How the Future Will See Us

By Lee Russ

Saturday, December 10, 2005 at 05:12 PM

Rarely can people imagine how they will look to people in the future.  In fact, rare are the people who can imagine that there is even the possibility that the future might view them as anything other than heroic and noble and, most of all, RIGHT.

But lets face it, when we look back at the past, what we mostly see is a series of immense delusions, deceptions and screw-ups, all committed by people blithely unaware at the time that they were anything short of perfect.

So here's an attempt to imagine how the future will view us during "now"--the early part of the 21st century.  My Top Ten possible titles of 22nd century texts examining the early part of the 21st century:

1. They searched for the Stolen Christmas While Missing the Theft of Freedom.

2. The Post-Rational Period and its Underpinnings in the Realms of the Unreal, Surreal, and "Really?"

3.  The Silent Implosion: How A Once-Great Society Came to Treasure Trash, and to Trash Their Treasures

4.  O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh and the Outrage Factory: Siphoning Sanity and Sanitizing the Self

5.  Why Did America Bicker while America Burned?  How a Tale of Two Idiots Took A Terrible Turn

6.  Led by The Crazies, Misled by the Crooks--The Decade That Ended the Empire

7.  Where Republicans Loaned and No Buffalo Roamed; A Cautionary Tale of Misdirection

8.  How America Increased Its Productivity and Sped Itself Straight Into Disaster

9.  From the Mountains of Debt to the Prayeries of Evangelism; Greed, God, and the Ghost of America Past

10. The Decade of Magical Thinking: How Theory Trumped Facts in the Bush-Whacked 2000s.