Here is a Random musing about the Future. In preparation for my special three part posting featuring my random predictions for the future.
People have been trying to predict the future ever since time began; but not many people can even remotely claim to have succeeded. Astrology doesn’t work (mostly because there are thirteen zodiac signs but astrologers only use twelve), psychics don’t know what their talking about, and Nostradamus was so vague that he could have meant anything. There are so many books and movies that are set in the future that they can’t all be right. And after watching some of them I don’t think that I would want any of them to be right. Who would want to live in a future ruled by apes or robots? No one really wants to become the society that burns books or makes Children fight to death on live TV, right? The future that H.G. Wells wrote about in the Time Machine doesn’t sound too appealing either. The future in Back to the Future 2 isn’t so bad, maybe even doable, in fact the year that it takes place in, 2015, is only three years away.
When you think about it the future can only go one of three ways: it can get better, it can get worse, or nothing can change. The hard part is defining better and worse because some people look upon the past as being more favorable than the present. I would also like to bring up the saying, “the more things change the more they stay the same,” this really makes it hard to project into the future because if the future is always repeating the past then nothing can ever truly change and America is doomed because the Romans and the Greeks thought they were the end all and be all of civilization too.
Of course things may stay the same in theory but things will always be changing. Technology will advance and then knowledge will be lost and then rediscovered that’s all part of the cycle of history. History is full of parallels and repeated mistakes. This is because people never learn from the mistakes of their ancestors and so they just make the same errors. Like the old cliché says “either learn from history or repeat it.”
A popular saying printed on Christian T-shirts, bookmarks, key chains etc. . . is: “I know not what the future holds but I do know he who holds the future.” This means that as long as God is in charge there is nothing to worry about. But the future gives us plenty to worry about anyway; it’s the greatest unknown, the ultimate variable and just plain scary. And the farther ahead you look the scarier it becomes, because the more time that goes by is more time for something bad to happen; like a natural disaster, or a layoff at work, it’s also that much closer to death. And death is a scary thing to most people. Unless, you know he who holds your future.
C. O. Bonham 