Change I - Oceans

As a tech rep contracted to the Navy down in Puerto Rico, I was fortunate to be allowed in with the Navy dive club and over a few months earn a NAUI open water and later a PADI divemaster rating. Basically if I wasn't working I was getting fifty cent air tank fills and diving.  Scuba day and night, shore dives and boat dives. My vacation days were spent at other dive sites a plane hop away in the British and US Virgin Islands.  Manatees, shark, big lobster (one of the few things we hunted - in general not much on spearfishing etc.), octopus, Moray eels, and every color of amazing fish. Beautiful coral polyps out filter feeding. An amazing time to dive.

The 1980s were a time when very little coral bleaching was seen - even post storm damage the coral bounced back quickly. However diving in 2005 near St John twenty years had a big impact. The small but constant oil input from motorboats, sea acidification increase from higher CO2 levels, and slight increase in temperature had combine to create large bleached and dead areas in fragile coral. New divers thought the coral skeletons were the norm and I generally didn't talk much about my disappointment. Trash in the form of waste was more common too. Plastic especially.

There are good spots I have seen and still others I'm told.  There are some protected areas free from motor oils and diesel exhaust are faring better such as several large Cuban preserves where the stressors are limited to just CO2 and temperature and the coral fairs better with smaller damage. Overall however the destruction is unmistakeable in the 35 years I have been in scuba. With my own eyes I can tell you the Caribbean is suffering.

The oceans are our best hope keeping this planet's life healthy. They are in peril and not close to fully functioning. Islands of plastic, dying coral, and overfished populations of sport fish are having the effect of killing the seas we love. Simply by chance my job and hobby let me testify to this personally.

Observing the changes

As a young man my first part time job was moving stock for a department store. Oddly I could actually afford a cheap apartment at 19, a motorbike, and a series of jalopies. My spitfire with used beer tap shifter was the most fun but always falling apart. Working about 30 hrs a week and going to a local Community College. In the late seventies. I also worked part time as a 'data aide' at the college which gave me a little something technical for a beginning resume.

Imagine being able to do that today on a retail job. Not a chance. Oh I had a roommate or two to help pay the bills now and then. When a sharp professor of computer science saw some ability I was able to get an entry level programming job. Computer Data Systems Inc was a contract shop that put jobs on my resume and taught me the ropes.  I worked with talented men and women of all races and backgrounds. No longer the most talented guy in the room like at school, I had to scramble to learn. I loved every minute. Later I worked with the prof who got me my start on a military computer communications job.  Spec'd as a four person two year job, we brought it in two weeks late with just the two of us during the majority of the work and occasional coworkers that would quit under the load.  I often fell asleep at the computer console late at night.

Next I moved to an 8A computer consulting firm doubling my entry salary to one pretty decent for a young man. Eighteen months later back to CDSI for a military contract in Puerto Rico.  Forty hours a week most of the time with occasional late night emergency. Suddenly I had time to bike, dive, and sail. With a Divemaster rating I spent a great deal of in the early eighties diving all over the Caribbean.  I enjoyed a relatively still healthy Caribbean sea - very little bleaching, mostly beautiful coral.

This is why I feel uniquely a witness to what is happening in our world. I've watched the incredible evolution of inequality. Or perhaps it's return. The changes fossil fuel energizing the world but also dumping CO2 into the air have wrought.  I'm not especially noble, just a good puzzle solver who was fortunate to turn that into a career.  As an OWG - happily retired I have a chance to give back a little perhaps. If just a couple people read what I've seen and are woke from the lullaby conservative media hypnotize people with - maybe I'll tip the scales for a little more positive karma to help save our grandkids.

Content is easier to fantasize than create. Well 1st steps.

Ouch I just looked at the date on the first and only post for 20thCV.

OK this content thing is clearly a challenge for me. One thing that I considered with an idea like 20thCV was the content would try to look at both the lonely side now and the interesting parts of living through the turn of the century. While staying honest about a quiet solitary life. Still it's hard to write - so it may return to cobwebs again. If not - well it may be a little lame.

My first memory is of my mom crying next to an indoor clothes drying rack. Kennedy had been assassinated - I just remember because I had never seen my mom cry like that. Lots of friends can remember further back than five but that's it for me. I do remember within a year later loving to read and by ten getting my own copy of The Foundation Trilogy and quickly devoured it. I had joined the Science Fiction Book Club at about nine but that book at ten was really big for me. 

I had an early gift for reading, science, and math - but never a knack for sports. Dad gave me chess and binary counting as well as science kits when I was young. Years later these skills would help me post high school when the computing revolution came for me. Socially awkward although I still had many nerdy good friends among the fellow geeks in middle, high school, and junior college. I could rattle off half hour Firesign Theatre and Monty Python skits by heart but flunk college English composition. Zero self discipline to study anything I wasn't interested in but voracious for subjects I did care about.

Computing gave me a career that was willing to overlook ( in the early days ) a bad educational track record and instead focused on my talent for writing code to solve any problem - I loved puzzles.  A college programming prof recommended me for a job and I was off and running.

Now I was a young man with a future and while I didn't know it - I had a perfect placement to watch the change in American society and would also see changes in our worlds environment.