Anyway, I've been thinking about the state of the world lately (in part because of some work I'm doing). And I find myself thinking about how my life has gone, what things were like in the world 40, 50 years ago compared to the world we're living in now. And I find myself looking at the world through the eyes of someone like my young assistant, Mathew. He's 25 and smart and funny and kind and basically a very cool guy. And I've been watching his daily vlog and I can see him start to figure out things that I figured out years ago, only I was older than he is when I did so. But the world is so very, very different in many ways--and also way too much the same in others.
But I guess it's the perspective of history that I enjoy now that I know he can't have, because he's too young, and that intrigues me. He just hasn't lived long enough to know the kind of things that I know, just like I couldn't have the knowledge of my elders when I was growing up or even as a young adult. Like, what was it like to live through the Great Depression? Not that we're living through that now, not by a long shot--despite what some people may think or feel, our safety net is holding us together. Maybe not well or not without showing some strain, but it's there and there was nothing, absolutely nothing of that in the 30s. That's when the safety net came into being (thank you, Franklin Roosevelt). And I'm sure there's still things about the past that I don't understand or can't appreciate and maybe I never will.
But there's the anxiety of living in a very unstable world that's apt to fall apart at a moment's notice with no warning (hello, volcano ash?) and where our resources are being strained to the limit and where things happen incredibly fast that makes this time especially ... well, exhilarating, exciting and terrifying. It would be nice to have the cushion, if you will, of history's lessons to guide us, I think.
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