Thursday, December 30, 2004

Uh-Oh's - I'll second that

John Perry Barlow writes:

"At the dawn of this psychotic decade, I proposed, on instinct, that we should call it the Uh-Oh's. Decades need names. How else are we map their unique zeitgeists in our subsequent reflections on them? Imagine, for example, how awkward our historical recollections would become if we could not refer to "the 60's," a decade which needed no adjective, unlike, say, "the Roaring 20's?" The name is the frame, and the frame says it all."

He goes on to tell the tale of his daughter Amelia's skiing trip to Austria (in lieu of a beach vacation in Phuket). This is good writing, I heartly encourage you to follow the link and read the whole thing.

If you need additional incentive, this is how he concludes the posting:

"This is a weird decade, these Uh-oh's. Shit has been happening with a frequency that makes it no less unpredictable. But, as Winston Churchill once said, there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed. That particular adrenalin jolt is no less vivid for its increase. We're halfway through this thrilling stretch of time. We're going to make it, I think, though I obviously don't speak for many of the wretched souls of the Indian Ocean Rim.

But some good may even come of that. Of course, some of my sense of that is purely personal. This horror will be forever anchored to Amelia's recent ordeal in my life's chronology, and I will ever count my blessings that her ending has been so much happier than what has been oozing from my TV screen. And even in a larger sense, I heard this morning that the Tamil Tigers have been working with government troops to bind the wounds of Sri Lanka. That may come to nothing, but at least they're not killing each other at the moment.

Shadows this dark can cast a powerful light. "

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