Some Omphaloskepsis Musings About the Future

If we look back 100-200 years, we find it hard to believe that people in civilized countries like the United States and Great Britain actually lived the way that they did. It offends us that slavery was condoned and practiced, and that life was so primitive. Children worked long hours in factories in appalling conditions, and some factories were literally death traps with locked doors. Doctors and barbers drew blood to cure us of disease, and most infections led to death or amputation in a population whose life expectancy ranged in the 40’s to 50’s.

If we go forward 100 years, will our descendants look back at us with the same mixture of horror and disbelief? To think that in 2007,

1. Babies were murdered indiscriminately in the ninth month of their gestation and even after birth – usually by crushing.

2. A large segment of the American public was able to ignore a long series of Muslim terrorist acts directed at destroying Christianity and western civilization.

3. People were fired from their jobs for uttering non-obscenities – words routinely used by large numbers of other people.

4. The Constitutional rights of American citizens were extended to illegal aliens and to terrorists who made themselves accomplices of foreign groups trying to destroy us.

5. Ignorant high school students who knew nothing of our history and traditions were allowed to blaspheme our President, our country and our flag, and their parents supported their idiocy.

6. A venereal disease that killed and spread as much or more than syphilis was given a special status involving secrecy, misinformation and propaganda.

7. A program called AFDC, which destroyed black families and bankrupted states, was only slightly modified when its appalling results became widely recognized.

8. A segment of the population was allowed to hold public exhibits and parades where nudity, beastiality, sodomy, masochism and casual sex were glorified – events sometimes sponsored by corporations like CVS and Bank of America.

9. Large numbers of American citizens were dedicated to the destruction of their own country.

10. Some front-line candidates for the Presidency of the United States actually supported and validated websites that encourage and post hate-filled, obscenity-laden and life-threatening comments and pornographic images, most of which are directed at a sitting U.S. President.

I haven’t placed man-made global warming or neoDarwinism on this list because polls show that a large majority of the American public did not subscribe to these notions in 2007.