Sometimes the things kids say acts as a catalyst for poetry. Yesterday, my six year old son asks, "Has World War Three started yet?"
What a question!
This morning, as I was reading The Oregonian, my son's question gave me a rather chilling perspective on the litany of horrors to which I insist on subscribing. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorism in Jordan, the possibility of a bird flu pandemic: it all seemed to point to a strange new dark age in the world. The gap between rich and poor widens in the west as the middle class erodes, jobs are outsourced, and new opportunity for wealth... or poverty... present themselves. With the surfeit of more and more computing power for less and less cost, it seems the only sensible thing to do is log in, tune-out (i.e., all the doom and gloom speech) and get rich. When the leadership of the country reward capital-owners, it's time to get jiggy with it and do the capitalist dance. Maybe everybody should stop being so obsessed with jobs. Maybe people should focus more on making money and creating wealth. I really believe that the huge increase in server capacity, processing power and proliferation of open-source coding is going to create huge opportunities for the next generation of people who help empower the down-sized and the laid-off to concentrate on their strengths and increase the economy's flexibility, adaptibility and efficiency by an entire power!
