21st Century

This whole global connectedness kind of bugs me.  People are constantly talking about how the world is so different now because we are all connected via the internet.  There is a huge problem with this idea that we're all so connected.  Part of that has to do with how we view life on the planet at this time.

Not too long ago my niece Sina and her family made a road trip from sunny Utah to sunny Long Beach.  Here are the things that her kids had on the summer road trip that we didn't have on road trips when I was a kid:

• Air Conditioning  (this is huge in the summer because to get from Utah to Long Beach you have to drive across a big very hot desert)
• Dual DVR players in the van so that the kids can watch the movie they want to without fighting about it.
• Hand held Nintendo games
• Seat belts

When I was a kid we were hot, tired and fought all across the desert.  My parents must've been crazy to think we should go on long road trips.  Not only that, we camped... in tents... there were no swimming pools or room service.  

So here is the perfect example of how life is better now than it was in the last century. 

Now let's think about the 7,000,000,000 people on the earth today.   I read several months ago that to be in the 1% of the wealthiest people in the world, you only need an income of $30,000 a year.  I think that just about everyone I know is in that group.  I wonder what your income has to be to enable you to be globally connected?  I wonder what percentage of people on the planet right now are even literate.  My guess is that for the majority of people on the planet right now, in the 21st century, life isn't that much better than it was 1,000 years ago.