| 6.7 Billion of Us .. ea birkett |
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| blogs - Opinions and impressions | |
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 The year i was born, the world was navigating through some perilous political shoals. A satellite was launched that achieved the first ever geosynchronous orbit. The USSR and the USA were trying to out-launch each other in the race to take over space and win the cold war. Thousands of missiles pointing at each other made a very uncomfortable détente. The cold war somehow remained luke cool. Meanwhile, Valium was created, packaged and brought to market. Beatle-mania swept through the UK and the wave would soon crash over Europe and North America. The miniskirt was born. All was groovy.
Martin Luther King was working out the last lines of his speech for the march on Washington ...I had a dream... . Kennedy didn't yet know it but he would be assassinated before i saw a birthday cake. During my first year of life we witnessed the first artificial heart transplant, the first liver, lung and kidney transplants. Quasars were discovered, and the atom's nucleus got broken down further than ever imagined by Einstein. At night while i slept in my crib, a group soon to be called the FLQ or Front de Liberation du Quebec was secretly forming in my city. The FLQ would shake and rattle the foundations of Montreal with bank robberies, bombings and kidnappings. One province over, Canada fired up it's first CANDU nuclear reactor. On the other side of the world pieces of Africa were gaining independence, trying to move forward against great corruption. In Vietnam, as a protest, an elderly Buddhist monk doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. Somewhere along the way (1975ish?), the West was still living with a great and very profitable fear of communism. Across Europe the borders of political ideology literally bristled with missiles. Africa and South America became the new battleground of manipulation. Atrocities are as old as man, but Africa, Vietnam, and Cambodia took it to new level. So many souls left the planet. I bought a guitar and absorbed enough to learn how to play. Soldier of Fortune magazine hit the news stands, and the Mexican authorities, pressured and funded by the US's new $35 million program of War against Drugs, began spraying paraquat on the mexican pot crops. The pot was still harvested and most of it ended in the US and Canada, smoked by the youth of the nation. I was probably mastering my third chord while Lebanon dissolved into civil war. The fuse that would ignite the Middle East was laid and lit. Far far away in Canada, we smoked paraquat pot, Lebanese hash and laughed our guts out watching the Saterday Night Live. There sure was a lot to ponder on, sitting in my parents home while strumming a chord or two. 2008 - World Population 6.7 Billion The planet's population has more than doubled, and those crazy shoals are still being navigated, are still perilous. The situation is still fluctuating somewhere between boiling and tepid, but we've made it this far. Oh... and about that Mayan Calendar...
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