Our Newly-Lost Sense of Astonishment
If you want to astonish anyone these days, they gotta be someone old enough to pre-date the personal computer. I was astonished when the Atomic Bomb went off above Hiroshima and a couple days later at Nagasaki. Prior to that, I’d found myself astonished at the unbelievable scenes as Nazi concentration camps were liberated.
But I’m old and those were old-timey astonishments.
I bought my first computer in 1982, an Apple Lisa that was touted to be the office machine of the future. As I recall, it set me back $10,000, which was what I had paid ten years earlier for a brand new Mercedes S-Class sedan. Lisa might not have equaled the cost of a Mercedes in '82, but it still cost as much as a hell of a fine brand new automobile. I was astonished.
And I continue to be, but over different stuff and I find more and more that I am alone among my younger friends in my naive ‘gee whiz’ way of looking at this world.
Example: There’s an article in the paper today about speculation that lead poisoning kil…