cmdr_zoom | Also, I should be in bed.

Randy Milholland, on the turning of the wheel and the passing of generations

So we're doomed to end up "racist and afraid of change" in our old age? Hell, I'm already there, at least half and probably both if I'm honest.

I'm only 40 (plus one), and lately I feel like I'm at or past what the latest Indy movie describes as "the age when life stops giving us things and starts taking them away." I lost one parent last year and it looks like I might lose the other before this time next. Looming on the horizon are environmental catastrophe, peak oil, global warming, the end of privacy, and (perhaps most ironic) the probable return to power of a faction which wants to turn the clock back even further than I would, undoing most of the social progress of the last half of the 20th, while continuing the plunder of the country. I feel out of touch and helpless and sorry for myself, but even sorrier for my young niece and nephew, who will come of age in such a world.

Then again, fearing tomorrow and/or wondering if it'll even come is not new or unfamiliar for me; I grew up during the final years of the Cold War, under the threat of nuclear extinction (thankfully averted through the efforts of Col. Petrov and others), and it was only for one brief decade that I left myself relax and have hope that things were going to work out. Then the halcyon days of the 90s ended, the new millennium truly arrived in September 2001, and... well, here we are. All in the same boat, which seems to be taking on water at an alarming rate.