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Two Thousand

Strange new number brings quizzical, futuristic outlook

Guest author

It’s a weird feeling, despite all the times we’ve remarked on it already: Each time we write the date on a check that strange new number, 2000.

For people my age and older (I was 14 or so when I first saw the movie 2001) the year 2000 has always loomed and glittered like a science-fiction dream. I thought we’d be zipping around in rocket-packs like the Jetsons by now, zooming off to the Moon and Mars for weekend getaways.

And yet the changes that actually have occurred are almost as extraordinary. Who would have guessed that computers would be as powerful and omnipresent and ordinary as they are? Or that people would become so jaded that they change the channel, yawning, whenever the space shuttle takes off? The first electronic calculator I saw, back around 1972, was about the size of a typewriter and cost several hundred dollars. Now they’re practically given away in Crackerjacks boxes, the only downward limit in size dictated by the fact that our primitive human fingers remain as big as they ever were.

The future just isn’t as much fun as I hoped it would be. I expect that would be true even if we were all waltzing around the galaxy with phasers on stun. We tend to forget that however much the world changes, you and I remain pretty much the same, for better or worse.

I’ve been accused of being something of a Luddite, because I’m suspicious of the current boundless enthusiasm that Neil Postman calls “Technology Uber Alles.” I started reading Postman’s new book, “Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past can Improve our Future,” on the same day that I’d glanced at Newsweek’s overexcited special section on the 21st century. After articles enthusing giddily over things like Virtual Reality Sex (in the future, we’ll never have to actually be with our actual partners; we’ll be able to imagine we’re with anybody we want) it was refreshing to read Postman, who quoted one of my heroes, Henry David Thoreau: “All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

For, as Postman reminds us: “There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it always has been, and it is a delusion to believe that the future will render irrelevant what we know and have long known about ourselves but find convenient to forget.” In other words, we need to carry something besides gadgetry and enthusiasm into the new millennium.

We don’t suffer at all from a lack of information. Our problem is always what to do with that information. What kind of tapestry do we weave with all our facts? What is the content of our shiny, technological package?

The century just ending was the bloodiest yet, because we humans can now kill more of each other, more efficiently, than ever before. What good would those Jetsons-style rocket-packs do us, if we simply used them for “unimproved ends” more efficient drive-by, or fly-by, shootings?

The future is not a separate place, pre-ordained, that we simply walk into, as if crossing a bridge into an already existing country. The future is something we build as we go. No matter how overwhelmed and unempowered we feel, we still have choices. And we have freedom in how we face things what we create around us, how we live, and love, and, ultimately, die.

But this is true only if we live thoughtfully, and compassionately, and perhaps prayerfully. Only if we occasionally lift our bedazzled eyes from our wonderful toys, and look around at the world outside our playground.

There’s a whole industry called “communications” now, but that doesn’t mean there’s more communication. In the brave bright world of email and Internet and voice mail and video, there’s still a need for talking, face-to-face. If nothing else, face-to-face talking reminds us that we are still human wonderful mammals, built of bone and wrapped in flesh, with souls as large or as small as we make them.

On winter nights like this one I feel that soul go soaring, as I walk home under the feet of Orion, breathing in the cold air that tastes of snow and starlight. Coyotes are carrying on in the hills, but here in town the houses are gathered, solid and warm and quiet and real. Yellow light pours out of their windows, and behind these windows are people eating and talking and dreaming and dying. There is nothing virtual about what they feel as they feed their pets and put their children to bed.

Strapping on a rocket-pack for a quick spin around the continent would be exhilarating, but I don’t think it could hold a candle to the walk home. (Diane Sylvain is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News, http://www.hcn.org. She lives in western Colorado.)


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