Getting Complicated

I AM CERTAIN that many old people have the problem I have; being old, and living in a complex world. I got my first computer in the science fiction year of 2000, a gift from my generous mother, and I was, to say the least, overwhelmed. It had...what...8 ggiabytes of memory? That's primitive by today's standards, isn't it? Now I have only a laptop, and it works fine, except when I for some reason don't have an internet conncetion, for instance, when its raining. That the year two thousand has now receded far into the remote past means that the year in which we are living is even more science fictiony. Nobody has ever successfully predicted the future, even Nostradamus. I never would have thought that I would be a young seventy one years old with the opportunity to carry a telephone in my blue jeans pocket. Almost certainly America's founders, all men of status, edcuation, wealth, dignity, and whatever matters, would have predicted anything anywhere close to where we stand today as a nation. Where we stand is in a strange place in which the presdient of the United State is a demonstrable reprobate, an adjudicated rapist and thirty four time convicted felon. This description is not slander or intended as insult. As Casey Stengal used to say: "You could look it up." We had the corruption of the Grant administration. We had it again with the Harding administration. We had Nixon. My mother, who was a nurse and not a historian, once told me that she assumed that every president in American history had had at least one mistress, and probably many more. My father was a laywer, an alcoholic and a womanizer, so my mother get a good education about men when she married one. The thre men in her life all abandoned her. Her father died in his early fifties, her husband ruined their marriage with alcohol and women, and then came me. Why do I think I belong in that sordid category? Really, I don't. I have hardly ever had a girlfriend, since romantic relationships seem complicated and stressful to me, as they involve getting close to a human being instead of a dog or cat. I never maried, although I still might since I am only 71 years old, but probably won't at this point, since I seem to be, as my mothe said, "smart". Yes, to my mother remaining single is (was, she's dead now) a sign of high intelligence. I tend to agree. Dogs and cats make excellent children, are far cheaper than human ones, and, on the whole, much better behaved. I have no regrets at having avoided marriage and my own children, although I confess I sometimes, oftenwodner what my children would have been like, gender, intelligence, pesonality, and such. More peole seem to be saying that if they were to do it all over again, they might not have children. A baby being born today seems destined and doomed to encounter the worst effects of climate change, which is aleady cascading down upon us, but has barely but begun. Ask the French about climate change. The heat wave currenly engulfing Europe is worse than our American variety. Europe, it is now becoming evident, is being hit harder, faster and quicker by global warming than any other continent, even though both polar ice caps are melting, fast. The French, like Europeans generally, don't go in for air conditioning, but may at this point be reconsidering. If I had had kids they would now probably be middle aged, and would by now perhaps given me grandchlidren. Almost all of my high school classmates have grand children now, and are ostensibly glad of it. Who wouldn't be? Grandparents and grand children are a match mad in heaven. Spaced apart by an in between generation, they pose no threat to each other, unlike children and parents. Children replace parents, the friciotn that oftn ensues between them is predicated upon this fact: people don't want to grow old, die, and be replace, no mater how much we pretend that we don't mind. Neither do we want to die, but since we currently have no other choice, we try our best to take the high road and maintain a good attitude about it. For millenia the world changed little from one generation to another. Then, around rolled the year fifteen hundred, and the Reformation, the rise of nation states and capitalism, and soon thereafter the scientic revolution and Protestant Reformation. Europeans began hitting the oceans to explore the rest of the world. Little wonder that Western Civilization classes in college are divided into early and modern. Western Civ I starts with the ancient Egyptians, and takes you up to fifteen hundred. WC II starts where WCI left off, and takes you as close to today as the professor can get. Interesting though WC! is, WCI! is exponentially more interesting; more people, more change, more everything. History is nothing but change over time among people, or,as one historian put it, "one damned thing after another". If yuo like history, you have more of it the more modern you become. For examination taking, modern history is inherently more difficult, with more folks and facts, but more interesting, which is the most important aspect of history; that is interests people. It is impossible to imagine how complicated and interesting the history of the rest of the twenty first century will be to students in the early twenty second century and beyond. It has to level off at some point, doesn't it? Since the human population must either level off or decline at some point in the fairly near future, presumably, so will the complexity of human society, culture, and events. That is, of course, if we solve the problems of climate change, environmental collapse, high tech mass war, and all the rest. Its anyone's guess whether we will, whether we will cause our own extinction, or our progression to a higher, more evolved lifeform. All we can do is try our best, and hope for the best.