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January 29, 2003

Perspectives!

I've a birthday due before long. As you might suspect, there's good news and bad news. One piece of good news? I know for an absolute certainty that I won't, unlike seven of my uncles, die before age 60.

In my lifetime I've seen many good inventions, and some bad. One of the best was the almost miraculous device with which I keyboard this column of personal opinion: the Macintosh computer. My thanks to Pacifican Jef Raskin, in whose fertile imagination the Mac first began to take shape. The Mac provides strengths where I'm weakest. I'd have been a terrible secretary. My fingers don't always hit the right keys at the right time. I also constantly second guess myself. I need to change words, move them to and fro. I edit myself interminably. Thanks, Jef.

I came to the conclusion long ago there's always a balance. Life is a zero sum game. Computers: a plus. Speed bumps: minus. That adds up to zero. Speed bumps were invented in my lifetime, and without getting my ok. Their inventor should be made to drive at high speed for hours on end over mile after mile of his creation. I presume the inventor was a man. I think a woman would have better sense.

Another rotten invention? Soundwalls! Those monstrous miles of boring brick should be torn down, or at least graced at intervals with statuary, windows or even billboards. To be that boring should be against the law. I can phone Crescent City and pay five cents a minute. It used to cost 27 cents a minute to call Walnut Creek. That's a plus. The balancing minus? Phone companies competing ferociously for my business, but charging me for Directory Assistance, people telemarketing me at inopportune times from Nova Scotia or India, and phone companies sending me gift checks to suck me back into their system. I pay far more for phone service than ever before. Twenty five years ago, when AT&T was still a bad old monopoly, my phone bill was a fraction its present size, and that's allowing for inflation. As for SBC, formerly Pacific Bell, that acronym says it all.

When, in the winter of 1956, I had good reason to argue about a particular phone bill, the phone company representative was the soul of courtesy, though she never gave an inch. When she later discovered I might be in the right, she called back to concede my argument. Even had she not, I'd been extremely impressed with her diplomacy and tact in a difficult situation. When it comes to phone service, I prefer 1950's style, thanks. Deregulation is the pits. Same for airline deregulation. Gas and electric utilities? Ditto.

Today's 30 year olds take medical advances for granted. They're not much impressed with penicillin, polio vaccine, or the various preventives like annual flu shots. No one's died or been horribly disfigured by Smallpox in several decades. Polio may be gone entirely from the world by February 23, 2005, the centennial of Rotary International, which has contributed tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of volunteer hours with that extravagant goal in mind. Without polio vaccine, Terra Nova High today might have 30 or 40 students in wheelchairs or Iron Lungs. The student body would be mourning the deaths of several more. Every school nationwide would be grieving, as we did so often in the forties and fifties. Thank you, Dr. Salk. Thank you, Dr. Sabin.

Today's high school kids will probably live longer. Many Terra Nova grads of 2003 may last into their nineties. Several may survive more than a century. My wish for them: may you live long, but may the quality of your lives match the quantity of your years.

The Reactor's e mail address: Paul@thereactor.net. Check his website at www.thereactor.net.

 
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