Misapprehending

WHEN I WAS IN SIXTH GRADE, in 1966, I had a crush on my teacher, and, I got to be a "Patrol Boy". I put on a bright orange Sam Brown belt and directed students across the street coming and going to school. It was a prestigious position. My guess is that now there are so such things as patrol boys, that all this traffic and pedestrian control is accomplished through highly trained adult police officers and computerized stop lights. Too bad. One day on patrol I started trying to imagine what cars would look like in 1968, which was two whole years into the remote future. Since the future was so far away, I assumed that by 1968 cars would look like science fiction inventions like spaceships or something, and might even be able to fly. On course, none of that ever came true, and now the distance between 1966 and 1969 seems much smaller. In 1969, wide eyed, I saw the classic movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" on the big screen, and I firmly believed that it was an accurate portrayal of the future. I thought that when I became a middle aged man i would have my choice of living on the moon or Mars. I was wrong about other things too. In 1969 I read the book "The Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich, who I believe still teaches at Cal Berkeley, and makes no apologies for the fact that his dire predictions and warnings about over population and mass starvation in the nineteen nineties did not, thank goodness, materialize, mainly because of revolutionary agricultural developments. The year 2017 always seemed like the remote, science fiction filled future, and now, here it is, much different than what most of us would have expected. It is now obvious to me that the world we have now is the one we were making in the nineteen sixties, unpredictable as it was back then, and that we are now making the future world, the one in which our great grand children will live. I hope we do a good job.