Questing For Foresight and Futuristics

 Madame:

Your words on discernment remind us that people crave simplicity in an overly complex world.  Black and white is a lot easier than trying to discern nuance in the truth of the tangled gray.

I am interested in your opinions this evening far more than I am in expressing my own.  What I am most interested in at the moment is what, of the noisesome things this culture dwells on, will still be issues 50 years from now?  Why will they be or not be issues?  What does that indicate?

Here’s a short list.  Feel free, as always, to add your own!

Marriage equality (homosexual rights)

Abortion

Immigration

Weapon Regulation

Environmental Impact (Climate Change, Pollution, etc.)

Obesity

Health Care

Education

Plight of the Middle Class

Infrastructure

Poverty

Energy Independence

Deficit and Debt

Terrorism

Social Security

Partisanship

War(s)

Jobs

Drugs (including legalization)

Corporations

Overpopulation

Misinformation/Disinformation

Consumerism

Spirituality

Religion

Species Extinction

Water and Food Supply and Quality

I’ve often thought that if we made decisions based on “how is the world going to look 200 years from now, and how will it look with this decision?”, we'd be better off, but 50 years is maybe more imaginable for people.  For those readers out there who are vexed by the American non-disposition toward math, that would be how you or your predecessors would have tried to look forward in 1963.

What fun!  And it’s also fun to read about how they thought we’d be by now.  In many ways we’ve gone in unimagined directions, and in others, we haven’t lived up to their expectations!