For Your Musings, As Well As Mine

December 1, 1992

These are concluding thoughts for this 1992 year. In order to get this year's musings to the printer in time for Holiday mailing, I have randomly chosen some items that to me are provocative. I may “muse” at some length on these in 1993, depending upon more data, experience and interest. Meanwhile, why not “think on these things.” I will do the same.

From today's Lakeland Ledger: “...many people in Polk County still seem certain they can’t ever get AIDS because they are heterosexual. This county has the highest percentage of heterosexually contracted AIDS cases in the nation. People still fail to realize it's not a ‘gay’ disease.”

The following items are “bits” from the Nov-Dec issue of THE FUTURIST:

LONGER WORKWEEKS: Nearly a quarter of U. S. workers with full-time jobs are working 49 hours or more each week, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At present, 22.8% of the nation’s 87.4 million people with full-time jobs spend 49 hours or more on the job, compared with 17.7% in 1980.

CLEANUP: Cleaning up the hazardous waste already polluting the United States will eventually cost up to $500 billion. The market for cleanup, or remediation, services is thus one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy, outpacing even electronic information services and computer software....

POPULATION EXPLOSION (from an article by Robert S. McNamara, former head of the World Bank; former Secretary of Defense): A 2.6 fold increase in world population and an eightfold increase in consumption per capita by 2100 would cause the globe’s production to be 20 times greater than today. Likewise the impact on non-renewable and renewable resources would be 20 times greater, assuming no change in environmental stress per unit of production.

THE CASH-FREE SOCIETY: Imagine a society in which cash no longer exists. Instead, “cash” is electronic as in bank-card systems. Currency and coin are abandoned. The immediate benefits would be profound and fundamental. Theft of cash would become impossible. Bank robberies and cash-register robberies would simply cease to occur. Attacks on shopkeepers, taxi-drivers, and cashiers would all end. Purse snatchings would become a thing of the past. Urban streets would become safer. Security costs and insurance rates would fall. Property values would rise. Neighborhoods would improve.

Drug traffickers and their clients, burglars and receivers of stolen property, arsonists for hire, and bribe-takers would no longer have the advantage of using untraceable currency.

CRIME: Private homes in the future may be designed more for security than for show. Bulletproof siding for houses will be commonplace, and homes for the wealthy may have faked ramshackle facades or artificial trash piled outside.

GENETIC CODES: The mapping of the human genome may revolutionize dating, as prospective couples will wish to know each other’s genetic codes. (I’ll take romance!)

WORLD AFFAIRS: Powerful global corporations may someday inherit many of the responsibilities now given to nation-states, including instigating wars and petitioning for peace.

RELIGION: By the turn of the century, more than half the Christians in the world will live in Third World countries, and church leadership has begun shifting to those nations.... Christianity is declining throughout western Europe (one source predicts a 50% drop in church membership in Germany between 1980 and 2030), but parts of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are experiencing a Christian revival in the wake of communism’s collapse.

In the United States, ecumenical churches can expect continued decline due to the graying of their congregations and the secularization of the “baby bust” generation. Meanwhile, evangelical churches are growing, as their congregations “tend to keep a much larger percentage of their young than (ecumenicals) – plus they have a higher fertility rate....”

Some predictions are grim and alarming, some bright and hopeful. The future has always made shambles of the predictions of most “seers.” As Robert Theobald notes in “FUTURE VIEW”, “despair is destructive, however. I choose to believe that enough people will commit to changing the world to assure that we will succeed. I know that success is possible. The challenge is to you, the individual. We all make a difference by what we do and what we leave undone. You are inevitably one factor affecting the future; both your actions and inactions have have consequences. And we can all provide each other with the knowledge that will help us get out of the hot water.”