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1972: Choose your Future(s)
It’s 1972. What does the American future look like, right through the early years of the 21st century? Fifty years ago, President Nixon’s panels of trusted advisors offered him a range of options regarding funding for new technological initiatives. These were big long-term projects, with effects over as much as a half-century: medicine, nuclear research, telecommunications, and transportation engineering, from space to subways.
The proposals: A famous inventor foresees a “New Rural Society”, where work, banking, and socializing are done from home with two-way TV, and home is wherever you want it to be. NASA wants the go-ahead to create a land-able, reusable spacecraft that will be the first step in opening space to private commerce. America’s cities are eager to build a new generation of automated urban mass transit, to be run on cheap, abundant, nuclear-generated electricity. Supporters of federal funding for supersonic transport airliners point to government-funded SSTs being built in Europe and Russia and ask if we’re going to sit this one out. This jumble of 70s visions is now largely settled—proven to be good or bad investments. Some are still in progress, a half-century later. And there’s still a remainder, a handful of technological question marks whose futures are unknown even now.
I am neither condoning nor defending Trump’s tweets, nor Obama’s. For good or ill, I suppose they’re just a sign of the times. But then I don’t use Twitter for any reason, and am thus saved having to care. That being said, I do wonder how past presidents might have comported themselves on their own tweets.
I confessed to my seven-year-old son recently that when I was his age I was usually out in the street playing with toy guns and eating a pack of candy cigarettes a day. “Where were your mom and dad?” he asked. I told him the truth: “Entertaining in the den with real guns and real cigarettes.”
As a kid from a rural agricultural community, I entered UC Berkeley slightly to the right of Barry Goldwater. But I was to leave in 1970 just to the left of Eldridge Cleaver.
I dreamt last night of my childhood. Richard Nixon loomed large.