So, 2001 January 1 has come and gone, we've all heard Thus Spoke Zarathustra about a million times, and yet...  Yet no mysterious black monolith was uncovered on the Moon, probably because we lack the technology, the funding, and most of all, the vision to be visiting the Moon, much less exploring it.  Twenty three years after Kubrick's proverbial "good science fiction movie", it remains fiction, a depressing and disgusting fact.   I look out at my students, aged 18 or so, and I wonder:  Where is your anger at your parents' generation?  Why aren't you furious that they botched it so badly?  In keeping with the general self-absorption of the baby boomers, now that they've seen the wonder of the Universe and stood on the very threshhold of the future, they are content to step back and forget it.  As in so many other things, they are willing to pen in their children.

For a while, it seemed like this would be the first generation of Americans who did not match the financial success of their parents.  After a history of ever improving, we seemed to pause.  Then the 'Net came and changed the way the economy works, and it seems like maybe we can reach higher planes of profit than our parents.  Yet... Yet... Emotionally, intellectually, even spiritually, I fear that the rising generation will be beggared by the miserly preoccupations of their parents.  They are impoverished -- impoverished in vision -- and worse, they do not even know what has been robbed from them.

-=-Bernard HP Gilroy

2001 January : Soapbox