The Future Lies Ahead

by Dennis Green

The first decade of the Twenty-First Century will go down as the most shameful period in American history since the Sixties — the 1860s and our uncivil Civil War. Even Republicans cringe to look back on the past ten years, and wish they could will some sort of national amnesia to simply make it all go away.

(And yes, I know that the decade, technically, doesn’t start with zero, but with “01,” and those pedants who keep reminding us are so out of touch with the popular imagination they completely missed the whole drama of the Y2K millennial turnover.)

But, as President Dwight David Eisenhower famously said, and Mort Saul picked up in a comedy album title, “The Future Lies Ahead.” And there’s nowhere to go from here but up. So even though I’m not a congenital optimist, I don’t share the general pessimism abroad in the land.

I think we’ll find enough ways to cut “Defense” spending and corporate welfare to eliminate the deficit by the end of Obama’s second term. Getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, those two sorry debacles, is just the beginning. The billions spent maintaining our huge nuclear arsenal might be next.

Coming out of the worst recession since Reganomics, we also have the opportunity to re-assess our values as a people. The lavish spending of the past decade — on credit cards and grossly-inflated real estate — may be a thing of the past. A “consumerist” society of material values may even give way to more spiritual and aesthetic concerns and pre-occupations. Since the late Sixties, we’ve been told that we can buy our way out of unhappiness, buy a fortress of security, and all it’s gotten us is default and foreclosure.

But we’ve also gotten some of the most vivid examples of what doesn’t work that money and votes can buy — from dysfunctional candidates and politicians to counter-insurgency strategies and invasions to uncover weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there. We’ve also seen some of our most treasured values proven correct in the face of torture, suspension of due process and government snooping into our private emails and lives.

So perhaps all those National Security and CIA agents can find honorable work in other professions as the new century unfolds. Almost certainly, new industries and technologies will provide gainful employment for the many hordes of former auto workers now on the dole, along with all those bankers and day traders.

Green building and energy technologies will blossom, I suspect, in the old rust belt and coal mine country of America, and “the service industry” will come to mean far more than cubicle rats pushing papers around, but actually refer to people actively helping other people, as the aging Boomers fill the rest homes of the nation and all those new people covered by health insurance need more hospitals and clinics.

I predict that Google will compete so handily with Apple that prices of iTunes come down, and the more than 100,000 apps now available for iPhones becomes a million, putting all those software engineers to work. The new Apple touchscreen tablet will take the place of the printed book, the portable TV, the desktop and laptop computer, the mouse and keyboard, the newspaper and the magazine. Whoopie!

As the Boomers, in huge numbers, come to face their own mortality, I predict, further, that so many people will be pondering and exploring the Culture of Death that all our attitudes toward it will change. I hope to be in the forefront of such a re-thinking with my new novel, Mescalero City Blues. So don’t be blue. For the best, the very best, is yet to come.

©2009 Dennis Green