Leaping Forward

WHEN COMPUTERS WERE INVENTED, nobody had any idea that one day everybody would have one. When I was a kid, in the nineteen sixties I read a lot of science and science fiction, and thought a lot about computers. To me computers were and would always be big, expensive, and rare, owned and operated by an elite group of big institutions and governments, operated by an elite priesthood of tech savyy computer people. Nobody else had any other attitude about computers, and their future, as far as I can remember. Science fiction writers would describe people traveling in time and across the universe, but they would always hat to find a telephone and a computer to use. A small group of people, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs envisioned a personal computer, and started trying to make one. People like Gates and Jobs, Darwin and Newton, Einstein, ad so many others who have contributed fresh, now original ideas to humanity which work extremely well, we need more of, right now. We need someone to present to us the idea of capturing an enormous amount of solar energy and using it to desalinate an enormous amount of ocean water for human use, and someone to make us believe that we can plant and grow one trillion trees with in a few years, someone like Donald Trump. Another revolutionary thought we need is for someone to convince us convincingly that it is good, virtuous, and desirable to universally embrace the notion that each person must have his or her own religion, without exception. Someone else might demonstrate that free will and chemistry are the same thing. Mind foreruns all conditions, so the Buddhist scripture goes. If we humans can simply alter our frame of mind, our attitudes, our modes of thinking, to eliminate destructive and unproductive attitudes, and replace them with more enlightened ones, the future of the species can be promising. We can start anywhere. For instance, can we not all agree that deciding a person's worth by the color of their skin is utterly, absolutely irrational, and must cease?