My New Year's Letter

Here is my New Year's letter that I sent out to close friends and family:

Happy New Year to all of you, and as we enter another new year, each of us grateful to be still alive and kicking, here are some of my thoughts about the passing of time:

The 60s are as far away from our present time as the 20s were from the 60s. My kids like to listen to the Beatles and one of my daughters has said that she likes David Bowie. Isn't that comparable to a child in the 60s being into Rudy Vallee or Sophie Tucker? My 12-year old daughter made a phone call to me this year to tell me that she was excited that she was
actually using a rotary telephone at a friend's house, and that she had for the first time dialed a phone number using the rotary dial! And I heard my other daughter talk about how she liked to watch "old movies" (she was referring to movies like "Pretty in Pink" and "The Breakfast Club" from the 80s).

Anyone who is between 70 and 80 years of age has been around for about 1/3 of the time that the United States has been a nation. People in their 40s have lasted through about 1/5 of the tenure of this country.

Though there is nobody alive who remembers the French Revolution or the American Revolution, there are people around who remember the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, each of the World Wars, the Great Depression, men walking on the moon, and the first resignation of an American president. And many of us also vividly recall the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Lennon, Indira Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, and recently, Benazir Bhutto.

There is at least one widow of a Civil War veteran who is still alive (or at least was as of September of 2007). Check this link:
http://www.footnote.com/page/1882/maudie-acklin-cantrell-hopkins-last . And just as amazing, check out this article about Revolutionary War widows who were alive in 1920:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9802E6D9173AE532A25757C2A9669D946195D6CF&oref=slogin . Yes, there are multiple veterans still alive from World War One (not a lot, but still there are more
that you might expect): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_veterans_of_World_War_I .

So many of the things that we take for granted and that are central to the way we live have only been around for a miniscule fraction of the history of humanity: oil, television, the Internet, telephones, computers, automobiles, electricity, microwave ovens...each of these items are used by many of us on a daily basis, but for long stretches of time, people lived without them. Yet one cannot say that the majority of people throughout time lived without them because our planet is so populated that a vast majority of the people who have existed throughout
human history have lived in the last 150 years, well within the domain of time covered by one of these listed inventions. With the population growing and the stores of fossil fuels dwindling, who knows how much longer we will use some of these things?

Also, take into account the number of things that have become virtually extinct, or almost so, by the path of rapid technological change: the telegraph, phone booths, computer bulletin board systems (BBSs), computer punch cards, drive-in movies, the slide rule, the stock ticker, laser disks...I'm sure many of you can think of other things that have become obsolete in the last few years.

Think about your ancestors--you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, expanding by a factor of two as you go back, so when you go back
twenty generations (which could be anywhere between three hundred and a thousand years, depending on the average age of each generation as they had children), you have over a million ancestors! What a paradox this appears to be considering that the human population is growing at an exponential rate, yet as you go backwards, you have more and more people in
your ancestry each generation. Of course, the further you go back, the more you see duplication of the same people in your ancestral lines, so this number may be somewhat (though not completely) illusory. Maybe this helps explain the song, "I'm My Own Grandpa!":
http://www.ziplo.com/grandpa.htm .

Feliz Año Nuevo! Just don't spell it without the tilde or you are talking about a rectal transplant.  Feel free to pass these thoughts along to another gaggle of unwitting victims...or not...