Monday, February 23, 2004

Listening to the BBC on the way home from work (I swear to God that I'm in more danger, late nights, listening to NPR, driving head on into traffic on Arsenal by mistake than any of the risks of drunk drivers. I can see the headlines "Dead man forgot what country he was in."), and I don't think I quite understood it, but it sounded as if the Irish Presidency of the EU made of their priorities AIDS, especially in future EU member nations. It sounded almost like a branding pitch for how effective Ireland's idea would be in making the world a better place. Which sounds like about the best world cup ever, getting countries to compete for the best, coolest program ever, to make the world a better place. How cool would that be? Nations fielding million person marching bands instead of armies, capabable of creating such a huge noise that you could, in fact, entertain neighboring nations. This was a restaurant epiphancy weekend, ringing what I think may be the biggest ring ever for Sqwires, and surviving unscathed myself, and I think, more imporantly, without scathing others. And, more imporantly, am so reminded that the Lord will provide. Also, writing that, that what Christianity strives for, largely vainly, is that peace that passeth human understanding, that you don't get by singing hymns or coffee hour. Only through a deeper engagement of the fundamental question of what it is that transcends me. And the endless, and sometimes violent and ugly and divisive, struggle to name what that is. I was thinking tonight, after hearing about the Kikrut suicide bombing, how quickly all violence would cease in an enlightened society. Those who wanted to kill one another would eventually disappear, without inciting fear and retribution among the enlightened survivors. There may be only a few members of humanity left by that time, but they would be the survivors, and really the repositories of genetic, or whatever stuff of which we are made, for the next big step in whatever journey it is we follow. John and I talked about the difficulty we always have in trying to decipher paths in information technology, create visions of the future, without thinking of those new technologies as being the answer, the best thing ever. While it's impossible to predict the exact future, we can be smart enough to give our progeny many more options and paths to follow, which includes limited the proprietary, that may lock us for years down an evolutionary path that dimishes us all in some way, either short, but especially, long term. 1:48:30 AM