Grandson

I will not be around to actual see the future that I envision.  A wonderful and exciting future.  A future that my grandson will not only live to see but be a part of.  A significant part, I expect.  He is 15 and straight A's in school.  A gifted athlete that excels in any sport he chooses.  Handsome and socially skilled.  He has everything going for him.

This summer we will travel in Europe together.  A journey that I hope will contribute greatly to the distance he will go in life.

I wish my father was alive to see where the progress made during his lifetime has taken us.  He was born in 1903.  The year the Wright brothers flew.  The excitement of his lifetime was trains, planes, automobiles, electricity, electronics.  He enjoyed reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. 

I was born in 1943.  By the 1960's planes and automobiles were still exciting things in the physical world but my first trip in a jet airliner was not much different than the essence of flight today, which is not just the meal.  Electronics were still evolving as far as consumer products go.  It was the dawning of the applied computer age.  My first assignment in the navy was stock control officer on a supply ship off Vietnam using an IBM punch card machine to keep track of all the inventory, issues and receipt processes as well as the related financial information.

Things have come so far since then but, like my father, I am and continue to be fascinated by their progress and even more fascinated by where they going.  While I think I may see where they are going in a future that I will never know, grandson Declan will see it.  So will his brothers.

Have I learned anything and turned that learning into insight and wisdom that might give Declan, who has so much potential, a leg up, a head start, an advantage in comprehending the future that he will be stepping into by seeing a clear picture of where the world is today.

One of my favorites is:  I can't get where I am going if I do not know where I am at.  I am exactly where I am at any given time.  Where is that?  I think that I get better at answering that question every day.  At least, trying to understand and, I think, actually getting somewhere.  Otherwise I would give up, get a rocking chair and focus on the past.  Over and over and over until it was all over.  Might as well have lost my mind.

Conceptual Things are the new exciting stuff of this century like Industrial Things were last century.  The excitement of progress in a conceptual world that Declan will grow up in.  We have the conceptual tools to create growth in that world like we had the industrial tools to advance in the previous century.

Industrial things also brought us a couple of world wars or simply the continuation of motivations for wars fought with better weapons.  Territorial gain for power to control, extract, dominate for self interest.  Conceptual things are the latest tools of war that achieve the same goals but with less mass physical destruction. 

The bright future I see in contrast to war being fought with conceptual tools is that if we gain control of the concepts we can ultimately fight the war to end all wars.  The war on cancer, drugs, other countries, religous wars, political wars, class wars, social wars of all kinds.

Money and Finance and the role they play this century is one of the most fascinating and exciting things that this century will probably see as they will be restructured by revolutionary new concepts that implement themselves in new systems that serve us better to get where we want to go.

By the end of this century, spirituality  will emerge as the the next era of exiting conceptual expansion progression.  While I think about that.....thinking.... thinking....it is really ahead of my time and far beyond what I care to think primarily about now.  Others are and that is good. 

Concepts of Money and Finance excite me now.  Joining the navy for a career was  the industrial vehicle associated with a social cause (I was really convinced I was defending my country against all enemies every time I took the solemn oath) for maximum adventure in my lifetime. 

If I could do it again I would join up with the forces to defend the country from foreign and domestic enemies that would seek to destroy the public hopes and dreams of freedom, justice and equality.  The enemies that are not vast armies that wage war.  Vast armies do not benefit from war, they only die.  The ones that profit from war in terms of power, control and self interest today do not have vast armies to fight their wars, only vast victims of ideology which, in large part the victims of the ideology support!

The ones that are profiting are very, very few.  They have a great amount of power.  They have a great amount of risk.  Risk against which they cannot insure themselves for any amount of money

In the end, this concept will triumph:  Power is derived from the consent of the people.  The information age is all about empowering people.

Industrial war was, god help me, exciting.  Conceptual wars of money and economics in this century is even more exciting.  Unfortunately they will implement themselves in the remnants of old style industrial war making.  The nature of old style industrial war will however be fundamentally different.  Not armies and navies of millions of men with  more or less equal magnitude/power relationship going out to fight the war instigated and directed by the few. The new equation is more like the management/union wars in the early part of the last century.  A few that control only a few but the ones they control are armed with guns against clubs and they were backed up by a government that could send in the army if necessary.

Declan is going to grow up and live in exciting times.