Life

A lot has been said about Twitter since it inception.  From WTF? to this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and everything in between.  I must admit, at fist I was skeptical of it, gave it a try early on and was not hooked.  About a year ago, I came back to it and noticed that it had picked up a little steam, so I thought I would give it another try.  I did and have stuck with it ever since.  I have various conversations with people who did not get it or did not think that it would become main stream.  I am not saying that it is completely main stream, but it is certainly making great strides.

Today I witnessed first hand how the Twitter effect is having an impact on the main stream.  I got a tweet today from a friend of mine that stated:  “Twitter AMBER ALERT @genochurch’s 14 yr old daughter is missing http://ping.fm/SUJAl - PLEASE RETWEET”.  A few minutes later, I got this tweet from another friend:  “http://tinyurl.com/5yodvb - Missing 14-year old girl in SC area. Pass it on. (We’d all want someone to do the same for us.)”.  I immediately re-tweeted this message so all those that follow me could spread the word. 

It in a situation like this that a mechanism to get important and vital information out as quickly as possible is of the utmost importance.  Twitter provides the platform to accomplish such a thing and today it did just that.  Within 10 minutes, other major news outlets started picking up the story, but by that time it had spread throughout the Twitterverse.  In the past, the AP wire served as the vehicle to get important news and messages out, but it seems as if there was a delay associated with that.  In this day and age of citizen journalism, Twitter provides a much faster way in which to disseminate that information.

It would be great to see Twitter set up some sort of posting mechanism that public service organizations could send a message to and then Twitter could tweet it out to everyone in the Twitterverse.  Of course this suggestion is littered with the potential for abuse, but I am sure that there are certain technical hurdles not to mention process hurdles that could be put in place to cut down the possibility of abuse.  One would hope that the greater good of humanity would outweigh the possibility for abuse, but you can never be certain.

Say what you want about Twitter, but the power of the tool cannot be denied, and in situations like this, you can see how it does in fact serve the greater good.

As the afternoon moved along, I took a look at what the stock market was doing.  It should not have surprised me, it has been going down for the last 5 days.  It was down around a hundred points at the time I checked, I figured oh well, it will probably drop 150, could be worse.  That was a complete understatement, it dropped 678 points, today.  Just when I thought it could not get any worse, it did.  So it left me thinking now what, what is going to happen next.

Let’s make no bones about it, we are in a recession.  I always thought that was the sort of thing that you read about in the history books, not something that would actually happen during my lifetime.  We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis in the last half a century.  In the last 100 years, there has only been one worse than this, the great depression.

On my way home today I thought about my wife’s grandfather and grandmother (they are not married, one is her mother’s father and the other her father’s mother) and how they grew up during the great depression.  I have heard stories of what life was like, and it sure did not sound pretty.  I am certain that once the great depression was over and their respective families got back on their feet, they thought that it could never happen again.  Fast forward to today, and they are smack dab in the middle of another great economic crisis.

I can only hope that our nation will pull together and get through this as a united nation, not divided.  I do not know what is going to happen next, but I am sure thankful for what I have.  I am lucky to have such a supportive, loving family.  I am so grateful to be surrounded by such a caring wife and sweet children, they are my strength.  Together, we will get through whatever lays ahead of us.  I have no idea what will happen next with our economy and our nation at whole, but I have faith that we will all pull through.