A Note to My Wife
24 Jan 2012 2 Comments
For thousands of years, humankind has raised its children under deplorable circumstances. If it wasn’t razor-fanged predators and creeping glaciers, it was religious crusades and rampant plagues. Children were growing up with nothing to hope for but another generation to carry on their line.
These days, we have almost none of those problems. Food is readily available to even the poorest citizens, education is free to a point and potentially very cheap after that, we’re at the top of the food chain and shelter is a problem for relatively few. And that’s just the bare minimum that can be said.
Freckle is fortunate enough to have parents (and a great support network of family and friends) who can give far more than the bare minimum. We carry around small devices that keep us constantly connected to the global repository of all human knowledge. We think nothing of hopping on an airplane to fly thousands of miles for the weekend. While there are still some great plagues out there (e.g. AIDS), they can be avoided for the most part with a little education and effort.
When you look at how much has changed in the last 100 years, or even the last 25 years, you will realize that Freckle will be growing up in the most exciting time in human history. Advances in genetic, robotic, information, and nano technologies will change the world as even we know it. There are some who say that if you can live to 2050, you have a very good chance of living forever. We are already taking the first major strides in weening ourselves off fossil fuels and moving to renewable sources of energy. Commercial sub-orbital space flight exists and one day may replace those pesky slow airplanes. All plagues may soon be a sad footnote in history. Globalization and transnationalism are making war a much less desirable way of solving our differences.
Freckle has so many things going for him/her; what’s there to be worried about? Rest up, think about all the wonders our child will take for granted, drift asleep with a smile on your lips. It’s going to be great.
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