I was reading a magazine article yesterday that was offering a dystopian look at the future. What it predicted made the Seven Plagues of Egypt sound like a musical comedy. Food shortages, pollution, floods, famine, massive hurricanes, contaminated soils, antibiotic resistant bacteria and lethal viruses.  A real picnic. It was enough to make someone go home and load grandpas WWII pistol or head for the garage and find some clothesline.

What ever happened to the future of the forties and fifties? Now that was a future to look forward to! Radar guided and flying cars, anti-gravity belts, commuter rockets to the moon, food in pills, hypersonic airliners, everyone wearing spandex and form fitting helmets, no disease, no privation, no wars; it sounded wonderful. Especially to a boy of eleven.

When I attended the General Motors Motorama in 1956, I was enthralled by the concept cars of the future. My father had bought a new Chevrolet Bel Air that summer, but that paled in comparison to those sleek, gleaming beauties slowly rotating on elevated stages under blazing lights. Beautiful girls in dresses and high heels opened the doors and let us see the interiors. I sneaked under a velvet rope and actually touched the fin of a Firebird II before a guard ran me off. What fun.

Comics and pulp magazines shaped our concepts of the future as well. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Astounding Stories, Planet Comics and numerous others. Space travel seemed as easy as riding your bike to the movies. Exotic landscapes, benign and agressive alien beings, beautiful women in need of rescue from some menace or another.  Worlds of excitement and adventure much preferable to your math homework.

Well, our cars have yet to fly (and it’s probably just as well considering how poorly people drive), the moon is still vacant, fast food isn’t in capsules, airliners are relatively poky (and airports are barely controlled chaos), no anti-gravity, Mars (the god) is still in business and we’re not all slim, happy and smiling in spandex.

I suppose the saddest part of the new future as opposed to the ‘old’ future is the total lack of enthusiasm for the days to come. A tomorrow bright with promise is gone and melancholy has replaced it. The old newspaper axiom: “If it bleeds, it leads” seems to be the order of the day.

As far as I’m concerned, I refute these pessemistic looks at the future. The sciences are making tremendous strides in all aspects of our daily lives. Disease is being conquered, broken bodies are being repaired, automobiles are safer and more reliable, pollution is being dealt with, clothing is more comfortable and wrinkle free, people are living longer, computers are faster and more user friendly, intricate robots explore the planets, gadgets such as cell phones, iPod’s, mp3 players, plasma tv’s, etc. are part of our daily lives, and the list goes on and on.

No, things aren’t perfect.  Wars still rage, poverty stll exists, hate and predjudice still find harbor in many a heart and utopia is still a concept rather than actuality; but all in all things are better today than in the forward looking 1950’s. It’s been said that nostalgia is the realization that things weren’t as bad as they seemed at the time, thus ten years from now we’ll look back on 2008 and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Now if you’ll excuse me, UPS just delivered my Samsung Mark VII Time Machine that I bought on eBay and I’m anxious to try it out.

ciao everyone.