a brief glimpse

It's funny how the vision of the future changed so rapidly. The generation before me, everybody had dreams of shining metal skyscrapers and flying cars. Then later on, when I was a boy, I remember seeing pictures of the shuttle and space stations. There was talk of people living and working in orbit and even under the sea. By the year 2020, we were even going to have colonies on the moon and mars.
Then, I can't really say when, we started thinking of the future as some horrifying dystopic world. If it wasn't going to be post-apocolyptic,it would be savage and broken in some way. The future began to be something to be mourned in advance. Was it because so many of those "world of tomorrow" visions turned out to be utter bullshit? Was it because we got more and more bad news from every corner of the globe?
All I know is that I personally never imagined a world so filled with orwellian things, a vague, shadowy enemy, a vague shadowy government run by scary, remote, sinister men with weird and threatening agencies like "Homeland Security" and "Total Information Awareness".
I never could have imagined that we would become myopic and our airwaves would be filled with the screeching, hateful sounds of propagandists, ranting and raving, supporting government agendas. ......

At times, though, I have to pull back and look at the bright side. I am typing letters on a keyboard and they will go out there on the internet and people who have never met me will be able to read my thoughts. I can use the same internet and learn virtually anything from Ether Kinematics to swahili. I can communicate and I can look at great works of art that I will never see in person. True, it's all so fragile, but it is too vast to ever completely be destroyed ( I hope).
Within this new sea, we can understand people from all over the world. I know millions of people have written about this, many of them more effectively, but it is an awesome time we live in.
Where gross materialism begins to fail, we find ourselves turning to solutions that rely on our own native intelligence and creativity. The other shoe that is the global energy crisis is going to drop soon. It's impact in America is going to be colossal...but, we have people here who have the ideas and technology that will change everything. We just need to be nimble and strong enough to move when the time is right. We know that government and big business can't solve the problem. They ARE the problem. I hate to start a ramble here, but I know that somewhere out there is the next greener, nicer, Edison, Ford, or Wright Brothers. They are going to help us move forward.
The future is going to be quieter, cleaner, and....more kick-ass for those of us who are willing to see it and embrace it.
Everyone else can wait for the rapture as long as they stay the fuck out of our way.