The Chinese Curse

In a recent E-mail journalism list, the discussion centred around the competency and intelligence of today's young reporters compared with those of my generation (I'm 53). One young hack responded: >>I'm sorry that I was not yet conceived when Nixon stepped on that >>helicopter and rode of to write his many books. Maybe what you see as a >>failing of young journalists is just confusion over the reporters and >>what they cover. We simply do not live in as interesting of times. The following is my response to his comment: I know and appreciate where he's coming from. When I was in school I felt the same way. History and adventure and exploration and all those things that had made it so fascinating to study history and read biographies of great people were gone/done/accomplished/explored. What was left? I developed the idea, at that time, that the alleged "curse" of the Chinese, "may you live in interesting times" was no curse, but rather it was a blessing. It wasn't until the anti-war movement and civil rights movements really got going and then the space race and then the Watergate and Pentagon Papers that I realised we'd perhaps been living in a bit of an interim period. It had provided us with a bit of a breather, but the end of history as our parents had known it, most certainly was not over. It wasn't then and it isn't now. In place of the generational and racial conflicts, instead of the corruption, instead of the excitement of two or three of us several hundred thousand miles out in space, we now have the Global Village some dreamt of in those earlier times. But a global village in such a way that very few people who coined and used the phrase in its earliest days could have imagined it. And, best of all, it's one in which we can all participate and from which we can all benefit. I speak, of course, of the Global Village we know as the Net. The Net is providing all the exploration, adventure, controversy, politics, socio-political and socio-economic developments (and much more) that any of us could possibly hope for. It's opening up a world of communications which assures (increasingly so) that everyone within reach of a computer and telecoms setup will have unforeseen amounts of free speech, uncensored by anyone, unregulated by any one. And at the same time untold privacy of communication, because no matter what various authoritarian governments like those of the US and UK try to do to quash that privacy, PGP is here and we all have it or can get it and use it. And the government be damned! Try as they are and as they apparently will continue to do, no government will manage to totally regulate or censor the Net nor invade the privacy of anyone with access to the Net. They may have created it, but like Topsy it just growed and growed and got totally out of their clutches. I can't think of anything any more exciting, interesting, worthy of covering. Copyright © 1999 T Bruce Tober William Davis, a 24-year-old journalist, filed a response.

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