It was the summer of 1969. I was in Lawrence, Kansas, scratching chigger bytes, watching Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon, and attending journalism classes at the University of Kansas.

I was a high school kid attending a summer program along with a bunch of other high school kids. I was learning to write headlines and run a radio show. My roommate was studying fourth-dimensional math, something about turning a tennis ball inside out without harming it. Other kids were studying the trombone or, judging from observed behavior, card-playing.

For most of us, it was our first big trip away from home. It was the summer of all possibilities. It was the summer of growing up.

There was a kid down the hall that I didn't know very well. He was from Hannibal, Missouri. A slight kid, about two-thirds the size of his ox-like roommate.

The roommate liked to peel fruit with a machete that he kept hidden in his room, against dorm policy. Also against dorm policy, the roommate had taped "glamour posters" to the wall, moved all the furniture around, and made an aquarium out of a five-gallon carboy. He pretty much ruled the roost while the slight kid cowered.

One night several of us boys were walking down the dormitory hall when the slight kid came stumbling out of his room, red-faced, coughing, and clearly disturbed. No, the ox-like roommate hadn't done anything bad, at least not at the moment. But the slight kid had.

He had wrapped a belt around his neck. He had tried to hang himself in the closet.

It wasn't much of a suicide attempt. You can't do yourself in by hanging yourself from a closet pole that's at eye level. But he had tried.

Frightened and confused, he stumbled out into the hall. And there we were, wide-eyed and unprepared. When you go off to summer camp, nobody gives you a "dealing with suicides" kit.

Having been dealt this hand, we did our best to play it. For hours we walked round the KU campus, talking the slight kid through his forest of personal demons. After trying and failing to kill himself, things got worse, not better. His conservative religious upbringing had taught him that suicide was a sin. Now God would surely condemn him to burn in hell for his clumsy stunt with the belt in the closet.

Not being scholars in such things, we were not well equipped to engage in the argument, but we did what we could to calm him down. We walked and talked until curfew sent us all back to the dorm.

I don't know how the slight kid turned out, but he did survive his summer in Kansas. We all did.

I don't know whether the slight kid was gay. But his roommate treated him the way many bullies treat gay teenagers. Gay teens are not the only victims of cruelty -- anyone who's different is a target -- but they are particularly vulnerable.

I thought about the slight kid this week when I heard the news about Tyler Clementi, a talented young musician who went away to college at Rutgers and wound up jumping to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Tyler's roommate had set up a webcam that had caught him making out with another boy, broadcasting the encounter live on the Internet.

It happens, over and over again. Big kids, little kids. In Texas, a 13-year-old carrying the double burden of sexual orientation and religious differences blows his brains out. In Rhode Island, a college kid majoring in culinary arts hangs himself in a dorm room.

When we are young, everything is too big. Our joys may be too big. Our despairs are always too big. If our older selves could step in, they'd wisely advise us: "I gets better." But our older selves are not there, and if we make the wrong choice, they never will be.

If you haven't watched Dan Savage's video advice, you should. It's about being a gay teenager, and it isn't. It's good advice for everybody. Straight kids have problems, too. Adults have problems. We all have problems. It gets better.

Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject#p/f/0/7IcVyvg2Qlo

I first became interested in computers in the 1970s, back when cars were big, hair was long, gas was cheap, and beer cost 25 cents a glass.

I was working at the Champaign News-Gazette as a wire editor while going to school at the University of Illinois. Most newspapers back then were produced on typesetting machines that cast type out of molten lead. Computers were big hulking things that required special air-conditioned rooms and trained operators. We were about to get one, our first newsroom editing system, to drive our fancy new phototypesetters. So I took a computer science course taught by Daniel Slotnick, a pioneering supercomputer designer.

What I discovered was that the priesthood of mainframe computing was about to get its world turned completely upside down.

The agent of this change was the microcomputer. There were only a few around. There was a Commodore PET, the first all-in-one microcomputer, in one of my computer labs, surrounded by terminals connected to the CDC Cyber-9000 mainframe. There were some early Apple II's, of course, and a really cool Cromemco in a campustown store window, drawing colorful patterns randomly on a TV screen. A revolution was in the air.

The geek wire-wrapping connections to assemble our newsroom computer snorted derisively. Toys, he said. Computers will never be reliable enough for regular people to use.

We all know how that turned out, but many of us don't know how much chaos ensued.

It was not Bill Gates versus Steve Jobs in those days. Not by a long shot. There were hundreds of companies with competing systems and software. Zilog was the big dog before Intel. CP/M was the hot business OS before DOS. Atari, Radio Shack, and a fleet of companies started in dormitory rooms were in the game. It was years before any sort of clarity emerged.

Now we're right back there. Tablets are going to change the world. But we don't really know who, or what, or how. The iPad is just an opening round. Watch for Android, WebOS (HP), ChromeOS, QNX (Blackberry), Meego (Intel/Nokia), and maybe even something from Microsoft if they quit doddering around like Abe Simpson. Some players (Canonical/Ubuntu) have already dropped out. Others will join in. And then there's the whole Apps versus Web question.

As so often is the case, this is a revolution long in coming. I saw my first tablet around 1995 at a newspaper conference in Berlin. It was built on a chip called the Acorn RISC Machine and ran software called RISC OS. The descendants of that chip power pretty much every smartphone today, as well as the iPad. With so much time for these ideas to cook, you'd think they'd be done by now,  but it doesn't work that way. Instead, we find today that we know less about the immediate future than we did five or eight years ago.

Some things we should have learned from previous revolutions and skirmishes:

You can't learn by sitting on the sidelines. Of course you should watch what everyone else is doing, but there is no substitute for getting into the action.

 Don't rush into a permanent committment. If you put all your efforts into the iPad, and it turns into a minor player (as so often happens to proprietary technologies, you're going to be hurting. Be prepared to play the field.

Great tech does not always win. If it did, we'd be watching movies on Betamax and computing with Amigas. Adequate open systems tend to beat great closed systems.

Overnight change doesn't happen overnight. The usual mistake is to overstate the short term and underestimate the long term. You get all excited that this will be the Year of the Tablet, and it turns out to be the Year of Astounding Hype. So you turn your back and get clobbered by the real wave.

You're doing it wrong. No matter what you do, it will be wrong -- criticized from every direction and ultimately crushed by something new. Be OK with that. Live to learn.

There's more than one way to do it. At the moment, there's a lot of excitement about iPad apps that transport print experiences into a digital framework. There's also a lot of excitement about completely new information experiences that don't even vaguely resemble old products. Both can be right, for different people and situations. 

Decades ago I read a business book by Robert Ringer called "Winning Through Intimidation." Ringer is a political kook (he's gotten much worse over the years) and more than a bit paranoid, but he sounded a warning that should be the first rule of commerce for every consumer and every businessperson: Everybody else at the table is out to take your chips.

Apple fanbois need to understand this. Apple is not your friend. Google fanbois need to understand this: Google is not your friend. Microsoft is not your friend. And so on.

But it's not just the fanbois. When you hear that Apple is working on a new service to "revolutionize" newspapers, the right response is to check your wallet and make sure the doors are locked, not break out the champagne. Journalists and publishers, Apple is not your friend.

We all make this mistake. Life is like a big card game. They're after your chips.

Steve Jobs may be a megalomaniac, but don't blame it on him, because this isn't his fault. This is how corporations work. It's fundamental.

A corporation is a legal "person" with many of the rights that you and I have, but having no conscience and operating only for its own benefit. If a human being acted like a corporation, we'd lock him or her up in a prison or mental institution as a psychopath. It has no care for others. Its only imperative is self-interest (to deliver profits to shareholders) and it will destroy others in its path in its relentless drive to get bigger and richer.

This is why we have laws that regulate corporations -- the laws that are constantly under attack by political forces that are funded by the corporations and billionaire investors through lobbyists, Washington "think tanks" and astroturf political movements.

This should not be new to us. Edward, first baron of Thurlow and lord chancellor of England from 1731 to 1806, had corporations pegged from the start. "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?" he asked (as quoted by H.L. Mencken).

Did you see Newsday's wonderfully funny commercial for its iPad app? It gushes about how "the new Newsday app is better than the newspaper in all kinds of ways"  ... except for one, as the dad in the video smashes the iPad by trying to swat a fly.

It was all over the Internet for a day or so. Then, according to Network World, Newsday received a letter from Apple's lawyers threatening to pull "all of our apps" from the iTunes marketplace.

Fun's over. Abuse of power? Evil corporation? It's in their nature. Doesn't make any difference whether the corporation is Apple, Google, the cellphone companies, or even BP. They are not your friend.

I called Robert Ringer a political kook and a bit paranoid. You can check that out in a few minutes with Google and form your own opinion. But never forget: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

It is nine years now since the day America lost its mind. Since the day a small band of hate-filled terrorists opened the door to madness, and our nation walked right through. Since the day when the entire world was moved to stand as one (a French newspaper proclaimed: "We are all Americans!") but we didn't notice because we were filled with grief, fear and rage.

For a moment on that day, we forgot our differences. Southern crackers and Detroit homeboys and Amarillo cowboys were all Americans, and all New Yorkers.

Sadly, it did not last. Nine years later we are a bitterly divided nation, bankrupted by seven years of war in Iraq and more than eight in Afghanistan, manipulated by political snake-oil salesmen into denying and abandoning the core values we profess to believe in order to protect the core values we profess to believe.

We fell victim to rage, were seduced by the dark side, and were led down a path paved with lies into warfare that, for many, may have felt good, but ultimately strengthened the enemy and led us to today, when "the terrorists have won" is arguably true.

We have lost our shirts and we have lost our souls.

I blame the news media.

Oh, there is plenty of blame to go around.  We could blame the politicians and we could blame ignorance, but there will always be slimy politicians exploiting the crisis of the moment, and there will always be dense people who are not interested in facts.

But it's our responsibility. It is what we signed up for. We who are journalists are supposed to facilitate an informed conversation among the citizenry that leads to sound self-government. If that is our intent, we have measurably failed.

What has transpired is anything but sound self-government and not at all informed.

Nine years after the 9/11 attacks led by extremist Wahhabi terrorists, the average American doesn't know a Wahhabist from a Sufi. And to a loud minority that gets constant coverage, all Muslims, well over a billion people worldwide, are the enemy.

Television news in particular has failed to meet its journalistic responsibilities. Friday morning I saw all the network morning TV shows feature a crackpot hatemonger preacher from Gainesville, Florida, leader of a tiny and inconsequential sect, who planned to burn the holy book of Islam. He was thrown out by his little congregation in Germany, and half of his Florida group has abandoned him. He's a little bug in the big picture, but he was being treated as if he led some broad-based American anti-Muslim movement.

It's a carnival, a circus, a show, a fraud. We have plenty of air time for the drama and almost none for learning.

The cable networks are journalistic frauds, focusing on reinforcing prejudice in order to boost ratings, and all too often abandon even the pretense of seeking truth.

I have often pointed a finger at Fox News, a vile and deeply corrupt organization, but CNN and MSNBC also are guilty, if not equally.

I could blame the Internet, too. It is a neutral technology but the consequences of the global network are profound.

There is a Sanskrit proverb: "The eyes do not see what the mind does not want." The Internet turns that weakness of human nature into a force for proactive, malevolent ignorance. 

People clump together in echo chambers and hear only reinforcement of their prejudices. Islamic radicals use it to recruit teenagers and turn them into walking human bombs. Angry white men hang around on wingnut websites and convince themselves that the president is a Muslim secret agent. Some plot murder. Some merely fantasize.

The Internet amplifies many things, including the worst qualities of humanity. The old media and society at large have not figured out how to cope.

When the terrorists crashed an airliner into the Pentagon, they killed Muslims and destroyed a Muslim prayer room that was inside the Pentagon itself. When the terrorists crashed two airliners into the Twin Towers, they killed Muslims and destroyed a Muslim prayer room that was right there in the World Trade Center.

These facts have been communicated by responsible journalists, but they've been drowned out by a combination of hateful screeching and spineless stenographic reporting that treats the screeching as if it were legitimate.

The 9/11 attack was not an attack on Christianity by Islam, but rather an attack on America by heretics. And yet we have this ginned-up "controversy" over a Sufi community center in Manhattan on "hallowed ground."

Nobody worries about the Ground Zero Titty Bar, or the Ground Zero Amish Market, or the Ground Zero Souvenir Hawker, but (if you believe the "news") huge numbers of Real Americans are inflamed that Muslims dare to profane the sacred soil by planning a community center.

Facts? It's several blocks away from the World Trade Center site, where a Muslim prayer room was crushed beneath the rubble of a high-rise building full of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics and more than a few who never gave a damn about religion.

The entire story is fakery, an arson fire covered by journalists throwing gasoline on the flames.

Shame on you all. Shame on us all.