Long, loooong  before there was an Ashton Kutcher or a CNN to tweat at us, the U.S. Post Office Department delivered between 700 and 800 million short text messages attached to some exotic and/or humorous imagery every year.   These bursts of personal information were called Post Cards.  Now here we are some 90 years later seemingly amazed that 1 million people would be receiving a 150 character TEXT ONLY message in a single day.

On Friday night David Letterman and Michael Keaton stumbled through some  anti-twitter, anti-blog, anti-tech attempts at humor.  Perhaps it was all sarcasm, but to me, it made my generation sound very disconnected.

Next came a reading of Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 seminal work “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.  Bucky’s extremely optimistic forecast of life at the turn of the 21st century reveals how many, many things we prefer to ignore rather than deal with “head on”.

This led me to purchase episode 24 of the original Star Trek series “Space Seed”.  My son and I have long debated which should motivate us more, this episode, or it’s sequel, the movie “Wrath of Khan”.  I argue that the televised Khan was much more thought provoking.  A ruthless dictator from Earth’s 1990s flees into space with a cryogenically frozen group of genetically “superior” human beings.  Apparently, the people of our planet were finding, even, super human tyrants intolerable.  After 200 years of slumber Khan looks around the Enterprise and observes how mankind has effectively stood still while technology has advanced significantly around it.

Finally, came a brief aside from my granddaughter as we shopped for some additional low-e light bulbs, “Why are you buying those?  Earth Day is over.”

I am about to embark on an Authorian Adventure
to prove to my granddaughter that the days of Earth are not over,
to promote a world where 190 years henceforth Khan will be just slightly below average,
to put Bucky’s confusing but ever so encouraging rhetoric of plenty into initiatives all generations can embrace,
and to do it all without a whit of twitter.

Stay tuned for my next not-so-subtle-novel-approach to getting the word out.