The Human Race

I remember growing up.   Or at least growing old.   For they are two very separate things.

When I was 6 or 7, and attending a parochial school in northern Illinois, I remember having to make a scrapbook detailing what the future would be like.   I found pictures in magazines of ‘cars of the future’, artists’ renderings of what the cities of THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY would be like (with flying cars, glowing white buildings, and happy people), and other such dreams and fancies of the 1960’s.

What a disappointment my species is to me!   Those cars of the future are here, but they don’t have Plexiglas domes, they don’t fly—hell, they don’t even hover!  Instead, they roll around on marginally improved rubber tires, with engines that, for all of their pollution control, still spew out noxious gases (like I do after a couple of Taco Bell burritos).

The 21st century has many marvels, but cities with slidewalks, flying cars, and most of all, happy people are non-existent.  

What happened?

I think that we became cynical and spend-thrifty, but most of all, I think that we got scared.   People are basically animals, and as such, do not adapt to change very well in the short term.   Sure, if all of the marvelous changes that have occurred over the past 100 years or so had happened over, say, 50,000 years, then we would have had time to adapt.   But the changes happen daily now, and it’s hard to keep up.    

Life gets in the way, most of the time.    Working for a living, taking the kids here and there, etc., leaves little time for even the most technophiliac among us to do more than just skim the news and make mental notes of the newest technology—which, by the time we get it, is last week’s or last year’s new stuff, and we’re that much farther behind.

Is it any wonder that so many people just shut their eyes to the newstuff, and look backward nostalgically to the past and the ‘simpler’ days?

But were the simpler days that much simpler—especially to those who lived then?   Or did the frontier family trying to squeeze a living out of a hundred acres of rocky topsoil look back fondly on their ancestors’ way of life.

We must look forward, but it’s hard to keep up with the race when the entire world is passing you by.   But that’s what living is all about; and we are, after all, not called the Human Race for nothing.

And so it goes…