Strange Days

I remember laying on my living room floor in 1986 thinking, how old will I be in the year 2000? And now it’s 2024. Time has flown by. I’m now in my 50’s and I have seen and experienced things I never would have dreamed of way back in 1986 let alone in 2000. And the best phrase I can come up with is, these are strange days, strange days indeed. I know that through time things always change. That’s part of technology and growth. And I’m sure every generation says they never thought they would see the things around them that happened in that time as well. It just seems to me that in my generation this change was fast and had an incredible impact on daily living.

I grew up in a time where tv was limited to a few channels, where watching sports was free and at night the broadcasters would shut down the feed. I didn’t have a microwave until almost Jr. high and we had rotary phones. Today’s youth can’t figure out how to use a rotary phone. And on phones of old to what we have today, holy Dick Tracy Batman. A computer in every pocket or purse. And that’s not strange? Technology has changed so fast that even artificial intelligence is almost becoming normal. It won’t be long.

I have never been through a world war but in these times, there are 100’s if not 1000’s of wars that have happened, and it’s become almost non complacent. And we see it every day on our tv’s and on our phones. We are surrounded by instantaneous news and much of it violent. We’ve been through a disease epidemic that we haven’t seen the likes of in over 100 years and we have the best medicine, so we think, that we have ever had. The world shut down. It was crazy, scary and something I never thought I would see.

We had politics go to extremes that in over 200 years has never happened and we are still dealing with the aftermath. We have more billionaires than ever making money hand over fist on the backs of the poor and middle class. We have a climate that is heating up faster than it ever has in history creating more water and warmer water. Ice caps are melting, glaciers are melting, more class 5 hurricanes on record than ever before. It seems to me that nature and technology don’t mesh together really well at this time. But as we are reaching out to explore space in this new strange time, I think to a great extent we have stopped exploring ourselves. We don’t take the time for one another. Too busy working to have fun, too busy to visit, too busy to take care of our elderly parents so on and so forth. We are living at a time where things are moving so fast, but we aren’t taking the time to enjoy the things that move slow, like butterflies for example, laying on our backs watching leaves fall from the trees. Who has time for that? I don’t know how life will be for the remaining years I have left but at least I am able to recognize that life is definitely loaded with high strangeness. If this isn’t strange days, then I don’t know what it is.