Uncategorized – Page 26 – The Future is Open

November 9, 2008

Yes we can

Barack Obama won the presidency in large part because he mobilized sections of the electorate that had either never voted before or didn’t feel called to do so. Many of those voters were young people. Some like me who are young at heart and a bit geeky use technology like Facebook and LinkedIn. Thanks to my daughter I’ve become an avid text messager for nearly three years now. I once considered text messaging a ridiculous pastime. I’ve come to appreciate the folly of that outlook. I’ve been authoring a blog for nearly three years and reading blogs for nearly eight years. I get the majority of my news from RSS feeds from the blogs that I regularly read. I rarely watch CNN, Headline News, Fox News, CBS, NBC, or MSNBC. Reading has always been key to my world.

Given all of that I was watching my new HDTV this afternoon. I had it muted as I was reading Huffington Post and as I watched this news show, one after another of talking heads appeared on the screen, each had a BIO next to their name. There were Republican strategists, Democratic strategists, pundits, you name it. The purpose of the show was to analyze the election results and perhaps to spin their own version of how it happened. Here were people analyzing an election that redefined the electoral landscape and they were missing the point. These folks were attempting to define something they don’t understand. The net generation is not left of center or right of center. We don’t need Wolf or Shawn or anyone helping us to understand the news. We’re getting our news not from the old sources but from the net. Barack Obama connected with us on Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and elsewhere. He spoke to us directly at HuffingtonPost and elsewhere without the media filter. We got face time from the man. Barack had to buy television time to get face time with the other folks who aren’t net connected yet.

This election was won in part because a man of vision was able to get his vision out without a media filter and directly to his constituents. Used to be you needed money and sponsors to get on television. Nowadays you need a computer, a webcam and a connection to UStream, Blip.tv, Youtube, or Google Video. Traditional media is done. They don’t realize it yet, but professional journalism is being radically redefined all across the web. In April the Christian Science Monitor will publish its daily edition on the web only. A once a week print edition will serve its more traditional readership.

President-Elect Obama is going still further in his leverage of the web with Change.gov. It’s an open invitation from the Office of the President-Elect to be part of the Obama-Biden transition and it leverages the web.

An ever increasing number of people aren’t getting their news from Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, or Chris Matthews. Their getting all the news they need at Huffingtonpost, Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan, Crooks and Liars, Think Progress, Commondreams, Alternet, FiredogLake, DailyKos, Altercation and many more. Many of the reporters are folks just like me, some are more familiar names but the stories are being told. Editorials are being written on blogs. Traditional new sources are dead. Someone had edited Barack Obama’s section on Wikipedia before midnight on election night with the up to date information.

Marshall McCluhan was right, “the medium is the message.”

November 7, 2008

Mom’s birthday

Last night we celebrated my Mom’s 82nd birthday with a trip to Red Lobster in Blasdell, New York. Mom’s seen a lot of life in 82 years. Born to two working parents in the pre-depression years. Her mother was a court stenographer for the City of New York and her dad was a bailiff in the city court system. She was born Helen Hand. My grandfather died suddenly of pneumonia when she was four and her mother struggled to provide for Mom and my uncle. In the days before social welfare insurance my Aunt Mae and her husband Bill took them in. That environment was very formative for Mom. Mae and her sister Helen were Irish Catholics, Bill was a Lutheran and in that environment my mother grew to accept folks of other religious denominations without question. Bill and my grandmother worked everyday and Aunt Mae took care of the childcare. Mom went to Catholic grammar school and high school and graduated with high honors. She won a scholarship to attend D’Youville College in Buffalo, New York. In the fall of 1944 she boarded a train bound for Buffalo from Grand Central Station in New York. Buffalo was eight hours away and must have seemed like a frontier town compared to New York. Going summers she finished in three years and graduated Magna Cum Laude majoring in Mathematics. In 1947 she was admitted to the masters degree program in Mathematics at Fordham University and in 1948, my mother earned a Masters degree.

She returned to D’Youville College to teach and it was while teaching there that she met my father who was attending Dental School at the University of Buffalo. They were married in 1951 and I came along a little over a year later. Mom had four children, my brother Mark, my sister Kathy and my sister Mary. Mary died in infancy. Mom put her teaching career aside and worked with my father in the dental office for almost twenty years. She returned to classroom in 1970 as my father’s health began to fail and in 1973 after my father died Mom became a full time teacher earning $8500 year. With that money she purchased a home, established credit and provided for all of us and our friends. She taught high school mathematics for twenty years. Life was always tough on Mom but through it all she found a way to be positive. She grew up in a Catholic Church that wouldn’t even allow women on the altar and now she administers communion to the sick and infirm. In 1980 she married Jim Luscher and we now have a huge extended family. He became more than a father to us and she became a mother to his children. Jim died in 1994 of complications of congestive heart failure. I know that was very tough on her, but she’s still going strong fourteen years later. She’s active in church, going to daily mass, distributing communion to the sick and driving friends to doctor visits and the hospital. Mom has email and a cell phone now. It’s difficult for her with her arthritic hands, but she does well in spite of it all.

She has been a model to us all and a tower of strength. I call it the Zen of Helen. Happy Birthday Mom!

November 5, 2008

Interrelated

This came in today’s mail and it’s fitting after the results of yesterday’s election. My wife commented to me this morning that she wondered what Martin Luther King would have thought and said. I thought too of Alex Haley and Kunta Kinte and the generations since the first slave ships came to our shores. We’ve had growing pains but last night stands apart. It was and is a special time. It took an eloquent bi-racial man and the prayers of a nation to bring about the outcome.

In a real sense all life is interrelated. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

–Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

November 5, 2008

Hallelujah

This is a special night. This is one of those watershed events in history. This campaign reminded of the campaign of John F. Kennedy in 1960. I remember that. I was a seven year old boy. This campaign just concluded has surpassed that one in the sense that not only have we elected a new president, but we have done so conclusively. I wonder what Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought of such an event. I am filled with gratefulness and happiness. This is the end perhaps of a long dark night in American politics and policy. I hope that President-Elect Obama can bring our nation together. I am weary of politics as usual and I think that is what President Obama will bring a paradigm change. I believe he will be a consensus builder.

We face a very uncertain future. These are times that will require special leadership and I believe that the creator has heard our prayers. I’ll write more as I’m really tapped out from all of this. I feel very tired tonight, a bit feverish. For nearly eight years now I have been praying for peace, walking for peace, running for peace and just trying to be at peace. Good night. Pax vobiscum.

November 3, 2008

Prepared for heartbreak

I’m not watching the news and I can’t even look at the blogs I normally read because tomorrow and more importantly is the night when my heart will get broken one more time. I’ve been pulling for Barack Obama and our local congressional delegate, Eric Massa. I’m prepared however for the Republican dirty tricks department and another stolen election. Through every form of subterfuge they will attempt to steal the election. They stand to lose too much money if the people win.

As I ran this morning I thought of another man from Illionois who did win the presidency and he did it at a time when the country was equally fractured. There is irony in Lincoln and Obama. Lincoln was the first Republican president and he wanted to save the union, just like Mr. Obama. Just like Mr. Obama he faced the dividers and haters who wanted to tear our union apart.

Now, 148 years later they’re trying to tear us apart once again. This time its not over slavery. I wasn’t going to vote this year. I was going to sit this one out. Obama’s win in Iowa changed that for me. His eventual nomination sealed my duty for tomorrow. I cannot bear the heartbreak of another stolen election.

November 1, 2008

Mena Trott on blogging

This is a really good presentation on the positives of blogging by a woman who knows. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlBTxuWCuL8]

October 30, 2008

Kay Hagan defended

Hat tip to Campbell Brown of CNN for unmasking a phoney advertisement being run by Senator Elizabeth Dole to claim her opponent is Godless. I had more respect for Senator Dole, but it looks like she’s lost her own self-respect in her desire for yet another term. Her husband, whom I voted for in the presidential election of 2006 was once a fan of term limits. Maybe this egregious advertisement will limit Mrs. Dole’s time in the senate. Let’s hope so for the sake of Kay Hagan and the people of North Carolina.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCpv8MPx5GM]

October 30, 2008

A video is worth ….

It’s often been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. How much more is a video worth? Barack Obama had a chance to talk directly to the citizens of the United States without the filter of the media. If you missed this as I did then here’s your chance to see his message. He is a leader that comes along only once in a lifetime. The man brings tears to my eyes. Not everyone does that.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtREqAmLsoA]

October 30, 2008

First Snow

This morning when I opened the garage door I was greeted by this site. I had already given my daughter my ice scraper and snow brush last week so she’d be prepared for the elements. Then of course I forgot to purchase a new one for my car. I started the car and let it warm a bit, used our push broom to remove much of the snow from the windows and then drove to work. The chill wind and snow reminds us all that winter is quickly approaching. Tomorrow the weather is going to moderate and all the snow will melt away.