The Future

Note: I am not here! This is an autopost, I am currently twenty miles away in the middle of a maple forest. Well…I am actually here in the library (puter is supposed to be fixed on Sat.) writing this, but tomorrow when you read it, which is today for you, I will not be here. Well I will be here, because I am always ‘here,’ but it won’t be the here you think it is…until now, that you have read this. Not that I expect you to care, or anything!

We are on a cusp. We have been on a cusp for a while now, but it is getting cuspier everyday. We are not yet to the brink of the cusp, but as these things go, we will be shortly. The future of the entire human race is being decided as the clock ticks away each second. It is the future of the future that is at stake in this election and the days after it. If John McCain is elected, we get one future. If Obama is elected, we get another.

Not that these futures are dependent explicitly on the actions of one or the other of these men, but it is certain that the shape of the future will be…..IN PART….decided by the outcome of this election. Some say that perhaps we should elect McCain to show people just how dystopian a future we will face if we do not learn our various lessons. I say the cost is too high to even think about fucking around.

Think of movies like the Terminator, or the Matrix, the futures contained in those movies are a dramatized version of what the human race faces if we do not very shortly get our shit far more together than it currently is.

But today, since I am not here, I would like y’all to think about, and if you can, scribble a few words about the flip side of the coin. What our future COULD be if we DO get our shit together!

If we overcome the current crises, if we set the Mind of Mankind and all of its resources on a new and different track. What is the potential of humans if we are somehow able to steer it off the path of war and greed and division and on to the path of working together for the best possible future of ALL of Mankind? What will the world be like if we did all cooperate, if all of the sciences and disciplines and artists and diplomats and yes….even the politicians decided to cooperate instead of compete? If all of our resources were intelligently used to solve actual problems instead of being used to make money and screw the other guy?

What would THAT future hold?

What is the future of technology and the web? The future of politics? The Future of the 7 billion folks on the planet who all need to eat and defecate and copulate? The future of Britney and Paris???

I know it is unfair to ask you to write all of that in a comment, but hey, do the best you can! Feel free to steal from your fav movies and writers as well as your own daydreams and visions and wildest hopes and dreams!

I will spend my day today, in exile from the interweb, lolling about a magical little solar powered cabin in the middle of a forest populated by folks who have serious tried to go ‘back to the land’ thinking about the same thing….and as soon as I get my dammmed puter back, I will write about it as well!

24 comments

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    • RiaD on September 19, 2008 at 20:11

    don’t want this one to disappear down the page…….

    thanks buhdy

    ♥~

    • robodd on September 19, 2008 at 20:14

    my mind cannot even get past your first italicized paragraph!

    • kj on September 19, 2008 at 20:18

    am not here either… but hope to be back to the future in an hour or three!  

    in my head, we are so many pieces to the puzzle and although there is no requirement for the pieces to fit together (in fact, i’m partial to the spaces in-between), holding each piece in with kind regard, a lack of force-fitting, and an attitude of celebration of beauty (our beauty, all the beauty around us) with rounded edges of memory… would be my hope.

    my rice bowl is your rice bowl, and i ain’t talking pink commie talk!  LOL  @;-)

  1. … we could explore so much, both inner and outer space.

    Exploring and discovering are, I think, urges integral to being a human being.

    As much as we like security and fear change, we also desire freedom and growth.

    Seems for too much of human history the former has been exploited in favor of the latter.

    So yeah, I believe if we could cooperate in the way you outline in your essay, we could transform ourselves and our civilization in unimaginable ways.

    • Robyn on September 19, 2008 at 20:24

    …and here I was floundering around for a topic for this evening.

    I say the cost is too high to even think about fucking around.

    Dare I say that those who think that letting things get worse so that they might possibly get better in the future have never plumbed the depths of how bad things can be…and perhaps haven’t lived long enough to understand that as bad as things can get, they can always get worse…and the way they get worse is the kind of thinking that thinks that electing someone like McCain will be the spark towards a better tomorrow.

    • Robyn on September 19, 2008 at 20:24

    …and here I was floundering around for a topic for this evening.

    I say the cost is too high to even think about fucking around.

    Dare I say that those who think that letting things get worse so that they might possibly get better in the future have never plumbed the depths of how bad things can be…and perhaps haven’t lived long enough to understand that as bad as things can get, they can always get worse…and the way they get worse is the kind of thinking that thinks that electing someone like McCain will be the spark towards a better tomorrow.

    • Edger on September 19, 2008 at 21:55

    If you were here I could have had your computer working by the next day…

    • Edger on September 19, 2008 at 21:57

    If all the tv’s in the world died tomorrow…

  2. I am not here! This is an autopost, I am currently twenty miles away in the middle of a maple forest. Well…I am actually here in the library (puter is supposed to be fixed on Sat.) writing this, but tomorrow when you read it, which is today for you, I will not be here. Well I will be here, because I am always ‘here,’ but it won’t be the here you think it is…until now, that you have read this. Not that I expect you to care, or anything!

    Get on with it!!!

    There. I feel better. Thanks for that. 😉

  3. sounds like heaven to me, rednecks and all. Find i have more in common with those who reject the modern version of were all yuppies now and we need to compete. With who? With what?

    Your short sweet diary is shades of RFK my favorite pol, yes he was flawed but who isn’t were all only human.

    “Some look at the world and ask why? I dream of things and ask why not?”   RFK

    Another quote I love is from my husband at age 26

    ‘All things are possible’… the Great Ramony

    Perhaps this is an opportunity. Shiva has two faces. I just hope to God they don’t resuscitate the MARKET, that has held us in it’s visions of sugar plums, along with death, for way to long.

    My vision is socialistic in nature and would have as it’s centerpiece harmony and actual common good. So here’s my musical choice of the moment and after all each moment makes the future.  Get together so simple yet it seems so hard. Who can better express the universal  then both the political blast from the past, Hunter Thompson, and this an age old truth …

    • brione on September 20, 2008 at 00:10

    …not only about what could be if dystopian influences continue.

    It is a very clear picture of what currently exists, and has existed for a very long time.

    The vast majority of us are asleep and going through the motions, just like we were in the Buddha’s time, and before that for as long as civilization has existed.

    Neo, like the Buddha, made the choice to penetrate the unconsciousness that pervades our lives and “woke up” to the reality of what lay under his seemingly normal life.

    We all have the capacity within us to wake up to the truth of our lives, to treat all beings with compassion and respect, to love our children more completely, to let go of self-centered greed, anger and ignorance, to fully blossom in a world reborn for all.

    That’s the future (present?) that’s possible for us.

  4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G

    Cooler weather and the abscence of bugs makes the Apocalyptic horses very frisky.

  5. . . . not on this planet.  Certainly not any that’s very pretty.  For two billion people, maybe.  Better yet, somewhere between one and two billion, practicing a rigorous, replacement-only, form of population containment, who have forgotten they ever heard of nukes, plastics, and fossil fuels.  For them, the future could be very bright, especially if their dominant culture is one that respects wisdom, age, education, and experience.  For these reasons, I tend to think that east Asia owns the future, if anybody does.

    More likely, the happy planetary future that I foresee will belong not to human beings as we know them, but to the beings who are the next evolutionary step forward from us.

  6. Bleak.  But I’m always hopeful; if one loses hope, what do we have left?

    Being unemployed and FireCrow nursing a kidney stone(emergency room last Sat night), it seems like the “one day at a time” mode works best.  I’ll leave future predicting to others for now.  

    But if Barack gets in, I would love to sing…”the futures so bright, I gotta wear shades”

    Peace.

    • banger on September 20, 2008 at 22:26

    Power will center around the courts of the powerful. Can you be of service?

    The powerful could be a group, or a member of an elite. The point is that the “system” will continue to break down and we will all have to make our own way through our own networks, friends, families, allies. The state is and can only be at this point a tool of the more nasty members of the oligarchy. Of course, a wise leader could make it all work smoothly but the essential movement towards the factionalization and fractionalization of society will continue. We need to grasp this reality and stop living in the past and stop living in the fantasies we were taught.

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