Watch Where You Put Your Feet

Been marveling at young people the last few days. There was a Christmas display, rotating lights of white snowflakes spinning around on the pavement. One small boy was jumping from one snowflake to another as they spun by. The next day in another place, a small boy was playing on the irregular stone pavement, trying to place his feet exactly on the stone bricks so that his feet didn’t go over the end.

Later I brought my new young friend to a party with a bunch of people she didn’t know, and she enjoyed herself. She asked the other young people interesting questions and listened to their answers; they followed up, it went on. A conversation. There was connection and maybe affinities forming, young people meeting like minds and having discussions over a long dinner. It was just beautiful to watch. It was normal, or what used to be normal, before social media encouraged us to hate anyone different from us, before we were encouraged not to get along.

At the moment, I’m grateful for people my age who’ve made (literally) new friends for me to get to know. I like my friend’s kids for the most part. They range in age from their 20’s to 30’s and they are lovely. Yes please. More please. We’ll be alright, if we don’t ruin their lives and opportunities with short-sighted governing.

This crop of tech-bros are an “après moi, le déluge” crowd. Who cares what comes after us, they think, unless, of course, they figure out some sort of organ exchange where they swap out their livers and hearts for new ones, like changing spare parts on a car. (At some point, mister-tech-bros, the chassis rusts out. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.) And let me amend that, no need to swap out their hearts because they never had one in the first place.

When the tech-bros finally make to Mars, their feet will have a hard time staying on the ground. It might feel nice at first, bouncing around in the lighter gravity, but all it takes is one bounce too high and all of humanity will be poised to pull the rug out from under them before they land. They’ll have nothing to do but dance among snowflakes that aren’t really there.