Monday, December 25, 2006
Poll #10 Results
It is impossible to not effect world change, you didn't ask if the change was the one we wanted. Everyone who reads this forum/blog is effected by it, some in direct negative reaction.
In 1940 I listened on my grandmother's short wave floor model radio in Chicago as DA BEARS won the US football championship 73 to 0 while playing in Washington. The stadium there became as close that day as Chicago's Wrigley Field, just a few miles away.
In 1954 Bill Zolz entered my science class and produced from his pocket a small plastic box he said was a radio. We turned it on and between static and screeches listened for a while to some talk from far away. Then we removed its back and passed it around the room. All wondered at the little thing I explained was a transistor. The world seemed a transistor's size that day.
In 1960 France was giving up on Algerian colonization but its generals revolted, telling their troops and fight to maintain what was. They didn't follow those orders, for transistor radios had let them know that Paris had something else in mind. Paris became a lot closer to Algiers that day.
A few years later I finished building our first color television and our daughters in the US could see Africa through the camera eyes of people who were there doing what people do. That was something my 1930's childhood did not allow. My kids looked beyond their father that day.
In 1987 we tripped from Mexico to visit my mother in the United States and showed her a photo of my wife riding a burro. She reached in a drawer and produced one of herself on an elephant in India. Our burro became a lot smaller that day and my mother a lot larger.
In the early 90's I tuned our amateur radio to a Mexican radio internet gateway and used a laptop computer connected to it to pass an email message to a daughter in the US. Her and I became closer that day.
In 2003 we opened the Further Left Chat Room on Yahoo. And now, three and a half years later, those we've met there communicate regularly. It has taught us there isn't much difference in persons who reside in Argentina, China, Lebanon, Mexico, the US, and the rest of the 137 nations who have found us. We've all become closer during Further Left's days.
Two days ago Time Magazine sorely surprised persons seeking individual fame when it announced that 'You' were designated its 'person' of the year. That was in recognition of how keyboard peckers such as us have brought sites such as ours to accelerate world change. It was a signalling of surrender from celebrants of the old order to admit we've become closer than they today.
Claude Shannon's 1938 paper on electrical switching circuits laid out the basis of computer creation. The still resulting increased facility of transportation and communication to which it led has defined the locale of today's tribe to those on the surface of a ball in the sky 13,000 kilometers in diameter. My shrinking world and expanding tribe is a lot larger in size and number and yet closer to me than it used to be.
Our world and the tribe therein that we count ourselves among is what we allow them to be. I don't know if this Forum or others of similar stripe have changed those of anyone else in particular. I do know they have changed mine just by letting me be a part of it. Any perceived negativity that may have to others in what is presented to them can only rest with personally created and enforced attitudinal borders of non acceptance. They can surpass those borders by seeing themselves among the rest if only they will.
"But it's really a revolution."
Pocho's comment tells a lot. Technology evolves, the aim is to bring more and more people together.
In this world of sharing and being shared, listening and being heard, we probably have found so far the best way to understand and know each other more. Cooperation in any time is always a task. So have I had to save this wonderful article by reposting to my website.
