John Perry Barlow has come up with a great idea for what to call this decade: THE Uh-Oh's.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh...

I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say "Uh-Oh?" Or, at the very least, something that translated into "Uh-Oh?"

Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.

Second plane. Uh-Oh.

America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.

As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don't need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh's visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.

So, the next time you're looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it's a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective - as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties - to evoke their essential flavor.

Here is the full text of the email:

THE Uh-Oh'S

Exactly two years ago today, I peered into the thickening fog that was the decade we now uncomfortably inhabit and proposed a name for it. It didn't take. This weird period remains unnamed. So I'm going to take another run at it.

I suggest once more that we call them The Uh-Oh's.

As I wrote in the embers of the 90's:

I predict changes that will to cause so much consternation among the traditionalists and ambiguiphobes that such creatures as the Unibomber, Pat Buchanan, or the Ayatollah Khomeini may become common as laptops.

The weird will turn pro, in the words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, and the pros will turn weird.

I could go on, and at length, but you get my drift. For these and many other reasons, I therefore propose that we call the coming decade The Uh-ohs.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh.

Hey. as it turns out, I didn't *even* know from Uh-Oh back then. I was kind of like The Grateful Dead thinking it had already been a long, strange trip in 1969.

I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say "Uh-Oh?" Or, at the very least, something that translated into "Uh-Oh?"

Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.

Second plane. Uh-Oh.

America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.

As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don't need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh's visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.

So, the next time you're looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it's a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective - as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties - to evoke their essential flavor.

And they certainly do have a flavor. They are, it seems to me, one huge pop quiz from God in the matters of Love and Faith.

Whether as a species or as individuals, we are all getting our faith tested at the moment. I don't know anyone who hasn't been sorely challenged in the last two years, and I know a lot of people well enough so that when I ask them how they're doing, they actually tell me. Good relationships have exploded. Serious illness, particularly cancer, has become incredibly fashionable. Death has not been taking a holiday .And just about everybody - save for the plutocrats we allowed to steal our country - is broke.

We are also getting plenty of opportunities to assess our actual capacity to love. In this, I refer to what Gandhi was getting at when he said, "It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. "

Both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden have taught us a lot about that kind of love in the last two years. (I also remember that the Dalai Lama, asked who had been his greatest teachers, replied, "The Chinese, of course.) Nor do we have to turn to televised bogeymen for such teaching. Most of us have lately found excellent faculty far closer to home.

Of course, not everyone is willing to make himself available for class. The American people, taken as a group, appear to be truant. We seem unhesitating in our willingness to hate whatever villain du jour the Administration and CNN designate, whether it be Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or the rising new star, Kim Il Jung.

Our faith seems faithless. Rather than actually trusting in the God we so loudly profess to worship, we trust military force alone to keep us safe, even if it means staging unprovoked assaults on countries that have in no way proven themselves capable of harming us, nor even expressed any interest in doing so.

Actually, I have finally figured out what's going on with a great many of us. Shocked into a kind of political catatonia by the multitudinous Uh-Oh's of the Uh-Oh's, we are pretending to be asleep. This is the only explanation I can think of for our political passivity.

If we were actually asleep, we would have been shocked into alertness by the wanton ruin of our economy in only two years, the overnight establishment of an oligarchy that makes Mexico's look enlightened, the detailed repudiation of the Constitution enacted by the USA PATRIOT Act, and the breezy willingness of our government to commit us to simultaneous wars in separate hemispheres.

If we had really been sleeping, these and many other shocks to the conscience would have us bolt upright by now. The real patriots would be well out of bed, rushing to defend America against the Junta, rather than ratifying it with their absence from the polls.

But there is an old Navajo proverb you've heard me quote before: "It's impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep." Never has that phrase seemed more bitterly and poignantly true than now. It is also impossible to teach someone who's pretending to be asleep. And, finally it is impossible to administer a pop quiz to possum players.

True as this may be of the American Collective, it doesn't seem at all true of the many of you I've encountered recently. Despite the slings and arrows you've each absorbed, despite the outrageousness of your current fortunes, despite the undeniable truth that the Uh-Oh's suck huge, I see growing in you the same groundless hope I've been attempting to nurture in myself, with spotty success, since Cynthia died years ago.

Back then I wrote that "groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind there is." I understand those words far better today than I did then. Now I can find very few rational supports for my optimism. Every curve I plot, macro or micro, plunges toward an abyss of war, pestilence, famine, and terror. But now I know in my heart what could only have moved there in times like these, that hope with a logical basis isn't hope at all. It's just planning. I've pretty much given up on planning. "Man plans, God laughs," goes the Yiddish expression, and It must be laughing a lot these days.

No, the hope I feel now, the hope I feel in many of you, is a blind and crazy hope that deserves the holy name of Faith.

There is also Love.

As I've written this little sermonette, I've been passing over Donner Summit in the Sierras with daughter Leah at the wheel. Also on board are the other two Barlowettes, Amelia and Anna, as well as a young man, Eli King, who's been a surrogate son since he was literally half his current height. We've been driving all day from Salt Lake City on our way to join up in San Francisco with our larger "family" in the String Cheese Incident for New Year's. The weather over the pass has been vile as is customary this time of year. We're all exhausted and wedged in this heavily laden little car like early astronauts.

But there is a lot of love in the manifest as well. Each of us has just endured one of the hardest years of our lives, but we have been mostly gentle with each other on this drive. We've laughed a lot, even if some of the humor was a little dark. We just found out that that the hotel reservations we thought we had in San Francisco never got made owing to a miscommunication on my part, so our immediate future is a little sketchy (though by the time I actually dispatch this, it will have sorted itself out). Love has seen us this far. Love will see us through.

May Love and Faith see you through tonight as well. And through 2003. And through the all the Uh-Oh's that sill await us.

Unconditional Hope,

Barlow

--

*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

**************************************************************

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)