Adapting only way to handle change

Today’s topic is change. It makes the world go round, but a lot of people hate it anyway.

Change is inevitable, and yet the older we get, the more we’re inclined to resist it. It can be evolutionary or revolutionary, and it always has its share of detractors and proponents.

Change is seldom without controversy. By its own definition, it causes friction.

And nowadays, it comes at a blinding pace.

More changes have come to the human experience in the last 50 years than has occurred in a thousand years prior. We barely have time to get used to anything before it changes — for the better or for worse.

Consider life and death and our approach toward “singularity.” With the merging of technology, science and medicine, humanity is now tapping at what might seem to be immortality, when our own inventions work to keep us alive indefinitely.

I read that medical scientists are working on a microchip that would be embedded at the top of our spines to monitor our body’s every change, then used as a method to inject medicine to a localized heath problem. It could become a portal for regenerating our bodies in a way that counters the natural deterioration of our physical selves. We may soon be capable of altering life expectancies in ways we haven’t even been able to imagine to this point.

Are we now about to play God with our own life and death cycles? When scientists mapped out our DNA, we tapped into the composition of life itself on our planet.

Socially, for the most part we’ve changed for the better. Most of us have become less violent and more tolerant of human differences. Instead of everyday shootouts on the streets, we now have lawyers haggling out our disputes through legal filings and in courthouse. Those who still turn to violence are often at a point of desperation with the changes, or the lack of changes, they are experiencing in their own lives.

Politically, change is cyclical. The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency and Barack Obama’s ascendency in 2008 were both transformational changes. Obama rode a rising tide of tolerance and acceptance in racial and cultural inclusiveness in modern America, but I guess such changes were too soon and too fast for many, so they got behind Trump. And next year, the odds are on the side of another monumental shift in our political leadership, as the pendulum continues to swing.

Closer to home, we oppose change when it threatens our livelihoods. That’s true in coal country and in places when oil and gas extraction feeds the local economy. These are the places where an up-and-coming green revolution is most opposed.

Fear and excitement always accompany change — a fear of the unknown coupled with the excitement that comes with new possibilities. How we see it is a choice we make individually or as a people.

And that’s the bottom line:

Bottom line: We must adapt. That’s the way we survive — as a person, as people and as a species. Here’s hoping we figure out a way to change it all for the better.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]