Past My Time

I don't think I care for the 21st Century very much. I expected it to be better, frankly, and the sense of disappointment I feel over the lunkheaded stupidity of my own species wears me down and makes me feel old and tired. I believed the movie 2001 when it came out. I believed that we'd have moonbases and the like, but more than that, leaving the science-fiction trinkets behind, I believed that we would have triumphed over ignorance, parochialism, racism and all those other wonderful -isms (the Communists, quick to diagnose but crappy clinicians to the bitter end, claimed that Communism would in the end eradicate -isms. I always wondered if they included Communism in that calculation).

I don't really miss the flying cars that we were promised, because it doesn't take much thought to realize that flying cars would be a disaster. If aggressive impatient morons make driving on surface streets into a game of chance, imagine what flying around them would be like. I don't really miss the spaceships and moonbases either. But the realization that people are getting stupider and meaner makes me ill. You'd think that by now people would decide to vote for (or against, for that matter) Barack Obama without regard to skin color. But how many times have I heard supposedly educated people where I work announce that they couldn't vote for him because he's a n-----? One gawks at these morons as though grasping for a punchline, but it isn't there. They actually believe that, and what's more, they feel comfortable enough with it to actually say it.

This isn't the 21st Century as it should have been. Something went terribly wrong somewhere along the line. Religious fundamentalists determine the science curricula of public schools. Racists and bigots threaten to determine the outcomes of elections. For most of us, the convenience of opinion has become more powerful than the weight of fact. What is true is not nearly as important as what we deem to be true, and we can selectively redefine anything on a whim. The mere fact that we sit around arguing about whether "the surge" worked or not is proof that we don't understand the merest outline of the problems in Iraq, and is proof that we don't care either.

One of my acquaintances is a prime right-wing blowhard, the sort who imagines that he has the solution to every problem around the world, and somehow his solutions always seem to involve violence. He was holding forth on how to solve the religious problems in Iraq, and I simply had to ask him if he knew the difference between Sunni and Shia. "Sure," this mental giant said. "They wear different-colored towels." It is a testament to my self-control that I didn't follow through on my first instinct, which was slap him sideways.

But what is the alternative? To wish for a quieter and simpler time? Tempting, except I find that I am loathe to give up electricity, running water, and satellite TV. So maybe the trick is to find a quieter and simpler geographical part of the 21st Century, to find and live in a part of the world that hasn't yet been despoiled by stupidity.

Maybe things will be less unwholesome after the election, because elections often act to stir up slimy sediments that normally lie undisturbed on the bottom of the septic tank. But I don't know. Once you start to take pride in your stupidity, all bets are off.