I commend to your special attention the excellent article in The Stanford 36'er by Jeanne Keesling Laird entitled "History of A Half Century." In the past fifty years the changes have been awesome. Some have made life easier - microwave ovens, panty hose, Kleenex, drip dries, the automatic shift, tires that go over 50,000 miles, airplanes where you can fly from Paris to New York or Tokyo to San Francisco and arrive earlier than when you left. Some changes made life different. Probably nothing had a more profound effect than the pill which impacted on our whole culture and changed acceptable social behaviour among the younger generations. Some of us feel that we may have been born at the wrong time. Some changes definitely made life better. Advances in medicine have extended life, improved health, reduced suffering. On the social front we have developed a more just and equitable society. We have done our part in making possible both the "baby boom" and the greatest explosion of knowledge the world has ever seen in such a span of time. Even so, I would argue that we have had more changes than improvements. Most of us here were born during World War I, played our part in World War II, and have never known a time when fighting was not taking place somewhere in the world. Peace has been the impossible dream. The League of Nations is gone and The United Nations has taken its place. Some ninety new nations have been spawned, mostly rising up from the ashes of Colonialism. We have had to learn new names and locations like Bangladesh, Zambia, Israel, Granada, and sadly, Libya and North Vietnam, to mention just a few. In many of these new nations there is ignorance and poverty, hunger and exploding populations, governments that are corrupt, incompotent, or both. Their unfortunate lot is a problem the world has yet to solve but sooner or later solve it we must, for it is another destabilizing force in an already unstable world. We have devised a social security system to care for us in our old age and most of us here are now reaping the benefits. As a matter of fact we have designed it so well that most of us get back in 18 months all the contributions that we made from 1936 to date. And the working young have not yet tumbled to the millions of new dependents they have acquired! There is other evidence at hand that shows we are having trouble mustering up the political courage to vote the solution even when we have identified the problem and know the answers. 3.