One Man’s Opinion, “We’re from Georgia AIM -We’re Here to Help,” Monday, October 7, 2024, 750 words
In looking forward and embracing our future yet to come, I often find benefit in looking back. One of my favorite quotes by author/humorist Mark Twain, speaks to, with more than a bit of tongue in cheek…the American fear of innovation and ‘things new.’
“I am all for progress. It’s the damn change that I am against” Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910).
In my own lifetime and career, I began with news operations, shooting film, equipment weighing hundreds of pounds, dot matrix printers and MS-Dos based computers, pre-Internet, Email and texting. The early adopters had mobile phones that looked like monstrous walkie-talkies, and pagers and began discussing sharing files and protocols on the Interwebs, designed and intended primarily for academic research and advancing science.
The U.S. Industrial Revolution and factories moved a largely male workforce away from farms, mines, foundries, forges and repair shops onto the assembly lines. Fear of business and job losses were instead followed by the creation of labor unions, various workplace benefits and the many positive aspects of modern big business. Later as automation and robotics came on the scene, or as the Internet became part of the fabric of American life and business, again we feared the loss of jobs, needs for skills training and instead saw the most robust period of economic year over year growth in modern American history, including a handful of BALANCED federal budgets coming from Congress and the White House, despite divided government in the mid-1990s.