Sunday, December 18, 2011

The Times person of the year interests me, why do people only see things from their viewpoint?

I spent the day in bed or a good portion of the morning, with no voice and a sore throat so had lots of time to contemplate. I find it kind of funny how controversial the Times person of the year article is.  Young people, in general, think they are the only ones that ever thought of something new or innovative.  They are young, full of themselves, and are going to change the world.  That is and has always been true, why else do you think change occurs?  The ones I have the most problem with are the ones that think they invented change.  I saw a question on facebook once where a concerned young person was asking about the Arab Spring in it's begins.  She wanted to know if anywhere in history this had happened before.  I thought it was a great deal like the uprising of the thirteen colonies and the change they made in democracy and history.  One other person seemed to think that it was a totally new thing, nothing like this had ever happened before in the history of man.  I think her opinion was just that, her opinion, and she was entitled to it.  But somehow almost a year, or is it almost two years later, didn't she forget the "green movement of the Iranian people" in her judgement of middle east change?  I think you can not judge a happenstance from the middle of it, you have to have the clarity of distance to actually see all that was going on for any event of change.
I do find it interested that the people of change, and protest, only see their small part in it and magnify it's importance in regard to the whole event.  Today we are in a  great time of change in the world, not just in America.  We have the social media to credit for it, I don't mean just the facebooks, myspaces or what ever media out let you use, but the media like consciousness of change in general.  We are living in a time where due to the Internet we get to know of a happening in real time but that is not the social media that is changing the current crop of young people.  It is the shared sociability of our time, they get to know how each other think, their cultures are not so alien to one another and they find common ground in knowing each other.  They are a social unit and a product of social media but in the end they are the true social media; but isn't that true of anytime?  All ages share the social closeness that their interaction with each other allows them, more limited in one age than another maybe,  but at the time the most socially aware people have been thus far in time. The printed word was the cutting edge at the time of the American revolution as is the Internet with the current revolutions.  Yes, we live in a smaller world with all of humanity interacting together, but wasn't it a similar reality that all in America could react as one country in a time when it took days or weeks to travel from one end of their world to the other.  Yes, we can travel around the world faster now but the concept is the same, we communicate at the fastest speed we can in our own time.

The green movement was really the beginning of the Arab spring in many ways but it was crushed by Iran. Yes, many of the countries of the Arab Spring have changed leadership but have any of the ones with real oil money and clout changed on any real level? we are at the beginnings of the revolutions and have a long way to go.  The young person who thought I was an idiot was aghast that I should compare the American revolution with this, it took all the way from 1776 to 1792 to be over.  The young person at the time quoted to me that Tunisia and Egypt had changed in months, well, Egypt might have fallen but they have a long way to go to a workable government. Libya is in the same boat.  I watch with interest awaiting the true end, to see how it proceeds and the developments of all the other countries involved.  I may not get to see it in my life time who really knows.
The Occupy Wall Street people think they are the only ones asking for change in our country, they picket and protest, but they look down their noses at the Teaparty people, and vise versa but aren't they really both the extremes of our American society? people trying to make change one from the far left and the other from the far right?  Both groups of protesters that might be included in the Times piece. What of the Russian people standing up for change, something that has never really happened on this level in Russia, even the Russian revolution was different or was it just their answer in their time? What of the unrest in Europe and the change being made there?  Yes, this is a year of protest, or maybe a time of protest, but why don't any of them see that they are not alone in their protest just different solutions, or maybe quests, for change in a time of great unrest and failure of the current status quo... tomorrow.

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