Will 2008 be strange days?

I've linked this post to the Wikipedia entry for the film Strange Days - a 1995 movie starring Ralph Fiennes. It was a daring piece of speculative fiction in celluloid form. Watching it cinematically, I enjoyed it. The public and critics didn't rave, however. Too bad.

The millennial event was the center piece and the central technology was digital entertainment. Imagine a skull cap that taps into various nodes of your brain allowing you to experience what someone else has. With recent technologies allowing doctors to stimulate specific parts of brains, this doesn't seem too far fetched in a couple of decades. it was simply overshot for the year 2000. But fun to imagine just the same.

Now what does 2008 hold in store? Lots of politics to be sure. How will the YouTube generation impact the outcome? It has been managed by mainstream media for typical spin purposes this past fall. Regardless of substantial impact, inclusion of YouTube in the electoral process has been good to see. Populist sentiments have been shining through.

One wonders, however, how much more we'll see of lone-state impacts. The two W Bush elections hung on single state counts. This always makes the average citizen question the counting methods and technologies in place. Do the strategists know that much about specific states and could monkey-business on a single computer really effect the outcome of our leadership? This has all been mulled over heavily these past eight years. Frankly, I'm tired of it.

With any luck, 2008 will bring a clear and undisputed leader to the U.S. It's been too long since we've had a rally cry that spreads from the heartland to the coasts. This time around it would be good to have a leader that didn't squeak in by swaying that one questionable state. That is my hope for 2008. We've got a little over 10 months to go before the drama ends.