Specialist First Class

A lot of these young kids dying in Iraq are listed as SFC, or Specialist, First Class. It's not a particularly high rank, but it's a sign that our Army is planning for the future (or "looking ahead," in corporate speak).

All kinds of people are talking about how everything's becoming more specialized, and I guess it's true. If there ever was any broad fields, any unifying feelings, they're long gone. Mexican-Americans are complaining because the African-Americans have things they lack, Filipinos feel slighted because bilingual ATMs don't come in their language, and most everyone is clutching and honoring their historic cultures over their current situations. I've blogged before about tribes, and how I don't understand them, so I'm not going to go over that again.

I'm also not going to talk about people, although it looks a lot like I just did.

Today I baked some bread, which isn't all that unusual. I have a bread machine, one I received as a gift. Not much else to do with it except use it to produce bread with a weird ass hole in the bottom. But here's where we get to specificity. I used flour to make my bread, "all purpose flour." That must not be as good as "bread machine flour" since nothing that can do more than one thing is considered as wonderful as all these single-use items. I wonder if we'll continue down this track and end up with distinctive muffin flours, biscuit flours, and dredging flours for each individual vegetable and cut of meat.

I used to buy milk, and as Lewis Black has pointed out, now the milk aisle extends forever. Skim, various percents, acidophilus, soy, lactose free, and so on. It may be better now, but it was much simpler when it came in milk and chocolate milk.

Doctors specialize tremendously, as do lawyers, IT technical folk, and probably half the professions on the planet. I blame all this on overpopulation. With all the students searching for theses, and all the big, easy stuff already written about, they have to split minute hairs to find something new to study.

In my ideal world we'd concentrate more on the similarities between ourselves than the differences. The political parties would be more about having a view than a shared hatred of the other party. People would be encouraged to see the forests, to see progress and not past calamities, and seek to be generally open instead of mired in a specific rut.