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Eulogy for the Industrial Age
by Ray Strackbein
We owe our existence and success to the Industrial Age. To ease your transition to the Information Age, understand the benefits of the Industrial Age.
Industrial Age Conquered Famine
The Industrial Age allowed us to feed the world.
It built our plows and tractors. It created the fertilizer to grow our food. It built the trucks and highways, boats, and planes to deliver food to people throughout the world. Famine, which used to be
catastrophic, is now rare. When people do starve, it is not because of technology, but politics.
Industrial Age Brought Abundance
The Industrial Age made life easier for all of us.
Immigrants and short-term workers migrate from agricultural economies to industrial and information economies. They migrate for a better life. They migrate and work to send money back to their
families. They often choose to leave their villages, gardens, and farms into what we here call poverty. They call it abundance.
Industrial Age Brought Safety
The Industrial Age conquered illness.
Small Pox is gone. So is polio. Leprosy is treatable. Wild animals are not a threat. Entire towns and villages no longer burn -- recall the great fires of Chicago and San Francisco. Quality of life is
better. Average life expectancy is longer. We are safer and happier.
The Legacy of the Industrial Age: an Easier Life
To see the legacy of the Industrial Age, look at photos taken in the mid-1800's as we entered the Industrial Age.
Look at the faces of the people in the photographs. Read the lines of an incredibly hard life on their wrinkled, leathery-tough skin. Guess the age of the people in the pictures. Why do they look like they might
be eighty or ninety years old, yet the caption says only half that? Why are their teeth missing yet we have ours? As we enter the 21st century, we look younger and happier because of the benefits of the
Industrial Age.
To the Information Age:
May we reap your blessings and bring even more benefits
to humanity in the 21st century as did the 20th. May we pass those blessings to all of the creatures, beyond us humans. As we create our future may we enrich the Earth.
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