To The Future

 I just read an article in the Times about a review of peoples’ views regarding the present and the future. A small survey was carried out, asking, if people had the choice, which period would they like to be living in? Apparently, Paris 1920 was the big winner. Perhaps not too surprising given its reputation. However, curiously, almost nobody taking the survey voted to live sometime in the future.  And that is not a reassuring signal. However, attractive and even romantic was Paris 1920, the absence of any sentiment of living somewhere in the future, perhaps reflects our collective state of mind about that future.

I’m old, having been born in 1934. So I have lived through that Great Depression, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the various near crises in the Middle East (we are always a footstep away from a disastrous war in the Middle East).  And then remember all that fun of the Cold War, with its various missile crises? ? Yeah, I still remember working at Lockheed as an engineer on the Polaris Missile system. Periodically me and my engineering buds would go to a nearby pub after work to have a beer or maybe a nice martini. And we would talk about where we would go should the missiles begin flying—head for the ocean areas, or make for the mountains.  Cuz surely, where we were living (pre-Silicon Valley) would be one of the first targets.  Yeah that was such fun.

And then I retired and moved down here to North Carolina, to be near kids and grandkids.  And, while we never achieved Great Depression Stock Market Crash days, we experienced several really nasty market crashes that sucked a fair amount out of our retirement.  But then we just kept on truck’n. And then we got Trump, and he was something entirely new. I mean, we had lived through Shrub’s stupidity, Reagan’s stupidities, and Nixon’s various cruelties.  But we had never actually imagined someone as inane, as cruel, as comically stupid running our country. And then, in the best tradition of “Can you top this?” a pandemic hit the World and the US, the likes of which I had never seen. We had seen the AIDS epidemic, but that seemed to affect gays mainly. We had also experienced the various attempts to constrain epidemics, like polio. But this COVID Pandemic seemed in a class by itself.  And unlike other disease entities striking us, this one was accompanied by something new—Public defiance, facilitated by our dumbass President. He seemed to be in denial, largely one imagines because a major disease state running around our country during an election period might well threaten his re-election. And so he waffled. Happily, the various Public Health systems of the world reacted appropriately and got a string of vaccines underway and finally out to the public.  My wife and I each got our two shots and then our two boosters. But meanwhile, a large part of the public was in denial, claiming the disease was a fake, or that it was a ruse implemented in order to defeat Trump.

And so, millions of people died all over the world.

And then it seemed that we somehow settled into a new world, in which the pandemic still existed, people kept becoming infected, including many who had been vaccinated, and people kept dying. While the rest of us, especially we Oldies, became used to wearing a medical mask every time we went out to a store, or really anywhere people gather.  And we called this our new reality.

But then we began noticing something else. As I noted in a recent blog posting, our weather seemed to change, as though someone had simply flipped a switch. Summer has always been filled with heavy duty weather. But suddenly, it seemed as though we had the same weather every day. The temperature would rise into the 90s, and a thunderstorm would be likely—every day. And should that thunderstorm actually arrive, it tended to be fearsome—heavy wind, lightning and then torrential downpours. But the threat was present every day. And the heat and humidity were the same every day.  Yet another “New Reality”.  And the weather all over America, and indeed the World, had suddenly changed. We used to live in California and loved our time there. But now California seemed to be simply burning down.  Reservoirs all over the west were suddenly drying up. Lake Mead, the Colorado River for heaven’s sake, all beginning to dry, and thereby reducing the availability of water supplies throughout a very large region. Ice sheets melting everywhere, as snow caps began disappearing. Yeah, something different was definitely going on. And it was called Climate Change. But, much like the COVIDIOCY, thousands, more likely millions, declared Climate Change a hoax. Fox News prevailed and the American people bought into the conspiracy theories created by those who had much to gain from selling such junk.

And so we find ourselves living in a very strange period that seems to portend a hostile future.

We seem to face several futures with some serious risks:

·      Public health crises created by new diseases, or variations of older ones (COVID seems to change at least quarterly), compounded by massive public denial, which leads to larger than necessary disease states and deaths;

·      Climate change that continues to modify the world in ways that threaten our very existence as humans, and likely the existence of other species of earth’s inhabitants ;

·      A population enraptured by lies about reality to the extent that they threaten the existence of at least America’s democratic system of governance. The essential problem seems to be the very large number of undereducated people who prefer believing conspiracy theories about reality, so that they do not have to do anything to combat the very real threats posed by that reality.

And that brings me back to that question about where would you choose to live, in the future (where the risks are unknown), or somewhere in the past, where the risks are known? If as a people, we always express a desire to live in the past, it means that we choose not to face the future. Now the future has many unknowns, but if we choose to ignore what we actually do know, then we may be designing a future for our great grandchildren, and even their great grandchildren that is deadlier than it need be.  Indeed, the only way we can avoid condemning our children of the future to disaster is by thinking now about changes we must begin making.  And many such changes may well affect our current lives in ways we may not like.  Therein lies the problem. How to convince folks that we must begin making sacrifices, or beginning to conceive changes that simply create new futures, new industries, new ways of living and making a living.  But we cannot any longer just pretend that nothing is happening and that it is even possible to retreat to Paris 1920.  Who we elect to govern ourselves is one way we set future courses that define new futures for the world’s children and grandchildren.

We can no longer afford to elect people who deny reality. They are literally killing us all. And they will continue to kill us all, so long as the people allow them to sit over us and continue the lies that are now killing us.  We need futurists folks. We need to shed the deniers, because they are deadly to the future worlds of our great great great grandchildren.  Whatever the cost to us now, we need new folks who will steer us into a new, saner, safer world.