Thursday, December 4, 2008

Think Positive

I am a cautious optimist. I believe that ten years from now the world will be a more stable place. In my opinion, the only unpredictable event in the past decade was the attack on the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, this one event changed the world as we (Americans) know it. Were it not for that, the Department of Homeland Security would not exist, John Kerry would have recently won his second election (even though I like Obama better), and our economy would not be stretched to its limit by a meaningless war.

The world ten years from now is bound to be affected by the events of September 11th as well. With any luck, the next few years will be remembered as a time of rectifying some terrible mistakes. The war in Iraq will finally end, and the War on Terror will take on a more metaphorical tone as have all the War on [Idea]s before it. I also believe the economy will bottom out, but with time, effort, and good ideas will recover. In other words, the country I was born in will come back to us, with maybe a bit more airport security, which never bothered me so much anyway. Again, I’m an optimist, and Obama’s election is a direct cause of a lot of that. I truly believe that mankind has grown past being a race of slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging savages, and I find that being continually disappointed is more tolerable than abandoning this belief.

As for myself, my future has always been determined one step at a time. The SDE program at UB is the first long-term goal I’ve set for myself in my 5-year college career. But as it stands now, in ten years I hope to be found good enough and lucky enough to be writing for some wildly successful game company. I will be working on my masterpiece, something deeply socially introspective in ways that most people don’t like to think about. After that, I plan on kicking back and accepting the first-ever Nobel Prize for Literature given to a video game script. Ok, maybe that’s unrealistic. I’d take a Pulitzer.

I will be forcing people to communicate with me cryptographically, at least online. I will either have found someone special or resign myself to being a cat lady. I will be living in the city or at least very close to one. I’ll have gotten laser eye surgery as soon as I’m convinced it won’t wreck my night vision. I’ll be driving a hybrid car (maybe hydrogen-cell, keeping my fingers crossed). I, maybe foolishly, believe that my life will always be my own, because I have the intelligence and the skills to make it that way, and the stubbornness to refuse any other way.

I realize these predictions are all fairly mundane. The apocalypse is not coming in 2012, Coca Cola’s private army (yes, they do have one) will not take over the world, we won’t be eating food in pill form or willing objects into existence. This is because I think that the world resists change. It takes a very long lever and a well-placed fulcrum to move it, and even when that happens, the world generally settles back where it was, strikes some sort of balance. There are a lot of forces in play: political, technological, economic, social, etc. But all people are fundamentally driven by a desire for stability. Like the “return to normalcy” of the 50s, in the next ten years people will find themselves getting sick of the way things are heading, scrap the unstable aspects and revert to a (relatively) simpler existence.

The interesting decade will be the one following. If the next decade is analogous to the 50s, then the 2020s will be the decade of social reform. That is when I believe a lot of today’s issues will be actively addressed. Global warming will be causing enough deaths that it can no longer be ignored. Privacy rights as related to technology will come to a head after the blood-borne iPod Yocto unwittingly creates a new STD—one that plays every song you’ve ever hated directly into your brain, commonly diagnosed as Nickelbackitis. Genetic engineering, especially in agriculture, will become much more regulated and standardized. Viable renewable energy sources will finally be implemented on a large scale, gradually phasing out coal and oil.

Once again, perhaps I’m being too optimistic. However, I simply cannot fathom a world that continues for too long in its current downward trend. I honestly believe that mankind will not survive the 21st century if we do not abandon fossil fuels, at the very least, and soon. That is why I have no choice but to believe that the next two decades are going to be years of recovery and progress. Barring, say, a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge.

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