Getting Good and Scared, by John Ostrander
Have a nice Hallowe’en? Was the Great Pumpkin good to you? Did you grab a few treats, pull a few tricks? Watched a nice scary movie or two? Seen a few Saws? Are you ready to get back to the real world?
The real world has gotten a lot scarier than anything Stephen King is putting out or that Hollywood is dreaming up. Crude oil is hitting record highs. Drinking water is drying up on both a national and an international level. The American housing market is in the toilet and likely to remain there. About a year from now we’ll be electing a new president and a new Congress, which means that we’re about to hit the hardcore election season during which little or nothing of substance will be done in Washington.
“Old news,” right? Heard it all before. Maybe we should summarize what it all means quickly and simply, the way Americans like it. Unless there are drastic changes made, America is going into its decline. Unless you’re in that upper small percentile of Americans that are really rich, the quality of your life is going to decline as well and not get better.
Fact? Not yet. By the time it’s a fact, it’ll be way too late to change. No, this is a projection based on facts. When I was a teacher at the Joe Kubert School, teaching writing to artists (an interesting task), one exercise I would give teams of students was to create a future based on facts derived from the research. The scenario had to be a reasonable extrapolation from existing facts or events and they had to explain the reasoning.