Changes

Sitting with friends on New Year's Eve and watching the year being reviewed, I was struck by my own sense of surprise at my reticense to expect change that, perhaps, hit me stronger this year than in previous years. I 'apologized' (I can think of no other word to describe my thinking .... an apology, indeed) for being so behind in my thinking. I suspect that I maintained a fantasy all these years that all the major growths and alterations of culture and civilization had already occurred. I suppose it was like the American shock over the bursting bubbles ... in housing ... in technology, etc., that grabbed the Americans and Spaniards and Greeks and Northern Europeans (y'get my drift) by the back of their chairs and yanked them off those chairs (think I really messed up that metaphor). How could it be that printed journalism and published books weren't the cat's meow, forever? How could it be that the Post Office would downsize or tyat there wouldn't be enough jobs for everyone who wanted to work in the most civilized nations in the world? And even on the positive side, telephones in every room seems like paradise and, yet, now one hardly is ever feet away from a phone or from the ability to communicate -- more in less in real time -- with anyone on this Good Earth. Wow! Google gives me 2,000,000 sites in which to explore the price of toilet paper on busses in Mainland China which is no longer called Mainland China. When I was listening to some old guy, Kirk Douglas, talking on the Academy Awards, I think it was, I Wikipedia'ed him and it already listed that he was talking on the Awards. How's that possible ... and would it tell me what he was likely to do, tomorrow? May-be! I could go on ... but, chances are, what I'd write might well have already been written and published on Wiki this or Wiki that! Ain't nothin' new under the Sun ... only, there is! I think I could be a Luddite ... but not a happy one.