SPACED OUT

Up early with the Fox Friends to see Atlantis touch down for the last time, I was reminded that July 21, 2011 bookmarked the night, July 20, 1969 when we watched Armstrong take "One Giant Leap For Mankind."  Pregnant with my son, now 42 years old, I watched on black and white t.v. with little doubt that the world awaiting him was a new one.  Ten years later, I found that I relied on my daughter to reset the digital clock on the VCR or advance my wrist watch for daylight savings time.  In my early 30's, I was made to feel pretty antiquated and unprepared for the "New World" of technology into which they were born.  Kids who "touched down" since we landed on the moon were of another species, no longer limited by a world....they were citizens of the Universe and objective observers of those who continue to fight over the past while a Future beckons. 

No grandparent who is asked to watch a wide-eyed child play a video game can ignore the stream of consciousness that has captured our now-elementary school-ers and doubt for a second that the poser who pulled the plug on our Space Program is anything but a bookmark himself, a black face on the "Presidents" ruler to represent the end of the era in this Country that witnessed segregation and racial discrimination.  To the children of the NASA transition team, nothing adults consider limitations rates so much as consideration.

Games that permit the kids to "computer model" communities, teach them ways to build and manage wealth.  Games that challenge their imagination to find alternatives for opening doors, climbing levels and scaling walls remind adults that what began as ping-pong, shoot-em-ups and PAC-man gorging has evolved into incredible options for exploration and consideration.  Few kids have time for deeply-seated hate notions.  They regard girls as true challengers to their own mental agility development and with a nod to the tradition of learning to do better, the Class of 2018, Children of the New Millennium, will have their Eyes On The Prize and step blithely to a Universe in which the Euro, the IED, the Teleprompter Of The United States are "retro" symbols of a mis-guided, frenzied cacophony of the last ones to occupy the seats of "power" before "power" became a tool of the system, not a coveted jewel of the ambitious.