I was part of that naive generation that imagined that today we'd have jet packs. I know that's a pretty stupid thing to want, but it showed that people were using their wits and energy to create new ways for examine their world, not flying locked up in a large metal can, but flying reliably and safely under their own power like birds. Learning more about human nature, I've given up a lot on reliably and safely but still the deep-down fool in me would like a jet pack. Instead I get promised a big old old wall to hide behind along with the other "good" Americans who imagine that they ought to be protected from the waves of off-white folks who insist on living and thriving in a world America cannot control as it once did a few meager decades ago.
The simplistic and reduced notions of Ayn Rand have taken hold in this land of the free and now we are not all citizens, all men and women created equal, we are "makers" and "takers". Some few who have stuck oil with some idea or notion and no small amount of hard work and timing imagine that they are the ones who count exclusively and others who might not have been so lucky should just shuffle along to the exits. Even worse they imagine their success is because of some moral superiority they possess, they have what they have because they uniquely deserve and others have so little because that's what they deserved too. The social contract is broken and ignored as technology makes much of what people have done for "work" obsolete.
When confronted with this coming reality, the knobs will say that new jobs will be created as they have been in other periods of social transformation. But they ignore that now we live in the dawing age of the robot and those "new" jobs are not coming, but we will still have plenty of people to account for. Ideas like a basic guaranteed income strike the "makers" as heresy, but I wonder if that's what Marie Antoinette thought too.
The climate continues to do what it does despite the debates about the causes and effects. We already live in a time when the naysayers have largely given up pretending there's no change, but still and all pretend we cannot change it. They might well be right about that, but the changes will come regardless and we as a society seem unwilling to change in the face of the storm. For my generation it will not matter, we will be dust before the rising tide comes to wash us away, but for the next generation I fear they will struggle and the one after that even more. And I still never got my jet pack.
Rip Off
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