There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense a way of concealing motives and thoughts as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History more often than not shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed sooner rather than later.

What's certain is that a totalitarian enclave like Cuba's can't continue to exist so change will definitely come there eventually.

Some argue that now isn't the time to push the green agenda - that all efforts should be on preventing a serious recession. That is a false choice. It fails to recognise that climate change and our carbon reliance is part of problem - high fuel prices and food shortages due to poor crop yields compound today's financial difficulties.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later he was succeeding a failed Republican president and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said probably because he himself didn't know.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself but each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Eventually I did that but it took a lot of twists and turns and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home no car no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.

There is no business in America that would be prevented from taking results into account when making personnel decisions.