Oddly, the one best thing that is happening on the planet today, and every day, is the future. Nothing beats it. The glories of the past are usually sung by romantics who ignore some rather brutish realities that we do know about. The old ways of historical New Orleans? Oh yeah, without air conditioning and pencillin, when the city came around in the morning to collect the dead.
Complaints about the troubles with cars are ludicrous when you consider what was in the streets of just 150 years ago -- an unmitigated slosh of mud and horse maneure and the waste of humans, mixed with the excrement of dogs and pigs and goats and chickens. Oh, yeah, the grand old past.
But it is the future where we should look to our solutions to today's problems. We will not find them in the past. We are everyday finding new ways to deal with the problems of today by looking to the future -- what should we have? What should be the way we order our affairs? How can we make it better tomorrow. The only thing we can really learn from the past is what not to do.
The biggest problem with the future is, of course, that we can't know what it will bring. And that right away brings consternation to people. "But we don't know!" those who want to preserve the current and reactivate the past will cry. It's true, too, and that's what makes people who look to the future all the more suspect.
Virtually every single thing, idea or product, that looked to the future or proposed a remedy that would work in the future has been attacked by nearly everyone. The great future dreamers are always considered a little wacky. Because the only thing they can explain is how this or that from today or yesterday will be combined into something new in the future that will be better.
Since the vast majority of the people can't see the vision, can't bring together now unrelated things into one thing, they are against the future.
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