Nothing You Think Matters Today Will Matter the Same Way Tomorrow
A good look back a half century from 2014 and how we thought this year would look back then. What they got right, what they got wrong and what has and hasn't changed. "A look at the future we imagined in 1964."
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If you were young in 1964, you may have fond memories of that year as well. I have never forgotten how the Beatles, who landed in my hometown of Washington, D.C., for their first American concert in February, chased away the Kennedy-assassination hangover, giving me and my ninth-grade peers permission to party again. From my own immature, hormonally addled perspective, the world kept leaping forward throughout that year as if a stiff wind were at its back—culminating with the election in which Johnson buried the opponent my elders deemed a trigger-happy proponent of nuclear Armageddon. It was a time when many in my boomer generation fell in love with the idea that change was something you could believe in—a particularly liberal notion that has taken hold in other generations, too, whether in the age of Roosevelt or Obama. Even as we recognize that the calendar makes for a crude and arbitrary marker, we like to think that history visibly marches on, on a schedule we can codify.
The more I dove back into the weeds of 1964, the more I realized that this is both wishful thinking and an optical illusion.
I came away with a new appreciation of how selective our collective memory is, and of just how glacially history moves, despite the can-do optimism of a modern America besotted with the pursuit of instant gratification. Asked at the time of the 1964 World’s Fair to anticipate 2014, Isaac Asimov got some things right (miniaturized computers, online education, flat-screen television, and what we now know as Skype), but many of his utopian predictions were delusional. His wrong calls included not just his interplanetary fantasies but his vision of underground suburbs that would protect mankind from war, rampaging weather, and the tyranny of the automobile. Asimov also thought birth control would find international acceptance. It was no doubt beyond even his imagination that a half-century hence American lawmakers would introduce “personhood” amendments attempting to all but outlaw contraception...
More of the 2014 we 'saw' in 1964 at the link.
Nothing You Think Matters Today Will Matter the Same Way Tomorrow
