End of year wrap up

i end the year with some dark thoughts, spurred by the recent air travel and other issues that leave me lamenting the conitinuing loss of rights and liberties, the unenlightenedness of the world--our way must be the right way because it is ours, reason and common sense no where to be found being just one element of it all.

Of course, the desire to “enlighten” is probably nearly as dangerous. How much of that is “my view” too? Except that my view of enlightenment allows others to live in peace almost entirely as they like, so long as they do the same for me. Is that bad for them? Does it allow me to still offend and harm them, just by being, living my own life my way? I suppose it's possible.

All in all, the world is still open to dreams, it's just that the dreams of space travel and utopian futures requires more enlightment, more sense, more cooperation to even approach. it's a big task that can't be achieved by one or even one nation or several nations without solid commitment. Solar energy as a twenty year commitment in Germany is big, and yet it is so small compared to the visions offered by space fiction. Even my own, sometimes dark, Cerel Gold can’t even approach happening (or just the nice parts) without the leaps of technology and cooperation and advancement in certain fields (solar power and energy common sense being the smallest fraction of them).

Cerel puts Earth in the place it has earned: a third world of potential instead of a leader. We can’t even attain that measure of galactic role in the foreseeable future, though fifty years ago it seemed something that we should be able to achieve this century, or the end of the last. Nothing new there, I suppose. Life progresses apace, but not always where we would like it to go. And for now, it isn't toward new planets across the galaxy.

The computer world has gone places most of us didn’t imagine, but it remains a virtual world, and one with as many problems as benefits, giving us the illusion of increased communication (the news calls it vastly increased communication , but it is vastly increased data flow, and that is a universe apart from communication. The messages, if anyone is bothering to send them, are lost in the noise, and most don’t even try. The e-mails that substitute for letters of the past are full of trivia of the day. Over time we might get some sense and hints of the nature of people’s lives, but I have yet to receive one that contained the depth of feeling of even a bland summary letter. Many who were poor letter writers are even worse as e-mail writers, though they can write to everyone at once and hit send. It all gives the illusion of communication at every level, from family and friends to international news. Yet all level have also lost, with news reports lacking substance or even the attempt at balanced reporting that was standard at the end of the last century. Recently, my sister and I might agree with a opinion and still rebel at the report because it is so obvious that they made no effort to convey the other side, which had value too, reasons, if not enough reason for the cost. We are surrounded by trivia in the name of facts while missing utterly any truth. We get the bits and pieces of data on a thousand topics, and not enough substance for any of them to give us the smallest measure of understanding.

Still, it offers a vast opening for writers: many issues to address ala the anti-utopians of the past. Now it's the nightmares and possibilities of the future: virtual life, the computer generation youth who think they are communicating even while their ability to interrelate with people in person deteriorates with lack of excercise to the necessary parts of the brain. Genetic coding is a nightmare to personal rights, privacy, insurance, adjusting, while potentially an aide to preventive medicine (if it is understood correctly and not misapplied as seems more likely in my gloomier moods). The stories are there to be written and I begin to understand the interest in near future speculative fiction, (even if I still don’t consider most of of it science fiction). It has the better chance of sliding into literary, nongenre fiction and popular atrention. In the end, that can be good for the future of the genre fiction, too, if it it prods the readers to ask the questions that have gone too long unasked about where technology is taking us and how can it get us to where we should be aiming.