Les 
If you are older than dirt you can remember a time when computers had two operating systems. Windows basically was stolen and homogenized to be used by Microsoft. I would say they perfected it but the only thing they perfected was being mediocre. Anyway, you had the disk operating system or DOS and windows would shell itself over it. It was clumsy to say the least. If you did anything more important than playing solitaire you might find yourself ripping your hair out trying to resolve issues between the two. The first time I tried to play Doom I almost checked myself into a looney bin. I never knew such molten anger.
I literally felt myself grit my teeth when I wrote that.
All this time later I guess they managed to dissolve that rift. The delivery system has become more efficient. Not perfect mind you, just much more refined. In the time they took to make this progress computers became phones. Computers became television. Computers became radio. They became a point source of information as most homes in the developed world brought their encyclopedias to the curb. Humans purged the old world without so much as giving it a thought. We felt free. Unwired. Wood paneling just didn’t make sense. Exactly how could anybody actually convince themselves that was THE look?
We stood together at the dawn of the new century wondering where we were going. We boarded a ship so excited for a new destination that we didn’t realize the ship had no sails and was bolted to pilings. It was an amusement park ride that only existed to provide a virtual experience. All the things it replaced meanwhile would wither on a vine behind a particle board wall painted any shade of cheap.
If we go back into human existence far enough you can see we only really worried about making it to the next day. Whether we lived or died the tree’s really didn’t care. Everything we invented was to make our lives easier. Fire was huge! The wheel! Those little skid plates that make moving furniture or cabinets around the house without having to pick them up! We generate life through love and innovation! Every successful generation made living just that much easier and through the passage of time we find ourselves where we are now.
We find ourselves deceptively safe. Like livestock peering through the rungs of an electrified fence. We are like parts of a circuit that serves purpose and function. Important but only as long as the power is on. What is a television with no electricity? What is a society?
As a society we have to make decisions that don’t make sense to everyone. That’s how societies work. Everything is a general consensus. We will all find ourselves as an outlier in someones bell graph sooner or later. The most deceptive politicians know that in order to be deft in their abilities to debate they have to know how to craft their arguments to include a level of personal in order to take you in, even though they know you don’t agree with everything they believe. They have to phase between points of view. That’s why I don’t argue about politics anymore because we all truly want the same things, but we can’t stomach that we might need to break eggs to make omelets. We can never truly ever always agree. That’s not possible with humans. How much history would you have to ignore just in your own family much less in the world?
A one world government is on a scale so large that it couldn’t make anyone happy no matter how hard it tried to force you.
I’m reading a book named “Silence” by A fellow named John Cage. He was an American composer, mid-last century who is famously known for taking the stage to play his new composition. He lifted the cover on the piano, set a timer, and just sat there. He pointed out afterwards that every sound that happened was a part of the composition. A cough, a creaking chair, someone laughing. He was making a point about humanity that when really thought about becomes quite breathtaking; who decides what is music? Who decides when and how is music? Or anything for that matter?
I made the same argument to my Mother when I was 14. I told her that I didn’t need to know how to tune a guitar to play it. She almost returned the guitar. I’m glad she didn’t. Some say even to this day that I never learned to tune my guitar.
What we really learn from such exercises is reality is our own point of view. Like a Jackson Pollock painting you either accept it or not.
I used the Windows operating system to illustrate a point: windows at that time was only a better interface for the real operating system underneath it all. But without DOS it was worthless. Just a more glamorous shell covering the skeletal subsystem underneath slaving away rowing the galley.
The most important thing to take away from all of this is how important it is that we keep continuing forward. I didn’t write any of this to suggest we go back to fighting for our lives trying to find something for our family back in the cave to eat. Far from that. I’m suggesting that we continue to realize that we invent because we love each other.
Windows was put in place because it made computers work better one would guess.
Bill Gates is a strange guy.
Where do we find ourselves on his bell chart?
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