What will make them cringe?
When columnists of 2068 look back on today,
Plastics.
Our society’s heedless and flagrant overuse of plastic packaging was the first thing that came up in conversation when I recently asked my wife and 21-year-old daughter to predict what people 50 years from now will look back on with dismay as they consider America in the 2010s.
Prompting this discussion was my colleague Mary Schmich’s recent column headlined “Ah, the America of my childhood. So full of bunk and bigotry,” in which she wrote of how bad — how racist and sexist in retrospect — were the “good old days” of her childhood in the 1960s.
What will prompt a similarly cool assessment of our times from a newspixel columnist in 2068?
Granted, it’s almost impossible to predict what will happen in the next five weeks, let alone five decades. And it’s difficult not to let one’s political inclinations infect such an exercise — we will be shocked, 50 years from now, that America had not already adopted all my personal policy prescriptions and notions of fairness and justice.
Nevertheless, here’s an honest guess at how such a column would read:
In the America of my childhood, the National Football League actually had a team named the “Redskins,” the most brazen and offensive of the ways in which the culture stereotyped and marginalized the American Indians whose land and dignity we’d already taken.
In those days, most people walked the streets without carrying any firearms for protection whatsoever and — hard to believe, I know — were able to enter movie theaters, shopping malls, trains, buses, restaurants, beaches and concerts without passing through metal detectors.
When I was a kid, the U.S. was virtually the only country in the world where health care was considered a privilege, not a right. People died needlessly and were driven into bankruptcy for lack of a national health care system, and defenders of this shocking state of affairs couldn’t stop crowing about the healing wonders of the free market.
Before scientists perfected laboratory-grown meat, we used a third of our arable land to grow feed for livestock — in effect processing that food through the guts of cattle, swine and poultry that fouled our atmosphere by producing massive amounts of greenhouse gases and polluted our waterways with their waste while assisting in the production of edible steaks, flanks, ribs and chops.
Humans — flawed, distractible, occasionally impaired humans — drove their own cars in my youth. About 35,000 of them died every year in motor vehicle crashes as a result. Fortunately for hundreds of thousands of people now alive who would otherwise be dead, the march of progress toward autonomously guided cars and trucks wasn’t blocked by some early mishaps.
And those death traps we drove? Most of them burned fossil fuels and so contributed to relationships with repressive Middle Eastern theocracies that were often awkward, to say the least.
Voting laws nationwide were a crazy quilt of local restrictions, curious practices and Byzantine counting procedures often adopted by parochial partisan bureaucrats to advantage their own causes. We Washington Redskins fans cheer.
somehow thought these experiments in putative democracy that often frustrated the popular will were preferable to the imposition of national standards for mapping, registration, balloting, tallying and reporting.
We treated cancer patients with what amounted to poison, toxic chemicals often just strong enough to kill the deadly cells without killing the patient. Infertility, obesity, unplanned pregnancies, heart disease and male pattern baldness — remember them? — were among the significant health concerns when I was a child in the ’10s.
There had never been a female president. We had not yet built the massive dikes that continue to make coastal living possible. Adults gave trophies — symbols of victory and triumph — to me and my peers just for participating in a team sport, thinking it would enhance our selfesteem and not breed cynicism and a festering sense of entitlement.
Before the installation of hundreds of thousands of cameras on the public way and the near perfection of biometric identification technology, street and property crime were significant problems. An evildoer could rob or shoot you on the sidewalk and expect to get away with it.
It was perfectly normal and widely considered acceptable to indignantly declare one’s objection to the idea that people could be born with genitalia that didn’t match their ultimate gender identity.
We usually had to wait at least two whole days to have merchandise delivered from online retailers. And mainstream media outlets were still prim and cautious in their use of the common oaths we used to call profanity, though most of them blithely — ugh! — used “Redskins.”
Like my journalistic forebears, I marvel that a country steeped in so much ignorance has advanced as much as it has.
Well, that’s one guess, anyway. I wish I could be even more optimistic and predict an end to unemployment, homelessness, domestic violence, sexual abuse, income and educational inequality and the threat of nuclear annihilation, but there are some wounds that seem impervious to the healing powers of time and technology.
The young man, woman or intersex person who will actually write this column after Mary and I are gone is in grade school now, perhaps already starting to chafe and goggle at what today is considered normal.
Here’s hoping there’s a Chicago Tribune that will publish their withering retrospective.
Who else but Donald?
When asked by a reporter Tuesday about Time magazine’s upcoming “Person of the Year” designation, President Donald Trump said, “I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trump. Can you imagine anybody other than Trump?”
I can’t. Since 1927, Time has named “the person or group of people who, for better or worse, had the greatest influence on the events of the year.” Trump seems to think this is an honor, but it isn’t necessarily. The title has been bestowed on Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Ayatollah Khomeini and Mikhail Gorbachev (twice).
No one on the world stage is even close to Trump for having influenced the events of the year, largely for the worse in my view. The only argument for not bestowing the title upon him again (he was Person of the Year in 2016) is that he’ll be insufferable about claiming it as a great honor.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s online reader poll for funniest tweet is “My mother-in-law likes me so much she asked if I would take the family photo this year,” by @WorstCassie. To receive an email alert after each new poll is posted, go to chicagotribune.com/newsletters and sign up under Change of Subject.