What interesting times we live in

I think about what is going on in the world and wonder how I will ever be able to explain this to my son. We have a recession, our parents went through one or more already; the US is involved in 2 wars, my dad fought in one. The next American president is more tanned than his predecessors, we nearly had a woman president… My parents never had anything like that. We are going through tough times, and the worse is yet to come. Yet I find myself somehow sheltered from all this. I have a job, which I am hoping to keep for at least a year or so, but then who can really be sure. I am very lucky, I do not fight in Irak, I did not know anyone in the twin tours. And yet I find myself somewhat involved, I suppose at this point it is more of an intellectual exercise and my parents would probably laugh on how sheltered my life still is.

Somehow though, I still feel the pain I see in the world. It is hard to ignore, bad news get spread because they sell and no-one really care about good news. Everyday, something bad happens somewhere, it is hard to ignore it and not be affected. I am in no way feeling directly as my parents did, I am so much more sheltered than they were. I am hoping that my son will be as well sheltered as I have been of course. Life throws enough at all of us to gain some perspective. But how will I be able to explain the significance of the events we are currently going through. A black president will be something common, maybe it will have the same significance as ‘one man, one vote’ for me. How can see how good it is, but I can only imagine the impact the right to vote was for those who did not have it.

The next question I will hope he will have would be ‘What can I do about it?’. It is a hard question for each of us to answer I suppose, I don’t really have one formulated fir myself yet. Best I can tell, we have to start with ourselves, and I still have some work there.

The whole point of the reflection I suppose is that what is information without the appropriate background, historical context, can it still be used as efficiently? Is it still relevant? Is need driving relevancy of information? I suppose that is just another way to say for information to be useful, you need to want it, you need to be able to understand it. So the only way for a search engine to deliver what we are looking for, it needs to understand what we know and what we are looking for. Are we the sum of our knowledge? Even that one is a bit too deep for me. But for the sake of argument, that would mean the search engine would have to know me to be able to give me an efficient result. Ouch.

Was supposed to be a reflection on the times, I got distracted :). Without going into politics, I am not sure there ever was a US president who had so many issues to resolve, I wish him well.