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Jack is starting out his second week of life today. He arrived a little early, and now he’s catching up – chugging along the milky road towards the happy, active little boy he’s clearly going to be.

Out on the cultural front, that first week was on the remarkable side. I saved a couple of front pages for Jack. While I don’t have any particular need to “believe” in it, change is certainly showing up – in capital letters.

CHANGE
Here in the U.S., we had:
The first white woman who could conceivably have won the election, vying for the Democratic nomination for President,
--this past week conceded that nomination to her opponent,
who was the first man-described-as-black to vie for nomination for President,
--and is now the first man-described-as-black to become the presumptive Democratic candidate for President of the United States.
Sorry it’s so awkward to frame, but there are a lot of issues here. 
(Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman to vie for Democratic nomination, that was in 1972. Hillary Clinton is also the first ex-First Lady to run for the nomination, if I can trust Wikipedia. Barak Obama is the son of a white woman from Kansas. His father was from Kenya. See what I mean?)

The perceptually challenged are having a hard time with this shift. But more about that in another post.

PARALYSIS
Today I’m interested in some other changes to do with how we’re getting around. Some of us are up against near-paralysis at the price of fuel, others are simply frowning at the pump. The effects of gas prices are all over the map. Bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are seriously vogue. Walking shoes must be selling well too.

QUALITY
The quality of life is slipping for lower income families who must decide between transportation and other basics, but air quality may be coming up. Actually, is it a lower quality of life to leave the car in the driveway and ride the bicycle a couple miles to the store? Is it a lower quality of life to share a ride? Traffic is lighter. I haven’t seen a chart yet that shows the impact that less cars on the road has on our timebomb-timeline for greenhouse gases, but it must be making a difference in the right direction.

I don’t know, Jack, is life out of balance, or is the balance simply less recognizable?

OPTIONS
So we’re exploring our options. This is an exercise in perception: What we perceive as impossibly broken we will not waste our energy attempting to fix. But I see options. For example, I bet a lot more people could work from home if they had to. Most of us have computers and a decent connection to the Internet. Not everyone, but pretty much. How about someone starts up some educational website that shows employers how to adjust their work flows so employees can commute less? One, two days a week from home?

Or, what if we started using some of those big empty spaces in our malls and office complexes, to create more versions of shared office spaces, so people could have short commutes to localized workplaces? Anybody working on that idea?

Options. As Boomers, with the future in our hands and the ability to communicate any and every thing we perceive about life today, what excuse will we offer this newest generation for our failure to act? And what stories of triumphal innovation will we be able to share?

I'm waiting to hear from you,
Suzanna Stinnett