Month: March 2020

Posted on

Birth of the 21st century starts by stay-at-home health mandate

Since we’re all mandated to home and communicating mostly by internet, we can easily see the future coming true this century as far as work, education, commerce, religion and major life events like weddings and funerals.  We are advised to keep to ourselves, wash our hands, leave our face alone and deal with this sudden turn of lifestyle and livelihoods.  And if we are the very lucky and not facing an occupational layoff, some of us are probably really liking telecommuting.  The freedom!  The cost savings in gas.  No more getting up early just to drive 20 or more miles in traffic to work in an office.  There are more positives than negatives.  In short, we are in the midst of a work and life revolution.  We knew it would happen this century.  So here we all are, thrust into a brave new world.

Novels like 1984, movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sleeper and TV shows like Twilight Zone have filled our collective psyche with fantastic ideas about how human life could be in the future, namely the 21st century of which we have been living rather lackadaisically for 20 years.  One prognosticator foresees a great divide among the few wealthy and the masses of dire poverty with no more middle class; fundamentalist religions gain a stronghold as the masses will not pursue higher education which teaches the ability to think for oneself; and along with strict religion will be more authoritarian governments and the need to do away with free thinkers by executing teachers and writers.  Government and life worldwide will be dystopian.  And microchips will be the norm.  Cash and coins will have no place in a bank card society linked to a chip under the skin.  Sounds plausible, huh?  Iris scanning will replace biometric fingerprinting, and paper mills will go the way of the horse and buggy.

Here’s my take on predicting future life this century, even if I may not live long enough to see some of it come true:

Bidets replace the traditional American toilet: About time.  Toilet paper will go the way of film.  Though unintentional, Americans have revealed the need for an immediate conversion.  We’ll get used to it.  Those who use them already tell us we’ll prefer it.

The internet will be more like the public library: Everything online will be noted upfront as fiction or nonfiction prior to one reading or viewing.  No more messing with people’s minds, leaving people to ‘believe what they want to believe.’  Newspapers (certainly called something else soon enough) will be verifiable, substantiated fact-based journalism.  Opinions will be tagged as such.  No more mixing news with views.  Free speech will be tamed by the young generation or the next who tired of not knowing the truth.  The truth will prevail, though in nations whose leaders are not omnipotent.

Work at home online: We’ve been forced to get a taste of this, trying it out for a couple of months or longer.  When the virus blows over, perhaps most people will continue working from home.  Business owners already see how the old 20th century business model is impractical and unnecessary, and they’ll certainly want to continue reducing costs like office space, electricity, water/sewer, garage parking, taxes, etc.  New employees will train themselves if jobs are mostly online.  Factories will continue to pursue robotics, leaving more workers to figure out other ways to earn a living.  That $20,000 a year living payment proposed by Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is looking plausible now instead of unemployment benefits and for many eventually no money for months or years.

Online education: Students of all ages will learn online and at home or wherever they want like a park or coffee shop or group of friends.  They already are doing this, though constricted to home, and today’s elementary to high school and college students have been studying online for years even while in school.  Few teachers will be necessary, and only the most outstanding and charismatic with a natural gift to communicate with various age groups will succeed.  The days of classrooms, boredom, discipline issues, bullying, and school shootings will become a few chapters in the history of American education.

Goodbye brick & mortar buildings: Former malls, shopping centers, business buildings and skyscrapers will be converted to much-needed housing for low-income families to average earners and higher.  No more homeless. No more just and only building state-of-the-art condos for the well-to-do among us. In fact, realizing our communities nationwide need more hospitals, the buildings are ready to fill.

Home gardens and community farms:  Everyone will be encouraged to plant seeds to grow their own produce.  If they have land, they will be encouraged to grow larger crops.  More people will be vegetarians and turned off by the thought of eating meat.  That transition may be far into the 21st century when we’re all dead and gone.

Driverless cars:  Next year is projected for driverless trucks, the big rigs that haul heavy cargo and manufactured products stored in huge warehouses.  The auto industry has made clear their goals after electric cars, or during the ongoing conversion, will be self-driving automobiles perhaps as early as 2024.  That won’t make me no mind.  I prefer a computer-operated vehicle to an emotionally frazzled human driver any day, and I would bet on far less wrecks, injuries and deaths.  A computer can analyze dozens of situations simultaneously while our human brain operates at fullest capacity when performing one task at a time.

Home gyms: Exercising alone or in a virtual class will continue to be preferable, as we’ve already seen advertised during Christmas 2019, and gyms were first to be closed due to the coronavirus spread.

Personal safety cameras: Everyone will wear tiny cameras the size of jewelry, like cool fashionable ear clips and necklaces, that will keep them safe and digitally record danger such as assault, carjacking, robbery or murder.  Police will be able to digitally access the wearable cameras for clues to solve crimes.

Hologram computers, internet, keyboards: We’ve seen this advertised, so it’s here.  People like weightless, if not invisible, tech.

Bio chips for health records, credit, banking: Despite the biblical warning to beware the mark of the beast in your hand or forehead, the microchip is coming now.  We live in cities that require pets be chipped, a tiny metal or plastic bit just under the fur.  A computer wand reads the data.  At first, a change this controversial and creepy will be an option but within a generation or two will become the norm.  The wallet will go the way of the crapper.

Addiction cures: They’re already here.  You just need to ask about it.

Home healthcare replaces nursing facilities:  There isn’t a person who would prefer some way to care for our elderly incapacitated loved ones rather than place them in a nursing home.  Home healthcare will be a booming business with excellent wages and families in need subsidized by the government.  Nursing homes will be a thing of the past.  Future generations will not understand why Americans used to institutionalize their elderly and incapacitated loved ones.  For generations the issue has been severity of illness along with financial ability, which the latter will be resolved by the restructured government budget.

Robotic maids: This cannot happen soon enough.  They’ll be included with the sale of every home and other housing, even available for rental.

So, until the future comes and while we’re still stuck carrying on an old 20th century lifestyle, we can dream of possibilities.  Already we can order online anything (except toilet paper).  The internet has become our good friend.  We already rely on it, whether in the palm of our hands or carried around in a shoulder bag.  Humans easily adapt to change especially when we see the new method as beneficial, whether economical or not.  In the near future, the older generation of you and me will be suspicious at first—as is a natural human inclination.  But we can’t say we weren’t warned our entire lives.  Let us be gracious witnesses, eager participants remaining calm and optimistic during the changing of the guard.    

Posted on

Bill Gates transcends earthly billionaire status to save an impoverished world

Wish that I were as intelligent as Bill Gates.  But like most humans, I do not share his acumen, the enviable and financially rewarding inclination toward mathematics, science, computer science and computer programming.  He reportedly reads 30 books a month.  He was a Harvard University drop out.  He was a teen-age geek.  And like all geniuses God blesses upon our planet from time to time, at a very young age Gates could see the future: Every home would have a computer, not a clunky metal box the size of a closet but something resembling a typewriter.  And lo his vision became our shared reality, by the 1980s and each year with tremendous improvements to today’s light-weight laptops and pads, not numbering one per home but several for each family member even little ones.  Foresightedness is a gift, and a highly intelligent human being knows exactly how and when to use it.

Today at age 64, Gates, the co-creator of Microsoft, is worth $96.3 billion. Throughout his lifetime, he’s often been listed as the richest man in the world.  But now he has fully separated himself from his tech biz to concentrate on far more important matters to billions of people living in poverty.  Bill and his wife, Melinda, formed an international nonprofit specifically to aid the plight of the poor in the world.  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation formed 20 years ago, according to the website, to “eradicate disease, poverty and hunger globally.”  The motto is: All Lives Have Equal Value, and the nonprofit’s premise: We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequality.

Americans don’t really see a lot of truly poor and destitute people especially children.  But the well-traveled Gates’ family has:  masses of humanity living in deplorable and inhumane conditions in Africa, India, Asia, South America and many other neglected places on the planet.  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars to reduce infectious and chronic diseases in the world, most fates unknown to Americans and the fortunate First World inhabitants.  The couple is to be applauded, too, for seeking ways to improve America’s public schools.  Education is the key to a bright future individually and nationally, and no one realizes that more than Bill Gates.  His parents afforded him a good education, but they also understood his genius.  He was not like other kids.  He was way too smart, operating in the stratosphere, existing in another realm, so smart that he took to building electronics and computers in the family garage.  A genius like his was bound to get noticed and financial backing when the right idea came along.

As a young wealthy businessman, Gates came across as uncomfortable in the public.  He gave few interviews, seemed quiet, affable but studious.  He was driven, could be argumentative, and indeed had few friends who could match his level of super intelligence.  Perhaps he was so intent on making Microsoft a national name and international product, a worldwide necessity, because he was a bit lonely.  Genius is hard for us regular earthlings to understand.  We’re prone to be jealous: Why’s he so smart (instead of me)?

Even as one of the world’s wealthiest men, for years the wealthiest bachelor on the planet, Gates was not known to date much.  He married later than most but picked quite a mate.  Gates has said fatherhood taught him unexpected lessons, softened him when he wanted to teach his kids how to be fierce and shrewd in business and in life.  That was his formula for success.  But he learned to be human raising kids.  Business competition, nose to the grindstone, seriousness and watching who’s ahead of whom no longer mattered as much as it did during his young adult years.  Those heady traits and tools to success and money mean absolutely nothing to babies and little kids.  He learned a new perspective in life: What really matters is life itself.  The Gates’ children are now adults.  In recent years Bill and Melinda signed The Giving Pledge and have been joined by several of the world’s billionaires called upon by mega-billionaire Warren Buffet to leave more than half of their wealth to charity, even 99 percent of it.

Gates was always aware of his privilege.  He’s been a smart businessman, won and lost along the way, and now has completely severed himself from the company he founded.  No longer content to sit on the board, Gates is growing into another dimension of those who have lived the good life.  Not quite yet the elderly senior statesman, still with a lot of energy and vigor to work and accomplish monumental goals, he intends to be in the front lines of improving life on earth.  Portable toilets and vaccines readily available worldwide are just a couple of sanitary and disease-combating accomplishments Gates is ensuring all humanity has access.

So in our current state of coronavirus fear, the human masses, at least in America, have shown themselves to be the opposite of benevolent. Those who hoard toilet paper, sanitizer and food are not fooling anyone with the excuse of providing for their family.  There are countries in this world whose people do not use toilet paper or if they do use considerably less than Americans … for some reason.  Have we forgotten our own grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t use toilet paper either along with indoor toilets and all the mid-20th century sanitation we take for granted and can’t comprehend any other way when it comes to ‘doing what comes naturally?’  Shame on the hoarders, Americans who cannot deal with uncertainty.  They’d never make it in the Third World or the world of our not-so-distant ancestors.

In this digital Information Age, the very era Gates had a starring role, there exists the critical masses, the cynics, the non-fans, the ever-suspicious of the wealthy.  Someone like Bill Gates is far removed from his detractors, the majority of Americans who never will equate his financial success and revolutionary creations, his ideas that catapulted everyone on the planet ready or not into the digital age.  Gates is not like us regular people, easy to envy and anger and give up on presumed pipe dreams.  As certain as he was in the 1970s that everyone in the future would have a home computer, he knows that the misery of world poverty—the unsanitary living conditions, disease and starvation—can and will be solved.  Today Bill Gates has nothing but time on his hands coupled with 100 percent mental focus, not unlike the days of his youth when he was more like you and me yet destined for greatness, sparkling with imagination and innovation.

Posted on

Since when did we let a little bug disrupt life on earth?

I’ve lived through a lot of scary health crises [AIDS & HIV, Ebola, and unpredictable flu strands not covered by the annual vaccine] … but nothing compares to the global mass hysteria over the coronavirus.  Constant mass media coverage has led millions of people to lose all reasonable perspective over this virus: canceling school, college and national conventions; two-week self quarantines; infected cruise ships docked at sea, guaranteeing the temporary illness to spread through recirculated air systems.  What is wrong with people, and I mean the people in charge?

Meanwhile, tens of thousands more Americans catch the flu, work with the flu, and yes some will die and have died from the flu—but the illness and deaths caused by the coronavirus is nowhere near the number hit by influenza.  According to statistics by the Center for Disease Control, this year’s flu deaths will be as many as 61,000 in the U.S. compared to coronavirus at 14 deaths so far.  Coronavirus deaths worldwide are at 3,460.  Let us take a moment to remind ourselves that the world is filled with billions and billions of people.  The number of coronavirus cases doubled one day in New York.  Still the U.S. has at this moment only 230 documented cases, mind you in a First World nation of some 325 million people.  The flu, on the other hand, infects 9 million to 45 million Americans every year.  Why?  Because we continue to go to work, church, grocery stores, movies, restaurants, parties and other gatherings throughout the two-week duration that produces lingering cough and mucus.  We usually won’t go out if we’re so nauseous we’re vomiting and/or have a fever.  Godspeed.

Symptoms of the flu and coronavirus are very similar and could just be a cold, which spreads like wildfire and yes can lead to bronchitis and pneumonia, walking pneumonia, and death for some, particularly the elderly and those with weakened immune systems.  Nothing new here.  But canceling life on the planet, remaining holed up in our apartments and homes till summer … wha?

Paranoid sickofrenic

Annual conventions are being canceled nationwide.  Routine flights are canceled to several parts of the world where coronavirus has been spreading.  No cancelations due to the flu.  While the media keeps an hourly tally on new coronavirus cases and related deaths in the U.S. and abroad, health officials have made clear there is no need to panic.  Then we find toilet paper and sanitizer along with face masks are in short supply in stores everywhere.  This is due to the virtual shutdown of China where the coronavirus was first detected and the government imposed brutal quarantine measures and halted manufacturing.  The world decided to follow suit in some aspects, at least with the knee-jerk emotional panic mode.

Repeatedly the public has been advised to wash, wash, wash our hands with soap and water while singing a short ditty like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in order to wash for 20 full seconds.  Americans have an inclination toward impatience.  We tend to rush through a lot of things.  Indeed we often are not very thorough especially with washing our hands or brushing our teeth.  So wash hands, use sanitizer, stop touching our faces, trash used tissues, and cough and sneeze into our arms instead of the air.  Seems rather Mickey Mouse, and by that I mean simple rules instilled in childhood to prevent the spread of cold or flu.

Most of the few who’ve contracted the coronavirus report mild symptoms, perhaps feeling better than with a bad cold or the real flu.  We’re told 80 percent who get coronavirus will have mild symptoms.  And this is problematic for those who want and need to work.  Our American motto is: Take over-the-counter meds and keep a-going.  But to really avoid spreading any contagious illness like a cold, flu and coronavirus, the best thing to do is avoid contact with people for awhile.  Rest is best.  It’s what the doctors say but not our bosses.  And people with coronavirus are supposed to stay home for two long weeks.  A vaccine for the coronavirus, a bug that will always be with us now, is a year away.

Amidst the business hysteria, the epic SXSW music festival in Austin was canceled, a $400 million loss.  California has declared a state of emergency.  New York has imposed school closures in areas where clusters of the coronavirus were detected.  All this in attempts to nip in the bud this single virus.

Maybe so, but Texas’ annual Kerrville Folk Festival is a go.  At the month-long Kerrville festival every May to June, thousands of folks from across the nation camp out beneath the stars, share outdoor toilets, strum guitars and open their mouths to sing songs.  Will it be a disastrous breeding ground for spreading coronavirus?  Remember, some people are simply carriers and will be asymptomatic, in other words unaware they have this bug.  But the Kerrville concert folks are likely trusting Mother Nature and the fresh air of the Texas Hill Country to prevent illness.  A folkie or a Kerrvert is made of tough stock, linking back to our American ancestors who worked with their hands before air conditioning made us soft and whiny.

Nation of weenies

My parents and their generation had almost every kind of childhood disease and lived to tell about it.  Their generation lived through polio.  My grandmother as a child caught yellow fever and lost all her hair.  Within a year, it grew back beautifully.  She also was bit by a brown recluse spider and lost a small hunk of flesh on her forearm.  Those were generations with grit, and their times were much more hazardous than ours, mostly due to modern medicine and vaccines. Yet the elders trusted natural remedies, one being to simply let the disease or illness run its course, and that oddly enough creates immunity.

For a nation that survived a couple of world wars, walked on the moon, and lived through every type of old and new disease including the gruesome Ebola virus lest we forget, how have we so easily panicked over a considerably mild virus and in so doing created a self-fulfilling prophecy of financial doom and gloom?  We’ve become a generation of helicopter parents, overprotecting children from any harm physical and emotional.  That control, in the guise of loving concern, may have backfired as the coronavirus continues to spread, not unlike any other bug.  I’d say more people who travel on cruise ships and airplanes suffer from a bout of gastritis than coronavirus.  But coronavirus is the cause celeb.  The only thing certain is there will be a new bug next year.  We have got to get a grip, practice good hygiene, and use our intelligence or as our foreparents called it ‘horse sense’ when it comes to a bug going ’round.  If we’re gonna live on this planet, we’re gonna get sick sometimes.  Going berserk over every new temporary flu-like illness has run its course.