Just How 20-20 is Hindsight?
I was cleaning my computer room today in anticipation of visiting later in the year when I came across something from OMNI magazine.
Omni was a Seventies attempt to combine science with science fiction. One would find inside both of those and sometimes some fringe stuff with all sorts of neat photography and graphics. It couldn’t survive the Eighties, in the face of more direct science mags like Discover, and a slackening of true science fiction writing. That whole section of literature has changed a lot over my lifetime. Half of it ranks more as fantasy now that scifi.
Anyway, the article I had pulled out I assumed at first was for the lovely photos in it. That’s until I started reading the comments under the pictures. They were predictions made by George Gallup Jr., yes, the man of the Gallup Poll, about the year 2000. It was still 15 years in our future, and the new century and millennium still held some bizaare fascination for us. This was WELL before the scare about the date flipover that shook up so many people. As a matter of fact, it was well before computers were a common thing. Oh they were out there, but they were slow and clunky, and required that you understood DOS. DOS was computer language, and since most of us didn’t have the patience to get to know the details, computers remained, at least in the private sector, a nerd thing.
Ipods....cell phones smaller than your palm.....the Internet......satellite television......home robots (a vaccuum cleaner, granted, but it’s a start).....Hell, even the Walkman didn’t exist.
U2 were still just a bunch of nice guys from Dublin, and produced their finest album to date as far as I am concerned that year :”Unforgetable Fire.” I won’t even TRY to get into all the music of the day. Let’s just leave it at this- it was over twenty years ago, and unless you lived through it, you really know nothing about it. History books never do justice to the real thing.
Anyway, it being that I have come to detest U2, didn’t mean to drop them into the convo here. They meant a lot to me back then.
On to the predictions-
I thought it to be an interesting thing to write these out here, let you see how someone who is supposedly in touch with the world saw things going back then. Let you see what he thought would happen. If you are 25 or better, chances are, you know from personal experience exactly what has happened.
Let’s see if he got it right....
From OMNI, sometime in 1984, that year of Orwellian signifigance:
NUCLEAR FUTURE
When asked how life in the year 2000 might differ frm today’s, all the experts headed their lists with dire predictions of nuclear war. Nearly 80% not only favor a United states-Soviet Union agreement to stop building nuclear weapons but urge the destruction of all existing stockpiles. And 50% of those polled suggest there be a global referendum to allow the citizens of every nation to vote on nuclear disarmament.
{I won’t bother to comment on that one....apparently all the “experts” were
American. They never forsaw the downfall of the Soviet Union.}
TECHNOFUTURE
Technology, especially automation and computerization, will foment (sic) the greatest changes in history by 2000- more so than the economy, overpopulation, or politics.
{Oh boy, they weren’t too far off the mark. The average family in 2006 spent over $1500 on electronics. Irony here though- the picture going along with this looks suspiously like a BORG cube........Considering they were four years in the future, Star Trek: The Next Generation.....well, I am a little creeped out.}
I think they got a few of these from Jeanne Dixon.
Spaceship Earth
The future is our common destiny, and Gallup’s interviewees predict that a heightened awareness of world problems will make us a truly global society.
MEDICAL PROGNOSIS
A most encouraging trend, says Gallup’s opinion leaders, is an increased commitment to medical research. In the next century, Americans will enjoy longer lives.
{pretty.....uh...lame? Over twenty years ago, obesity, diabetes, and AIDS were not epidemic. Nobody apparently saw any of that coming.}
I am not EVEN going to go into the religious bullshit dumped into the article. Organized religion is a bane to the entire world, and needs to die. Nothing has ever improved because of religion: it is the great divider, and will bring down nations. This one is NOT immune to that either. But I must say this- if the polled “experts” of that day saw a problem with our moral decay, why wasn’t more done to truly bolster that? It isn’t up to the churches.It is up to those who lead to give a better vision of what we each can be. Instead, we have a government chock full of whores, thieves and liars. Is it any wonder the general malaise that haunts urban life right now proliferates?
What give anyone the courage to live a moral life, when the wealthy are caught stealing from the poor on a regular basis?
No conclusions. I know better than to try to say what will be next week, much less in twenty years. I guarantee no one envisioned what is happening now in our world. There were no Nostradomuses in the 20th century. Who could keep up with the mass of changes that have occured just since 2000? I would love to know what Mr. Gallup would have to say in retrospect.