[wisconsin_cur]

[align=center]Some thoughts on the future[/align]

There is, perhaps, nothing more uniquely human than our pre-occupation with the future and the past; a
pre-occupation that is most notable as we approach the end of one year and the beginning of another.
For the next few weeks media will be congested as publications and pundits will offer their assessments
of the year gone by and the year to come. This year posses to be even more ripe with reminiscences
and predictions as we prepare to close the book on one president's time in office and begin another and
the new president will come to the office with a higher set of expectations before him than any other in
living memory.

The problem with human memory is that it is selective. We all remember what we want to remember
from a period of time and this is true if we are discussing a political leader in retirement or a progenitor
who has passed from this life. We are a species which thinks in narrative and any good story requires a
beginning and an end with a climactic fulcrum; preferably closer to the end of the story than the
beginning. The details we include in the remembering or telling of the story is completely dependent
upon the nature of the climax and the conclusion. The story of the Bush administration, for example,
would be very different if one plans on concluding with the occupation of Iraq or the absence of any
major Islamist terror attack within the United States since September 11th 2001. Depending on the
story we decide to tell George W. Bush is either preparing to ride into the sunset or retreat to Crawford
for a last stand against the judgment of history.

Predicting the future is an even more difficult endeavor since we do not yet even have a pool of facts to
draw upon. We have trends which we can extrapolate into the future but these will only take us so far
as the first unknown of the new year. While many constraints, challenges, resources and personalities
are known; the future is open. Humans are capable of action and whether they choose one or another
path can influence both the timing and the outcome of events. We can make predictions about the price
of oil but we do not know if a suicide mission to destroy Saudi export capability is in the final stages of
planning. We are inspired by the rhetoric of Barack Obama, but we do not know yet if his appointees
will succeed in the task before them. Even if we could have 100% confidence in what we know about
the present trends and actors in the universe (an very large if), our predictions about the future would
be called into doubt the very second that we make them, because we are constantly moving into what
we do not know: the future.

We attempt to overcome the unknown by telling stories about the future. Like our stories about the past
we must pick and choose the details we wish to emphasized to get to the climactic ascension and
conclusion we envision. Unlike the past we are not even constrained by events since they are yet to
come to past. We can pick the trends that we desire to emphasize and extrapolate them out into the
future, however we desire. Some make prudent and responsible predictions about the future based
upon measurable trends. Others will clothe their fantasies in the cloak of current events, seizing the
new year as another opportunity to see their latent desires played out on the world stage; regardless of
whether or not those predictions are rooted in reality.

The facts are intimidating: a world-wide economic illness has taken hold, crashing oil production in
Mexico and the growing lawlessness there, tensions between India and Pakistan, erratic commodity
prices leave markets and policies uncertain. We need not add to these facts with imaginary
manifestations of what we do not know. What we can see is scary enough and requires serious thought
and preparation; we should not cloud our thinking by obsessing with the truly unknown. If you are
prepared for what is known, by all means prepare for the unknown, but do not allow the unknown
prevent you from preparing for what can be done about the things you do know.

Recognizing that the future is open is a reason for hope not despite the facts but born from an
understanding that the facts reveal to us only what we think we know about the present. We could be
wrong. The facts could change. Trends could play out in an unexpected manner. This should be a
motivation to emotionally and physically prepare for the future. No, it will not be like the past and it
will probably be bad but after the climactic fulcrum is a conclusion and that conclusion has yet to be
written.