Waking Up to the Future
I have to admit, I have been sleepwalking for the last two years. All I have done over this period is to just hunker down and wait for things to get better. I knew in advance at the start of 2020, that the decade would be one of immense change, I wrote about it in some of my blogs. But the reality is, of course, very much different from what I imagined then. Many of the new trends and changes came about from the Covid-19 pandemic, certainly our political parties have done little else then argue over vaccinations, mask mandates, closures, restrictions and ways to avoid doing anything to help people. To say that there are other problems out there in the real world other then transgender people and race history is an understatement, as has been shown from the sudden impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I have grown extremely tired from all the messaging that says everything is just great, and only our, (choose one or the other), political party can save us and our way of life. When in fact absolutely no one is thinking about the near or distant future and the real extreme challenges we need to start facing right now.
Covid and the Ukraine War has only accelerated continuing supply chain issues and has now set off dangerous inflationary trends. It has also impacted energy issues with rising gasoline prices, even though the U.S. has some of lowest worldwide costs amid the largest car dependency of any country. Needed clean energy advances are blocked with much higher commodity prices of things such as steel, rare earth minerals, lithium and nickel necessary for the new world of electrical vehicles, mass transportation and providing large amounts of nonpolluting energy to combat increasing CO2 levels. Gas prices also impact farming and food production. Imports of wheat and fertilizer from Russia and Ukraine will be greatly slowed and farming in third world countries may be unable to pick up the slack from much reduced imports leading to shortages and famines.
Other very near future problems we need to face are advances in quantum computing that have the ability to break modern encryption that safeguard our finances, tech and military secrets. Artificial intelligence and robotics will accelerate the loss of service-based workforce jobs in a mind-numbing way over the next several years. Medical advances will continue to offer life extending therapies and other moral questions of living and dying. There is the real need to recognize that Russia and especially China will continue to work against our economy by stealing intellectual property, buying up large amounts of real estate and actively fighting against the dollar. Russian efforts to delegitimize our government and create even more divisions among Americans will continue unabated. And if that is not enough, other kinds of viruses and future pandemics are also a very distinct possibility. As Pope John Paul II said, “The future starts today, not tomorrow.”
(We need to stop sleepwalking, it is eyes wide open time to start preparing for a large number of issues to tackle. For too long I have expected and painted a rosy Star Trek future that, alas, can never be.)
