Gasoline is close to three bucks a gallon. The future is now. Welcome to the 21st Century. Time for a nostalgic and inaccurate look at the Twentieth Century.
There might be a few five-year olds reading this, but I doubt it. Most of us grew up in another century. The 20th Century. We had 20th Century Fox. We had rabbit ears on televisions. We had albums. We smoked on airplanes, drove drunk, blew up M-80s, and slapped women around when they got out of line.
We thought microwave ovens had the off-chance of giving us cancer. We had the USSR to worry about, a nice big target we could understand. They didn’t do anything unexpected, and the only thing they threatened us with was nuclear annihilation.
John Wayne was alive and well. We had three networks and we had three anchor men to keep us calm.
We had cheap gasoline. MTV played music videos.
Robin Williams was still funny.
The Corporations hadn’t bought up all the stadiums and renamed them. We had to go see bank tellers.
We could get on any damn airplane we wanted, because we were Americans . It used to mean something to be an American. We won WWII and saved the world from Hitler and the world knew enough to thank us for it. We were Hippies and Fascists, but we were all on the same side. We were all Americans. We weren’t left and right. There were no Red and Blue states.
We didn’t wear seat-belts or bicycle helmets. The seat belts were buried somewhere in the seat and we had no reason to dig them out. Anyone wearing a bicycle helmet would be beat up or at least ridiculed on principle. Bullies were just bullies. There was no mamby-pamby rules about bullying. If you got picked on, it was just getting your ready for the real world. Oh what wonderful, barbaric times those were.
If a kid failed, he got an F. Now nobody wants to tell the kids they failed. It might hurt their little feelings. Nobody gets an F anymore. Nobody fails. Everybody’s special. Yeah right.
We kept our phones in our houses where they belonged.
When we went on vacation, nobody could get hold of us. That’s why we went on vacation.
Everybody had health-insurance and a retirement plan. Social Security was secure. The Government knew what it was doing.
Global Warming? Now that was science-fiction.
If you wanted to play a video game, you had to go to the convenience store and pay a quarter. There were no naked people in video games. Monsters were bulky and fake looking. Video games didn’t warp the mind. Rock music warped the mind.
Rock music had guitars in it.
In the 20th century, special effects were cool. Now they’re expected, and you can’t really tell when something is computer generated or when it’s real. In the 20th century, stunt-men in unconvincing wigs had to risk their lives to make a movie. Now they use a computers for the “stunts”.
The Year 2000 was a dream. We imagined that in The Year 2000, we would all drive hover-cars and enjoy inter-stellar space travel. Wars and intolerance would be a thing of the past. Captain Kirk would be out there exploring the universe with his multi-cultural staff. We would eat a pill for dinner and diseases would be cured and it would be a bright a glorious future.
Dick Tracy was an amateur compared to today’s Blackberry-toting, text-message-addicted wired people. (You see kids, Dick Tracy was this comic book detective and he. . . oh never mind.) We’re never out of touch. Remember Captain Kirk’s communicator? Bulky compared to today’s cell phones. And his didn’t even have a camera. (Captain Kirk, for you youngsters, was this guy in a science-fiction television series . . . Oh forget it.)
Infants, infants are being kept off of planes because their names are on no-fly lists. This has actually happened. I’m not making this up.
We clone.
The Japanese are working on skin for robots that feel heat, cold, and pressure.
We pause live TV and play our music on tiny gadgets that have no moving parts. We can download video anytime we want. We can watch that guy get his head cut off as many times as we want.
We don’t have to copy albums to cassette tapes. We download songs off file-sharing sites.
We Podcast. We Blog. We Email and Chat. We Text, Google, Download and Upload.
Once upon a time, you had to go to a theatre and watch a movie after it came out! Now, if you know the right people, you can see a movie for free before it comes out. Or they send the movies to you in the mail. Or you can download them.
People really do have antenna coming out of their heads, in the form of head-sets for cell-phones, or those little things they hang off their ears.
Back in the 20th, if you saw somebody sitting in a car by themselves, and they were talking, it was a because they were crazy. Now you can’t tell.
The space-shuttles, once the proud cutting edge of space travel, are OLD. The space station is OLD. Nobody cares about space travel unless there’s a good chance of seeing something explode.
We order our books online. Pay our bills online. Grandma gets pictures of the kids online and sends them to the store for printing online. She has to go to Canada for her prescription drugs though. Poor Grandma.
Gasoline is close to three-bucks a gallon. Some people are hacking their hybrid cars to run on batteries. Oil is running out?! Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. Sure, we had an energy crunch in the seventies, but three-bucks a gallon?
Yesterday I had to take our mini-van into the dealership to have them REPROGRAM THE CAR-KEYS. Only in a dystopian future could they mess up the design on car keys. The van has scores of onboard computers built into it. We have a DVD player to pacify the kids and radar on the bumpers to warn us before we back into anything when we go to the mall. That van has more computing power than the Apollo space-capsules.
Surgeons use robot arms to operate on patients from miles away. Judges talk to the accused via video-conferencing. Computers are everywhere.
You used to have to put up flyers to get your point out. Now you register a website and post a blog.
We used to have the USSR. Now we have terrorists who don’t want to land the planes anymore. They don’t want to go anywhere, they have no demands and no political agenda. They’re a death-cult that just wants to kill people. They make bombs out of toys and cell phones. A morphing, invisible threat that offers no nice big target like the USSR. Man I miss the USSR. That was easy.
DNA tells us that “Oops!” maybe black guys weren’t guilty of everything. “Sorry sir, but you’ve just spent decades in jail for a crime you didn’t commit. Sorry! Our mistake. Guess you’ve got some catching up to do!”
In the 20th century, minorities were discriminated against, then they were off-limits for discrimination. But in the 21st, gays— well forget about it! We can make laws to discriminate against them all we want. They’re gay! Hell, let’s change the Constitution. The founding fathers might have been slave-owners, but they certainly weren’t gay!
In the 20th century, religious people liked Peace. Now they like WAR! In the 20th, you supported the troops by building an airplane or signing up at the recruiting office or rationing gasoline or buying war-bonds. Now you slap a magnet on your SUV and call it good.
In the 20th century, we made our own cars and we manufactured stuff. Now we outsource everything to other countries.
Gasoline is close to three bucks a gallon. The future is now.
