Dystopia Now!

We live in a world where things have been wrong for so long they are now commonplace. The list of the horrors that plague modern society is long and well documented. I will not subject you to yet another rambling lecture on the topic.

What I'd like you to consider, is that this is the Dystopian World long foretold by the writers of decades past. Not exactly as any such had imagined. Nothing so pure and distinctive as an Orwellian novel, but dystopian nonetheless.

In 1964 I was 5-years-old and visited the New York Word's Fair, My life was deeply affected by what I saw. I knew the future was to be filled with the miraculous promises of science and technology. Now fifty years later what has come to pass is not the world of nuclear powered flying cars and world peace, but a world filled with crime,war, disease and blight.

Sure, most of the blight is limited to pockets from which we keep ourselves insulated. Yet, our avoiding it by driving quickly past it on a freeway doesn't mean it isn't there.

Did you expect a call to action at this point of the story, or perhaps a "Gee how bad you should feel" ending? Perhaps You think I have a solution that the human race will come up at the last minute? It's not happening.

Greed, lust, power and hatred cannot be overcome by technology. Its about human motivation, its what we writers use to drive the characters in the plot of a novel. Efforts to sanitize such evils by denying their existence or redefining them in such a way as to allow for our own greed, lust, and hatred, while denying those of others is childish.

The dystopia we live in is the resultant sum of the collective will of the hearts and minds of wicked, bad, or evil individual humans. This is the cold and sobering fact almost none of us are willing to face up to.