Let's face it: we're electing our celebrity role model for the next generation.

[keopeli]

For anyone with access to electronic information (that's you and me), the world can change very quickly based on instant information. This isn't new - it started with the radio. But that was just a hundred years ago.

Long, long ago, it used to be that all information was shared in oral discourse. People memorized stories and stories became legends. This was undoubtedly easy for we humans to learn to do. I can teach my cat to make sounds that I make. I sing with the birds. I help people sing with their voices as a profession. It's safe to assume that humans learned language quickly - and regionally.

It was the Phoenicians who learned to write it all down. This was a difficult step to do, because it required inventing a language and requires others to know the symbols. Codifying a spoken language is a difficult thing. Imagine this: write down your favorite song in a way someone else will understand. Then have that person sing it back to you - not so easy.

If that wasn't enough, it also had to be taught. The written word was imperfect because it varied with each author and often each copy, and it has yet to come together. Today, languages offer us much of the diversity we experience and, understandably, it challenges our realities.

Then, a German man, in an ingenious moment of clarity that's so monumentally simple it has perpetuated the memory of his humanness, Gutenberg invented the printing press. Suddenly, the legends could be written down. Now all you had to do was teach everyone to read! And the first thing that was printed? The Christian Bible. It's still the most printed book ever.

This did happen. We learned to read. You're reading. :) (I should say most of us have learned to read, since many people around the world are still live without reading at all.) This was when (many) humans became "enlightened." Such knowledge among all people gave birth to art, music, business, government, and urban development. We became much happier and we had a LOT of children.

It would take another several hundred years before the most curious among us would learn enough from reading and, thus, reasoning, to discover and invent new things: Ben Franklin, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein et.al. Electricity. Light. Public utilities. Radios. TVs. Computers.

Our means of communicating knowledge has become so fast that it can't be imagined. For everyone who has learned to access and use this means of communication, the world is very, very big.

This access has happened in the past 30 years. But, something is different this time. This time, we don't have to learn a new language. This time, we don't have to learn to read. This time, everything is just out there for us to absorb in our minds and very little instruction is given.

The fact is that the Internet is like cable TV on steroids. Those who partake benefit greatly. Yet, there is a great divide, in the US at least, between those who either ignore the internet, don't have access to it or don't know how to properly search the internet to learn and those who do. It's the classic battle of the old paradigm verses the new one.

But surely we can agree on this: we are all electing our new celebrity role model. For at least the next four years if not twelve (that's 2020), we will have this figure in our living room and on every newspaper we see. We're all affected by the presence of electronics in our lives, whether TVs or computers (even if you have none in your home). We all want our next generation to be lead by someone who reflects what we are and what we hope our next generation will be like. And we want them to be outstanding on TV...don't we?

If there was one thing I wish we could all agree, Democrats, Republics and Independents alike, it would be that we all agree to proceed unafraid. What we crave together is to be engaged in what's going on. We have so much information now that we're all prepared to take action and move forward, so let's do it unafraid. We'll all be better for it.

Peace.