What a world (woild)!

You have to admit, we live in interesting times (sometimes horrible and tragic, but always interesting).  Maybe you have to have reached what the French call “a certain age” to really appreciate this fact.  I am old enough to remember all sorts of odd things and to think back about all that has happened.  To give you an idea:  I remember seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live on TV.  In fact, I was looking at a TV in a store window and my parents were talking to some friends with whom we were taking a walk.  The adults were not looking at the screen.  I tugged on my father’s sleeve and said “They shot Oswald”.  Before he looked around my father said “No, son, Oswald shot President Kennedy”.  I said, pointing at the screen (if memory serves) “No, Dad, they shot Oswald”.  By that time the the TV in the shop window had everybody’s attention.

Or, then there was my friend Skip, who in the late 60’s or early 70’s had an LSD experience in which, as he explained to us later, he saw the whole world connected by a “web” and you could “web in” or “web out” and go anywhere you wanted.  I often think back on that as I write these blog posts.  Or, there was the evening in 1969 when a bunch of us wannabe hippies went to see Janis Joplin, and one of the guys (not the coolest) disappeared and came back the next day saying he had met her and gone back to her hotel with her.  “Riiiigghhhttt !” we all said.  We knew it was not true, because he said she was a heroin user when we all knew she was a boozer…! hmmmm..

History does seem to have gone crazy.  All sorts of things are happening that nobody anticipated, and, I suspect, our leaders are often, at least for a while, simply at a loss about how to respond.  Let me give you an example.  Gaddafi has, apparently, fallen.  Not that long ago he was received with full Head of State honors in France, and was even given a place to pitch his residential tent.  I suspect that, off the record, some people in the Elysee Palace are a wee bit embarrassed right now.

My point?  Well it might all be random…just so much vain noise on a little dust heap circling a not very big star in one of an infinity of galaxies.  Ho hum!  Or, it might be leading up to something altogether different and better.  Maybe the out of date and retrogressive stuff is breaking down, and the ground is being prepared for a wiser, more humane era.  Clearly we are not there yet; but we are capable of  learning, and we seem to be “slapped” with one lesson after another.

Just a few IG thoughts in the dwindling days of the interesting August of  ’11.