Just think what we have been witness too..and there is some good shit.
It is so easy now to be angry or full of despair. However, I think sometimes it behoves us to look left, look right and marvel at how far we have travelled. Things are hard for many right now but I was thinking about what I have been witness to since I first arrived on the planet and how much we have progressed in a (relatively) short period of history. For me:
The first female Prime Minister.
At school I was taught touch typing, not a computer in sight.
At uni only one chap had a mobile phone which was as big as a house and needed a battery that filled much of the boot of his car.
DNA (how cool is that?)
The Berlin Wall fell
Apartheid ended.
Getting cash out of the wall rather than having to go into the bank. Immediate financial transactions.
Puters at work.
Email (sometimes I miss letters!)
The internet.
The Northern Ireland Peace Process.
The smart phone.
Broadband. On demand everything! Internet shopping! (Shoes, yum)
GPS – we never have to get lost again. Unless the GPS gets confused and sends us the wrong way down a one-way street. Remember the Atlas on the back ledge of the car?
Digital photography!
First black President.
HIV is manageable rather than a death sentence. We all remember how bad that was, right?
Gay marriage.
The first openly gay cabinet minister.
The second female Prime Minister.
Social networking. Although that could be described as the good (DU), the bad (facebook) and the ugly (twitter).
For all the never-ending shit at the moment; Brexit, Trump, Terrorism, Populism and despair, our time is an amazing time. We have lived through a huge shift in technological advance and an advancement in equality that will be talked about long after we are all dust. Next important priority – we must not let the bastards take us backwards.
What have I missed? Not the shit please. The good stuff. And that includes the stuff I was not born in time for but has impacted on who we are today. I am thinking civil rights, space travel, the introduction of the contraceptive pill, etc etc.
The news cycle right now would bring anybody down. Let's celebrate our generation of genius for a moment.
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