Half a Century of Thoughts -- part two

I have a lot of mixed emotions when I look back at my childhood. On the one hand, there was incredible freedom. I was largely left to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, other than going to school and being home by dark. No great hardships since I didn't dislike school and there was no one to play with after dark. Of course, I didn't feel that way about it at the time, the freedom part, much like I didn't feel anything about my ability to walk or do anything else. It just was.

I spent as little time at home as possible, most of my weekends being spent at my friends' houses.

Which is where the mixed emotions come in. My friends didn't want to come to my house anymore than I wanted to be there. Not that I really understood that at the time. Except for one friend who left crying the first time he ever tried to stay the night at my house. My (step)dad started yelling about something and scared him, and he had to go home. He never came to my house again, though I spent many, many weekends at his. I didn't get that that was the same reason none of my other friends wanted to come to my house, either, and why I always stayed at theirs.

And the freedom I had was negligence. My parents rarely knew where I was or when or if I'd be home, not that I didn't ever not show up at dusk. Unless I was spending the night with someone, but my mom, at least, always knew that because I would actually ask for permission. Of course, there was that one time... That time I ran away.

My mom knew that I ran away, since I did it because of some fight. I don't remember what happened other than that it ended with me yelling, "I'm running away and never coming back!" I made the best effort at it I could being a spur of the moment thing. I walked around the block three or four times trying to figure out where I should go. I realized fairly quickly that I couldn't go to any of my friends' houses because their moms were friends with my mom and I'd just get sent back home. Likewise, I couldn't go to my grandparents' house... though maybe I could have for a while? I don't know. I didn't try it, but it's possible they wold have let me stay. At the time, that didn't feel like an option.

[One note: When I mentioned in the previous post the "house I grew up in," that was my grandparents' house. At least, at this point. But I'm not going to explain that right now.]

In fact, it felt like I didn't have any options. So I sat down under a tree on the corner of the street I lived on so that I could think. And I thought about it for hours. So many hours that it got dark and I had come to no conclusions about where I could go, but I was determined to not go home. What was the point of running away if you just went back home? Eventually, a car came up the street and stopped next to me. The door opened and my mom growled, "Get in the car." Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to refuse on the grounds that I had run away; I just got in the car and we drove backwards down the street to our house.

I think the "running away" thing is emblematic of my childhood. Maybe of all of GenX. Sure, my mom came after me, but she got lucky. If I had been some other kid, some kid who didn't think things through and need a plan, I might have just walked off randomly through the city and never been seen from again or, at least, not without the intervention of the police. And let me be clear, this was not one of those "teaching moments" from a sitcom where a kid declares s/he is going to run away and the parent helps said kid pack and plan until the kid realizes that running away isn't a good idea. This was my mom not caring enough to do anything about it, and it doesn't matter that she believed I wasn't really going to do it, because, clearly, she was wrong about that. If she had bothered to ever know me as a kid, she would have known that I wasn't in the habit of making idle threats. It's not like "I'm going to run away!" was a thing I said on a regular basis.

The problem here is that she didn't bother to worry about me, or even wonder about me, until it got dark and I didn't come home. She just went about her business. And my dad(step) didn't care at all. It was never mentioned, and he took no action or acknowledged that anything had happened.

The number of times I almost died as a child is appalling. I mean literally almost died. Like the time my cousin and I got stuck in what can only be called quickmud and didn't realize we were in any kind of danger until we were literally in it up to our mouths and only barely got out (because she used me as a surface and pushed me all the way under so that she could get her hands on the bank and pull herself out). Or the multiple times I was chased my water moccasins while out playing in the woods so far from anywhere that no one would have known I was dead. It physically distresses my daughter almost any time I talk about things from my childhood. Which is what made me realize that there were things wrong with my childhood. Prior to that, to me, it was all just normal.

Not to mention that my mom would just give my stuff away because she felt like it. Seriously, I would come home and stuff from my room, stuff I loved, would just be gone. It was always, "Oh, I gave that to so-and-so." She didn't have any reason; she just did it. And my wife's mom would do the same kind of thing only she would throw things away.

And the Boomers are still doing that shit, even at this very moment. Fighting to protect the most corrupt "President" (#fakepresident) of all time so that they can continue to hold onto everything. Stealing the future from their kids and grandkids so that they can continue to bloat themselves. And they don't fucking care! There's a reason that Gen X has been the first American generation to not surpass their parents in wealth and success, because Boomers are like Shelob in her cave sucking the life out of everything that gets near them.

Of course, the problem is not just the Boomers. Mostly, Gen Xers have responded just as I did when I ran away. Boomers pull up in the car and say, "Get in," and we do it. Why? Because the Boomers are in the right? No. I'm pretty sure my mom was not in the right about whatever the disagreement was. My dad(step) was never in the right and my mom only rarely. No, we do it because they're our parents. We don't even think about it, not until it's too late.

And, you know what, it's too late. Or pretty damn close to it.
And we keep letting Boomers tell us what to do.

Make America Great: Stepping into the Future

While it can't be said that America was ever great in practice, an argument could be made for it having been great in concept. Or, at least, in concept in its own collective consciousness. If that time existed, and I think it did, it was in the post-World War II years and lasted up to around 1970. The assassination of Kennedy and, then, King wounded it, but, really, it was Nixon who drove a stake right into the heart of the idea of American greatness. Then he twisted it around a bit and pissed on the corpse for good measure.

Let's take a quick look at post-WWII America:
First, America had just saved the world. Almost literally. Whether that was actually true or not doesn't matter, because that's how Americans viewed it.
Second, America was helping to rebuild the world, including offering great assistance to peoples who had just been its enemies. Sure, maybe some of that was motivated by the guilt of having nuked Japan but, still, we were doing it.
Third, there was a push toward equality for all. True, it hadn't gotten there, but people began to see it, finally, as a possibility. It brought hope.
Fourth, World War II led the US into a technology boom, which was heightened when Russia launched Sputnik. We had a great focus on education and science and the future, and we really believed that anything and everything was possible.
Fifth, because we believed in the future, we began to build for the future and infrastructure expenditures show it. It was all rather altruistic because it was an idea, not for those doing it, but for those who would come after.

That was the environment the Boomer generation grew up in, one in which there was huge growth, plenty of everything which was handed to them on a platter so they didn't have to work for it, and the future was so bright they had to wear shades. Perhaps, it's no wonder they long for "the good old days."

Of course, their focus is on the physical output of the ideals of a previous generation, ideals they themselves don't hold. They are a generation of consumers and profit and, now, through Trump (#fakepresident), Republicans are engaged in an act of necrophilia. The focus on coal and other dead industries is nothing more than trying to fuck a corpse back to life.

And the worst part? Trump (#fakepresident) is doing it on live TV and twitter for the whole world to watch, dragging us along for the ride. Not that Turkeyneck McConnell, Paul Ryan, and a slew of others aren't humping away with him.

I think the only way to step into the future is to push the Boomers out of power. Probably all of them. Even the "good" ones (and I do think there are some good ones). Leave them to have their orgy of the dead on their own.

It's time to stop letting the future slip away.

Because we are well on our way to not even being on the bus to the future. It's like we were driving that bus, then let China take over, and, now, we're just getting off entirely.

There are so many things on the verge of happening:
Self-driving cars
Flying cars
Sustainable energy
Laser guns! (oh, wait, China already did this!)
a Mars colony
Asteroid mining
Feeding the whole world
Curing cancer
Well, I could go on for a while...

Do you know why none of those things are actually happening? Boomers and their fear of profit loss by not being allowed to rape the Earth and kill species.

It's time to put or focus on the technologies of the future because we can't go there by trying to make coal the fuel of the future. It's the fuel of a long-dead past, and we need to leave it there.

Look, I'm not saying you're ever going to get that personal jetpack, but, if you do, it certainly won't be coal powered. It's time to get rid of the G.Old.P. They are the proverbial weight around our collective neck tying us to the past. Personally, I'm tired of the past.
It's time to step into the future. I want to see it before I'm dead.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Flying Cars

There may be no better indication that the future has arrived (when it does arrive) than that there will be flying cars sitting in people's driveways. As with driverless cars, the idea of cars that can fly has been around almost as long as cars have been around. But, then, the desire for flight goes back thousands of years. All you have to do is flip through Greek mythology to find stories of Man riding flying horses or Man making wings from feathers and wax to know that man has always wanted to fly. It's no surprise that we want our cars to fly, too.

It may have been The Jetsons, though, that really embedded the idea of the future and flying cars into our psyches.

What kid growing up watching this cartoon didn't want one of these? Well, maybe not precisely one of these, but a car that flew, nonetheless.
George Lucas didn't help when he created this

even if it doesn't quite fly.
And we can't forget

However, it was probably the movie Blade Runner that really sealed the deal and presented us a future vision, even if it was a bleak future vision, of a world with cars that fly:

It's been a while since I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I'm pretty sure the flying cars are in the novel, too. Almost positive.

The thing is... flying cars are here. They sort of have a mythical quality to them, right now. You hear about this company or that company working on them, promising them, but they never seem to be quite available, so everyone seems to think it's just one big scam. I think it's really a matter of the government, though. And, probably, the airlines. I mean, if people can own flying cars, we won't really need airlines so much anymore, will we? Maybe for international travel. For a while. At any rate, several companies have fully functional flying cars ready to go, but there continue to be, and pardon the pun, roadblocks at every turn.

This is my favorite one:

That's the Moller Skycar M400. It has vertical take off and landing, can go 400mph, and has a 900 mile range. It even gets around 20 miles to the gallon, which isn't bad considering our old van barely got that. The real issue? The $1,000,000 eventual price tag. They do have a four-seat model, though.

A model more likely to be ready for the general public within a reasonable time frame is The Transition. I believe a pilot's license is required, though. You can find out more about it here.

This is a future I really expect to see in my life time. I hope. The whole flying car thing just seems to have gotten bogged down in government red tape. But they're real. They work. They just cost a lot of money. And, well, they're not really legal, yet.