Our civilization will reach a point in the future when we expect technology to work, but we don’t keep up with learning of how or why. Information will climax with critical mass. Will society break back down into master/worker? Would a large-scale pandemic save us from over-population, wanton consumerism and general debauchery? The biblical Sodom and Gomorra did have at their disposal every depravity known and unknown in their homes, one mouse click away. The nightly news spews fear and gore and we are so desensitized that we barely notice the gross. We talk about atrocities with the same cavalier attitude that we discuss a car accident or a celebrity death. It is so easy to stir the masses and sway the opinion of many with the drumbeat of one. I don’t know where we are headed or what the future holds, if we are even entitled a future. There are commissions on light pollution, noise pollution and ordinances to regulate dog ownership and the height of the grass in your yard but we are so divided by all these special projects that we have lost some common sense. Yes it is great to fund and maintain animal shelters but until there are not any hungry children in homeless shelters, the dogs can starve or be put to death. Recycle, absolutely but how about having felons be responsible for trash and recycling in lieu of going to jail. Decriminalize hemp and improve the economy. That we live in a nation that has made prisons a profitable industry and that prison towns rely on a constant influx of inmates is wrong. The healthcare and pharmaceutical machine make a living on the sick, dead and dying. It is economically irresponsible to cure heart disease, cancer and obesity because without them, healthcare would fail to make money. The single largest employer in Greenville County is Greenville Hospital University Medical Center. Hospitals should be free, medicine should be free and until we have seriously regulated medicine the big three will not be cured. All these foundations, all these marches, all these ribbons and tee-shirts and what real progress has been made?

I propose that the shear amount of information in this world is increasing at the rate that we will reach a point sometime in the future. When this happens I would like to subscribe to the hope that we will have an evolutionary leap and the community memory and recall will be part of a nurtured collective knowledge. We will see knowledge that will be both ancient and brand new. I imagine the placental automatic transfer for all knowledge to all babies, like the knowledge to breathe or the knowledge to beat one’s heart. I fear that if this evolutionary hiccup happens that there may be a segment of the population that doesn’t get it. Doesn't just "know" the things everyone else knows. The enlightened population will become a ruler class enjoying the knowledge, the power and the fruits of the labor of those not evolved. Could we experience a world with the normal and the enlightened, just as some suspect the Neanderthals shared the countryside with the newer, improved homo-sapiens? If the lesser of the two populations took advantage and behaved as dominant cultures generally behaved, it would not be outrageous to think that there would be an uprising and the potential for loss of knowledge. Great civilizations have come and gone before us, failed without our understanding completely how they slipped away. Children of 2009 know more by the time they are twelve, their brains crammed full of ideas, computer prowess and political and religious knowledge. More I think that twenty year olds from decades ago. Is the information age, the dawn of the last age? Will something like a pandemic or evolutionary leap make it possible to continue at this pace? If an uprising caused the manufacturing to cease, how would American households cope without paper-products, prepared food? I am excited to see where and how far America goes but I am not at all under the delusion that our lives are guaranteed or that comfort and happiness are rights we are entitled to.