A recent column examined some of the ways we get ourselves worked up over imaginary threats to society, like the impact video games have on the fragile emotional states of our children, how GMOs destroy DNA, and the science behind avoiding microwave ovens.
This week let’s go at it from the opposite end. Let’s look at botched predictions of a grand future once we allowed experts to show us the way. A wonderful new dawn would bring endless bounty when society adopted hot new trends with fancy names, extravagant promises, and topnotch public relations campaigns.
ENERGY: Wind machines and solar power would soon generate limitless, free energy and eliminate the need for fossil fuels, (remember End of Oil predictions?) after a few technological kinks were worked out. So far wind machines have done nothing but kill a lot of birds. Electric cars are for rich people who enjoy spending hours in Ukiah charging their batteries then limping up to Garberville to do it again.
Folks, it’s been 50 years. Some gains have been made in powering homes, but cars and airplanes will run on sun juice about the same time flying carpets and women riding broomsticks are using commuter lanes.
(NOTE: The same people who advocated all the alternative power schemes also predicted we’d soon be living in Yurts and Geodesic domes, growing our own food and that The Simple Living Workshop would be a national holiday.)
HOMELESSNESS was considered a minor, easily vanquished social ill that professionals and nonprofit agencies would solve with proven strategies and services. Handing out money to panhandlers only made matters worse, they said, because giving a bum a buck meant he’d go waste it on cheap vodka.
Instead it was proposed that we give 50 billion bucks to the professionals so they could build empires on the backs of the homeless. Today you can drive down Ukiah’s State Street and, block after block, marvel at their vision, honesty and problem solving skills. All those earnest, gaudy promises backfired horribly, unless building an empire with government money was the goal all along.
EDUCATION by the 1970s was a dreary business. Sharp thinkers told us forcing students to remember dates, learn to read by repetition, or acquire math skills by rote memorization only provided students empty, meaningless skills. This outdated, non-thinking approach to learning was short-sighted and misguided.
A new wave of educators armed with PhD’s promised innovative strategies and a bright new scholastic future via Classes Without Walls, Learning Without Borders, and students grading themselves. Today we have Harvard math professors advising students that 1 + 1 no longer equals 2, which suggests we’ve come a long way, baby, but the direction we’ve traveled ought to be scrutinized.
While on the path to an improved educational system, college campus indoctrination and censorship became common, American history was no longer taught, campus rape hoaxes were frequent, and no academic pursuit was valued more highly than Diversity (of everything but opinion.) Leftwing theories only, thank you.
Today universities are suppressing free speech, harassing conservatives whether professors or visiting speakers, tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, renaming buildings, adding safe spaces and inventing micro-aggressions.
Now let’s meet the new head Chaplain at Harvard University: an atheist. This is the reality of Higher Learning in the 21st century, but the question remains: Higher than what?
PUBLIC ART: Another sickness has crept up on an unwitting society by unseen forces working to make art ugly and repulsive. Often they use children to shield whatever motivates them to ruin civic spaces, museums and galleries. Look at Ukiah and the monstrous displays all around town of so-called art.
What was once supposedly avante garde is now a nonstop assembly line of art-flavored junk that a sane society would send straight to a landfill. In Ukiah it hangs on buildings and walls and insults us daily with visual assaults via awkward displays of muddy colored jumbles of subject matter both idiotic and childish.
Today’s performance art practitioners and stagers of poetry readings are further evidence that grant money ruins artistic integrity every time, with the public paying the price, twice.
CYBER-TOPIA: We all recall rosy predictions of the magic a good hard dose of the internet would bring: Unfettered access to all the information in the world resulting in a million voices ringing out, a million voices heard.
Total knowledge! Complete empowerment! Diverse opinions! Free cookies!
We’ve travelled just a few short miles on the Information Superhighway, but we’re already lost, confused, and more than a little suspicious of the silent bargain we’ve struck with this unleashed internet monster. Can the cyber beast be tamed?
Its power seems that of the gods, but more mighty and wrathful than Thor, Poseidon and Zeus combined.
(Strolling up East Perkins Tom Hine noticed a cluster of empty businesses: Curry’s Furniture, the old Lido / Sunset Grille / Perkins Street Bar, and the BBQ joint across the street. TWK wonders what assistance the city plans to provide struggling businesses around town, given there’s many millions of bucks to buy motels for homeless folks arriving from Tacoma and Pensacola, plus benefits and programs to keep more impoverished bodies rolling in from all across the country.)
“In the little world in which children have their existence, whoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to: but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big boned Irish Hunter”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens