazy to go look up links to all of this).

It is about time; we seem to have been having periods of great change every forty years or so. But I'm not old enough to remember what the sixties and seventies felt like, in terms of the public sphere. I have no memory at all of the 1960s, having caught only the tag end, and the 1970s just felt like being a kid. On the other hand, communications are so much faster, more ubiquitous and more complete than they were then that I'm not sure I could tell anyway. How do you distinguish the rumblings of change from the results of negative news being perceived as a better story? How do you tell whether more people are becoming dissatisfied enough to act, or are only now speaking publically because the Internet has provided the means to complain to millions instead of to the water-cooler crowd?

The only thing I know is that these are interesting times. I do believe that the US and the other free countries will ultimately survive and continue providing unprecedented leavels of individual liberty and rising standards of living, but how much of that is stupid optimism based on a lack of understanding of the real factors in place? I bet plenty of people thought ancient Rome would endure, too. The most we can do is try to keep an eye on things and learn useful skills to deal with whatever happens. I don't plan to build a bomb shelter in the backyard; I do try to keep up with the news in a general way. We don't keep a survival kit at hand, though we do have all the components of one in the house - not deliberately, we just used to camp a lot. And we have that handy reservoir of water in the back yard, though it's cleverly disguised as a selling feature of the house. One other thing about the future: it's not apt to be boring.