Renaissance place...

I'm blogging from a famous east coast technical university. I had forgotton many things about my own college days, and this place brings back much of it, not just the youthfulness of the place, but also the "scienceyness" of the place. Darwin and Galileo's names are carved in stone here. This place is ground zero for much of the religious right (and some of the extremists on the left).

They make their own viruses here; they giddily engage evolution in theory and practice, they help God play dice in His mad gambling binge, shattering notions of limits. And there is money to be made, and lots of fresh-faced kids are learning things and doing things and upending paradigms all over the place.

The ROTC walks kinhin "in honor" (by which I think they mean "in high respect") of POWs and MIAs. The odd thing about that is not the ROTC kids themselves (What do they think about Iraq? Would it really matter? Where they are likely to wind up is in the more coveted spots away from the actual fighting - I'm not in Flint Michigan). No, the odd thing is the people watching the ROTC students' kinhin. Most don't seem to know how to react, some look and turn away. One cadet salutes. One can imagine- it's an out front kind of kinhin, in full view- what might go through the minds of ths students as they watch the people watching them, which would mean that this very monkey mind path would itself be a distraction from the focus on the POWs and MIAs.

None of which is related to anything politicky or Buddhisty or economically, but it definitely stirs up something energetic in me that I'd forgotten a while back; the enthusiasm of being able to do something that makes history. I've made a bit of my own, a small bit, here and there in my career, but there's a heck of a lot more history to be made evidently.

Intel's going to have some rough times ahead in the next few years, I suspect.