The future ain’t nearly as bright as it used to be.
When I was born in 1971, we were just two years removed from the first manned moon landing. There would be a total of six manned landings, all by Americans, from July of 1969 to a a few weeks before my first birthday. I was born at the peak of the age of space exploration. As a kid I remember watching the shuttle launches and I recall pretty vividly the Challenger disaster in 1986 while I was at school. Growing up we watched Star Trek on TV and saw Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the theater. It seemed to us that we were on the cusp of exploring space, a new age of discovery where humankind would escape the bonds of earth, conquer the stars and perhaps even make contact with aliens! The future was bright.
As a child in the 1970s and 80s, 2020 seemed like a long way into the distant future and while we couldn’t predict what that would bring, it was assumed it would bring a progressively better society and that space exploration and great technological achievement would make life immeasurably better. Colonies on the moon and even Mars were just assumed to be the natural near-future next steps.
Instead we get billionaire vanity projects.
Space is no longer the final frontier, at least not for the bulk of humanity. It will become the playground for the ultra-wealthy. According to Space.com, seats on Branson’s Virgin Galactic will run around $250,000 each. There are lots of people who can afford that but the vast majority of humanity will not. As chaos descends on the world, can we be far from seeing space colonies where the wealthy can flee from the devastation? The proles will be ordered to drive tiny electric cars to “save the environment” while the ultra-rich blast off on huge rockets to take selfies in space, just like we will be told to eat the bugs to reduce our climate footprint while the rich eat steak.
That starry eyed kid I used to be in the 1970s is facing the ugly reality of life in the 2020s. It isn’t a bright future for humanity but a slow war of attrition that a small cabal of elites are winning.
I don’t dream about space travel anymore, I just dream of a future where my family will be left alone. Even something that simple seems as fantastical as exploring the stars.
The Once-Great Nation status inflicted on us by the revanchist Left is not all it’s cracked up to be, not by a long yard. The ironic thing is that once we’re all fully and firmly settled in and resigned to a third-world lifestyle, they’re the ones who are going to be most miserable living it. Pretty much everything that makes Proggie’s preferred big-city, citizen-of-the-world living arrangement so appealing to him—high-tech personal electronic gadgetry; reliable and affordable household electricity, powering advanced appliances and conveniences; ubiquitous Internet access points, most of them free of charge; ethnic restaurants; a fulsome glut of entertainment/nightlife choices; trucked-in fresh fruit and vegetables, &c—will assuredly NOT be available in the dismal Neolithic-era civilization they so shrilly advocate.
As always, Leftist useful idiots blithely assume that they’ll be exempt from the privation and disaster created by their ideological and political preferences—that their delusional self-definition as the Good, Smart, and Moral Ones forever immunizes them against the consequences of their own unworkable stupidity. Our only consolation is that, as they find themselves blindfolded and marched over to be put against the wall and shot down like dogs—UNEXPECTEDLY!!!™—the looks of shock and disbelief on their once-hopeful faces are always priceless. Happens every time.
- Entries
Not so fast there, Bucko:
If the Wright brothers had meant for cars to fly… They would have given them wings- wait. Wat?
Flying car takes to the skies for first inter-city travel. Watch video
Yup. Just like God and Heinlein intended
I know, I know: you sweat blood coming up with a perfectly good headline, and then some asshole like me comes along and… 🙂
There’s one in every crowd, and I’m usually that one.
Every commie sees himself as a future member of the inner party, living in luxury in a grand dacha while the proles toil to provide his every need. None of them envision themselves as one of the corpses in the mass graves, even though communism always, always, always produces far more mass graves than dachas.
As for that once-bright future, society shifted away from studying hard, working hard, and building for the future. Just too square and boring, man. Decades of “free” love, lots of drugs, and throwing tens of trillions down the rathole of making “persons of color” equal has brought us to today’s rapidly-becoming-third-world status. Why exactly this happened is the question, as our elites mostly do not personally follow the life path that is pushed by media on the common folk. Perhaps they truly are that short-sighted. But it is easy to see why so many suspect nefarious motives and see conspiracies everywhere.
“…as our elites mostly do not personally follow the life path…”
While there is nothing but anecdotal data to support it, I suspect the vast majority of the “elites” (spit) were handed their wealth and status. If I think of some of the prominent republicans – Romney, Bush (all), etc. you find a very high percentage of people that did not have to work (maybe they did, but they didn’t really ever worry about the bills).
While many of the ruling class certainly benefit from inherited wealth and family connections, I was mostly talking about personal life styles. While there are notable exceptions, most of the ruling class tends to follow the “get an education, get a job, get married, stay married” life path that was much more common back in the “horrible, repressed, oppressive” 1940s and 1950s. The social breakdown of the underclass (and increasingly the working class) with fewer and fewer children raised by two married biological parents who work is not common among the ruling class; they do not themselves practice what they preach (and enable through government programs).
It is certainly true that many in our ruling class focus their education and work on fields/career paths that are more political and less useful/productive than a few generations ago. Many more lawyers, politicians, journalists, and “activists” and a whole lot fewer doctors, engineers, businessmen, etc. The politicized fields have become far more lucrative paths for those with connections, and require a lot less math and science. Thus we end up with a leadership caste that is mostly innumerate and believes in BS like ‘COVID will kill us all’ and the Green Nude Eel. But they do not (yet) reject the very concept of education and a career, unlike the POC underclass.
No argument from me Haz, I get what you’re saying.
Most of them get an “education” that is essentially useless if they had to make a living with it. They don’t know why the light comes on when they flip the switch, they don’t know why water comes out the pipe when they turn the valve, they have no clue why the air gets heated or cooled, and on and on.
They may get a degree in something like business that allows them the facade they actually run something. Their business capability is on par with their plumbing ability though, really non existent.
Even when they become lawyers – well – just go down to traffic court and watch the junior DA’s at work to understand the intellect involved. A gnat is on the same level.
What they excel at is the language. They are good at stringing together words that mean nothing but sound good.
There are exceptions of course.