Bad news
By RAVI DYKEMA
Does the future seem ominously uncertain to you? Consider war, global
warming, peak oil, environmental degradation, religious extremism, species
extinction, and super-viruses.
I hear such sentiments often nowadays. Not long ago I learned about
a spate of predictions for a specific date in 2012, a mere 5 years hence
(See “Apocalypse
now, or never,” page 27). As an editor of this magazine for
24 years I have kept trying to peer into the mist down Time’s
trail, and have kept trying to motivate my readers toward healthy action.
I share this mission with some illustrious company. In this issue alone,
we cover, in addition to the 2012 prophecies, Leonardo De Caprio’s
movie, “The 11th Hour” and the movie “The Man From
Earth” (See Movies, page 16). De Caprio’s movie is about
our species’ relationship with our planet and how we can respond
effectively to current problems, and “Man From Earth” is
about 14,000 years of our history leading up to now, and the insights
such a huge perspective offers us.
We even covered this very topic in depth in a long-ago issue, March-April
of 1991. In it we focused on prophecy with an article titled, “The
Flashy End of the Twentieth Century.” We also printed an interview
with futurist Jean Houston, Ph.D. I wrote an editorial that sounds like
it could be written today.
I wrote, “There has always been bad news. But today’s bad
news! What do you make of it? About the environment we read of global
warming, an ozone hole letting through destructive solar rays, ocean
pollution causing species extinctions, even toads disappearing from
the pristine Colorado high country. Even the very symbol of modern convenience,
your house’s electrical wiring, might be giving you cancer, according
to a Newsweek article. I could go on: we expect our politicians to lie
to us; our best efforts over thirty years to address poverty fail miserably—the
poor are worse off than ever, while the rich prosper; we’re fighting
a massive “morally right” war (the first Bush’s Gulf
War) against our former protégé (Saddam Hussein) whom
we assisted in his previous war (The Iran-Iraq War). Don’t you
get the feeling something is not working, that some piston or gear cluster
in the engine that pushes our society along is busted, or perhaps was
designed badly from the start? If we continue in the direction we’re
headed, where will we end up?”
Ta-Daaaa! We ended up here, 16 years later. And I still worry, as I
did in that 1991 editorial, about people’s reliance on prophecy,
whether the Biblical rapture or the Mayan calendar’s ending. I
worry that it can breed inaction if the believer thinks a deeper engine,
God perhaps, or a spirit being or an extraterrestrial force, is going
to carry us to our destination whether or not we personally lift a finger
on behalf of sane policies and projects for our world.
We are a lot better off now than I thought in 1991 we would be because,
I think, LOTS of people studied, schemed and sweated to make the world
better.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 FEATURE ARTICLES
