Monday, January 30, 2006

Email Me About The Future

As I was doing my daily perusal of news websites, and sports, I saw an interactive story. A writer at CNN wanted to know what we think the future will be like. Since I've been wanting to start a blog for some time now, and have recently fallen in love with the two headed Greek god, Janus. I decided this would be a good place to start. Looking forward and looking back.

What will the future be like? I have a sneaking feeling that we have peaked as a civilization, more precisely our method of living has peaked. The capitalist machine marketed the industrialized world and made it profitable never realizing that what we drive, fly, wear, type on, and on and on and on, is not replacable, and hardly reusable. So, what will the future be like? I'm not sure, but I think that we will once again get booted from the garden, because even inspite of our insatiable curiousity we don't learn. Even when we eat the knowledge--we don't learn it. And instead of angels guarding the entrance there will only be our poverty, our lack of resources that we have been so prodigal with.

What I hope is that we can save just enough of what we know now to avoid the darkness that the western world experienced after the fall of Rome. That we can lose our technology and still manage to keep the good of our western democracy. Innoncence until proven otherwise; the freedom of speech, and hopefully the continued freedom of ideas; the equality of races. I would even include a few religious ideas: loving our neighbor; respecting life.

All said, my own interests are not nearly so doom related. I really do believe that there is good in people and in this world. I think that we just delved too deep too fast to reference Tolkien. Not that we shouldn't delve. It just needs to be done with intention, with a pair of eyes on the past and a pair of eyes on the future. That is what I think we need to pass on, that kind of bifurcated vision. If we can learn to weigh our decisions in the future, we can learn to balance.


Rupert