Predicting the future is tricky

By KEVIN HORRIGAN

I am trying to contemplate the future. It is too hard. The tube beckons.

There is the 1982 movie “Blade Runner,” a “sci-fi classic,” as they say in the blurbs. It is set in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles in 2019 where Harrison Ford is trying to track down four quasi-human “replicants.”

The movie people imagine that in 2019, Los Angeles will be dark and horrible. Their contemplation of the future includes flying cars, “off-world” life on other planets and laboratory-created pythons for use by strippers.

However, when Harrison Ford makes a phone call in the movie, he parks his flying car near a phone booth. When news breaks, he grabs a newspaper to read about it. Here we are less than 10 years away from 2019 and you hardly ever see a phone booth. And in my business, only pie-eyed optimists believe there will be a print edition of a newspaper in 2019.

One of my brothers, owing to a misspent youth, became an art historian and a museum curator. He once “curated,” as they say in the curating trade, a traveling exhibit for the Smithsonian called “Yesterday’s Tomorrows,” which made fun (in an intellectual sort of way) of people’s goofy visions of what the future would look like: flying cars, cities in the sky, airborne buzz saws that chew up enemy airplanes, living rooms that you clean by spraying it with a hose.

It all goes to show that predicting the future is tricky. How do you conjure up transgenic pythons and miss cell phones?

Still, every day people have to make assumptions about the future based on nothing more than their own somewhat tenuous grasp of the present. On the tube, I see Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, complaining about new emissions standards that Congress is imposing on automakers.

“What if you want to drive a gas hog?” Dr. Coburn asks. “You don’t have the right any longer in this country to spend the money to drive a gas hog?”

Clearly Dr. Coburn is among those who cannot contemplate a future in which the pursuit of happiness cannot be achieved as fast as possible in leather seats with a V-8 engine and the A/C set to max.

Big cars, cheap gas

Americans of my generation have a hard time contemplating a future without big cars and cheap gas, even though there is no particular reason to believe that God is making any more oil, nor that the world is going to step aside and let us suck up as much of it as we’ve been used to sucking up at $1.50 a gallon.

Barack Obama can see the future. He’s on the tube telling me that the future is full of small, fuel-efficient gasoline-driven and plug-in electric cars that cost half again as much as a regular car, all of which will be manufactured by the new U.S. Department of the Treasury and Cars, with some assistance from the automotive industry, which apparently has seen the Light.

I have seen the Chevy Spark, of which Government Motors hopes to sell 160,000 a year. If I am to drive one, they’ll have to build it around me and I’ll have to wear it like a suit.

I can’t imagine such a future. The car doesn’t even have wings.

A young woman interrupts my contemplations. She is just back from the coffee shop, where she and her friends spend a lot of time sitting around texting other friends and occasionally engaging in face-to-conversation. “Everyone I know is scared about the future,” she says. “They don’t know where they’re going to get jobs.”

I tell her not to worry. I say the future is going to be great. I say, sure, my generation grew up in the ’50s and the ’60s and everything was bright and possible, unless you happened to be black. But think of the people who grew in the Depression. They probably thought everything was going to stink, too.

I do not mention that it took World War II to end the Depression. I believe young people should study history on their own.

X Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.