Honestly Nostalgic

That's a short clip from David Ossman's -How Time Flies. You might recognize the name David Ossman if you were ever a fan of Firesign Theater.  They were popular in the 1970's but by the mid 1980's each of the four members were working on separate projects and the real death knell of any creative group is when they put a best of collection -that happened in 1993 with Shoes For Industry: The Best Of Firesign Theater.

On college radio this record was often played in the last half hour of New Eve leading up to the count down to midnight. The story is about Mark the lone astronaut in the spaceship Pegasus that left Earth in 1979 and returns New Year's Eve 1999. 

So could you imagine yourself as an astronaut leaving Earth for 20 years? It's similar to Washington Irving's story of Rip Van Winkle. The world is going to change with or without us, we are all involuntary travelers through time. To everybody younger than myself, I am from an exotic foreign land -the past.

I can be poetically nostalgic but if I'm pushed into honesty I have to say the past was good but the present is better. Every generation makes its own mistakes and I could be critical of how kids today are  too dependent on what's become the electronic umbilical cord -but overall this generation gives me hope. Of course it's fun playing on the gullibilities of people half my age too.

The personal computer has become the world changing technology of the last 35 years. It has been as much of a break through event as the production of the Ford Model T. The Model T was not first car ever manufactured -nor was it the best, but because it was made to be affordable the Model T became the most manufactured car in the world. It numbers weren't surpassed until the VW Beetle was in production for over 25 years.  Can you imagine your world without an automobile? Unless you live in an urban village you are going to be spending a lot of time and calories on bicycle. And going back to horses is so much easier said than done. Ask anyone who owns a horse, those animals require daily care and maintenance. If you don't use you car for a couple of days it just sits there but a horse has to be feed, cleaned-up after and groomed regardless if you use him or not.  That's why rich people had stable boys.

The Ford Model T was such an advantage to over owning a horse that people in 1908 were willing to pay or borrow a year's wages to own one.

The next wave of world changing technologies will probably be in boosting the efficiency of food and energy management. As the world population reaches 9 billion something as mundane as going from the standard light bulb to a compact florescent and the to an LED bulb could mean the difference between shortages or abundance. The next generation of batteries could make the internal combustion engine obsolete and solar energy less expensive than power through the current electrical grid. World food production could be increased by a third if waste and spoilage could be reduced by half. If that happened 9 Billion people could be fed without a single acre of new cropland.

History pivots on the smallest things. Take something like the cast iron stove, nothing could seem more mundane. The cast iron stove was a product that helped root the industrial revolution in America. After the Revolutionary War gun and cannon makers converted over to the production of stoves. The cast iron wood stove could heat house, cook a meal or bring a pot of water to boil using less than half the fuel of an open hearth fireplace. That meant the man of the house didn't have to cut and stack six cords of wood (760 cubic feet) every year. For the woman a cast iron stove meant less dust and ash in the house, it also meant she didn't have to spend most of her day tending to the fire. The cast iron wood stove gave the woman of the house time to learn how to read and write and by the middle of the 1800's women were beginning to demand the right to vote. Education works that way.


I like to put myself in the mindset of Mark the Astronaut, where I'm waking up to a world of wonder.  Maybe we will have Zepliners ( lighter than air RVs) to float around. I could go for a North American Village Movement.

As computers have made the world more inter-connected through social media, the average person has a great access to the world and all it's knowledge. The Arab Spring could have never happened without the power of mass communication -before the internet most Arab countries regulated typewriters and copier machines to stop the spread of unofficial information. The next movement in social media might be the return of the real contact. Instead of looking for a second life people will spend a little more time with their first one. That's the kind of nostalgia worth indulging in, not some melancholy pining things lost but an attempt to preserve what still works.

Heaven on Earth may never be within our grasp but I think a better a future is out there. And that's where I hope to see you all... in the future.