Modern conveniences have spoiled me. Nuke something (via microwave) and have a meal in a few seconds. Refrigerators with built in ice makers. CD and MP3 players and home theater surround sound systems with speakers and woofers that are almost invisible. I use voice over Internet protocols, so I don’t have a telephone land line and don’t pay phone bills. Of course, the phones themselves don’t have wires, either. Just a handset and a charging station.

How fast can I travel the country, or the world, via aircraft? Many waits in security lines and processing to board the aircraft now take longer than the flights.

Once I thought color television was amazing. The rotating mechanical outside rotary antenna supplanted color television as an incredible addition, adding so many more channels. I think we were able to get about eight. Then came cable, and the cable explosion.

Now I don’t have cable or a rotating antenna, nor a satellite dish. I receive over the air broadcasts via a digital indoor antenna, and supplement my watching habits with Roku devices on two televisions. The third television is a curved, high definition smart TV. It doesn’t need a Roku. It has a wireless connection to the web, a ‘smart TV’.  Its screen is 55 inches but it weighs about forty pounds, though it has stereo speakers built into it. Through the Roku and smart TV, I stream offerings from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Now, Acorn and Showtime. I have monthly subscriptions but these cost me almost nothing. I use Swagbucks to buy gift cards to pay for these subscriptions.

My computers have gone from heavy, thick machines with a small green screen (and no mouse or pointing devices, back then) to sleek, four pound laptops. Enhanced Graphics – wow, sixteen colors! – gave way to VGA to digital graphics and plasma screens. My mouse is wireless. I can take my computer anywhere and connect to wireless systems, using its battery pack to write and converse with people around the world, watch videos, or create posts, like this, that others can read within seconds of me clicking ‘publish’.

All of these are almost taken for granted but the stuff in my car continues impressing me. I’ve had it almost two years, and two things, the climate control, the keyless entry, and the headlights, keep me impressed.

With the climate control, I rarely touch them. The air conditioning and heater are utilized to keep the temperature on my side of the vehicle at whatever I’ve chose. The fan kicks on to a higher speed if necessary to cope with colder or hotter conditions. Sometimes, when it’s really cold, I turn on the seat’s heater. All of this is a long way from rolling down windows, adjusting vents, sliding heating and air con controls back and forth, and turning fans on higher or lower. The car does all these things for me.

Likewise, the keyless entry impresses me. I put the fob into a pocket and forget about it. Press a button to unlock the doors. Press another to start the car. No key.

The headlights are always on, dimming themselves as needed, turning around corners to minimize blind spots, raising and lowering to keep level in relationship to the car and road’s angles. This, again, is a long way from the early days of turning the headlights on, stamping on a metal cylinder to toggle the high beams on and off. The metal cylinder gave way to switches on sticks mounted on the steering wheel column.

How long these will continue impressing me, I don’t know. Digital clocks and watches long impressed me. Cable television amazed me for about four years, I think, because it soon became a flawed offering. But the things that concern me each day are not these amazing devices, but more basic matters, like water and drought. Where are the modern devices to deal with those? And what about the hand gun deaths in the United States? I understand the second amendment but I really thought we could hold two positions in our minds and intelligently address these.

I must pause to write, too, and note, yes, and what of prejudices, prejudices based on sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, poverty, race, the color of your skin, or even your clothes or the way you wear your hair, and your politics, and your education, and the way you speak?

Of course, the flow is all about money. There is money in prejudice as fearful people keep pathetic power hungry people in leadership positions. If there was more money in solving the drought or improving water efficiency, more modern conveniences would emerge to deal with those issues. We see that happening on the power side. I have passive solar panels on my roof but I’ve had them almost ten years. I take them for granted, too, although I do pause when passing the invertor to see how many watts my system is generating, and I look at the electric bill each month. Yet its technology has already improved and that system is how the mechanical antenna with its rotor was like compared to cable.

I don’t mean this to sound or be self-congratulatory. It’s meant to be a reflection of the changes witnessed, no matter which direction they went, in my lifetime. The world amazes me, but I’m frustrated that we can’t solve or seem even to address some issues, because there’s no profit involved. Where profit becomes involved, like housing, heathcare, agriculture and politics in America, the results become depressing, with profits, power and control overwhelming the common good.

Yet, perhaps because I write fiction, and was raised on Star Trek, or maybe because I’m a natural optimist who hates giving up on anything, I keep hoping and believing that change will come our way. We’ve elected, at last, a black human to be America’s President. A female, at last, is being nominated for the Presidency (assuming all goes well between now and the convention). And the Pope has apologized for some of his religion’s more regretful recent issues, and is pushing his church to be a more charitable and humane organization, the way it was originally intended (I think…).

The USA has even re-established relations with Cuba. Back in my youth, in the 1960s, we were in the cold war with the USSR, which no longer exists, and fighting a hot war in Vietnam (which now manufactures our consumer goods). Hot wars around the world still subsume our energies and destroy lives and the planet. Cue Edwin Starr: “War! Good God, y’all. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” And people will argue, no it’s necessary to deter aggression and right wrongs.

Maybe it was once. But now I think of war as a small black and white portable television, with a tiny screen and limited reception. Unfortunately, there remains too much profit in war for anyone to rush to do away with it.

What we need to do is find the profit in peace. And then the modern convenience machine will go right to work.