The Futurist Weighs In, Part II: The Things We Leave Behind

By Sara Robinson

Created 01/22/2010 - 6:36pm

My little series on the turn of the decade (which started last week [1]) was originally conceived as a two-parter: a look back to the past, and a look ahead to the future.

That changed a bit this week, when the present rose up and made itself known in a very big way.

American history has a rhythm to it: years of calm punctuated by seasons of astonishing upheaval. Sometimes, the long quiet spells -- like the long intervals between earthquakes in places like Haiti -- can go on for so long that we forget that life could ever be different, or that History, writ large, can possibly happen to us at all. All the really heinous, traumatic stuff -- war, famine, economic panic -- happened in somebody else's past. The sweet prosperity we have now is what forever looks like.