Sharing a Moment of Hope

Today was a day of new beginnings. A shared moment of hope and a moment of reflection. As we witness history being made, with the inauguration of our 44th President, who also happens to be he first African American to attain that office, so to are countless images of that history being transmitted around the globe via the World Wide Web. Youngsters in ram shackled school houses in Kenya, A nomad family in a Yurt in Mongolia, all viewing history in he making on notebook computers with satellite internet connections. Our world is shrinking and millions of people with digital cameras are helping to make it smaller yet. The ability to upload an image taken on the National Mall in Washington D.C., to a computer in the U.S. and have it available for viewing by someone on he other side of he planet almost instantly is changing the concept of community.
Just imagine if a child growing up on a farm in Nebraska uploads images of his or her experience attending the inauguration to an image sharing website, and a child in Gaza sees it and for the first time see Americans in celebration and not as they are portrayed on Al Jazeera TV. Multiply that experience by hundreds of thousands or even millions, with the sharing going in both directions and you will have a generation of people growing up with a connection to one another. Just maybe that connection will make it harder for them to perpetrate acts of war on each other. The adage,"A picture is worth a thousand words", sould be updated to, "A picture can change a thousand minds".