Another Year - 2007

When first learning about years - months - weeks - days and how they are counted, I often speculated about what the 21st Century years would be called orally. It seemed natural to say or write nineteen-thirty or nineteen-forty and even nineteen-nintynine, but I couldn't comprehend calling a year twenty-o-o.

All the years I knew were "something-hundred," as in nineteen-hundred or eighteen-hundred. Or instead of saying nineteen-forty-eight we often shortened it to forty-eight and every one understood the year we spoke of.

Would we call the new century year twenty hundred? 2-0-0-0 was awkward and didn't sound right or musical. Perhaps 20-0-1 would be comfortable to say, but none seemed to roll off as easily as nineteen-ninety-nine. And if I ever knew "K" meant, except for military K-Rations, I'd forgotten it.

And you know what? The year 2000 arrived and I'd lived to the Twenty-First Century. Nothing sensational about the name of the year two thousand but there was much hoop-la. The date change would cause computers to crash because most software would not recognize year two thousand, just as Social Security computers had trouble when people passed a hundred years of age. And then there was the big attempt to frighten people into believing the world would end.

And now it is easy to spectulate that if this world stands, some people living today will still be living in 3000 or K3 or whatever it is called.

How will the world remember US? "Us being not only the USofA, but the entire world. Greedy, adulterors, licentious, gluttonous, cruel, and vile people? Child predators, dope sellers and users, uncontrollable neighbors, unprincipled
nations, reprobate legislators, profiteering presidents, irrational, obscene and vile habitants of this earth?

We seem to be as evil and undisciplined as the Romans before their fall. So which nation will conquer us? Who will be our master?

Or has each century suffered and survived the same conditions that exist today? The Trojan Horse or Weapons of mass destruction, plagues and diseases or aids and immorality, floods and famine or Katrina and African starvation, sheihks and harams or pimps and prostitutes.

Each century suffered the same torments only different. The health fears in my childhood were infantile paralysis, pneumonia, tuberculosis, measels, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, scarlet fever, yellow fever ... diseases rarely seen today in the USofA. Yet, we still have flu but rarely to epidemic proportions and no longer is all cancer fatal and the majority of people survive heart conditions.

War hasn't touched our soil since the nineteenth century and the War between the States, but there was that matter of the Mexican War when the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845-46 sort of mixed in with President Polk's negotiation for California.

In this century some of our fathers and grandfathers were force-marched by the Japanese on Bataan; many of them dropping dead in their tracts . In 1838 Native Americans from our very own state were force-marched to Oklahoma Territory. Those who survived the "Trail of Tears" were resettled on foreign soil without any intervention from President Andrew Jackson.

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we invaded Iraq.
Private employees and American service men number about the same in Iraq.
Anna Nicole and James Taylor are still above ground.
And to quote what's-his-name Grizzard from Newnan, GA, "Elvis is dead and I don't feel so good either."

I could go on and on, but I'll let you come up with world thoughts of your own ... are we better ... no better ... and maybe worse ... that the generations before us.

Peace.