I once expected to be an adult in a world very different from the one I grew up in. I hasn't happened. The 1990s are far more like the 1960s than I would have predicted in the 1970s.
When I was a teenager men walked on the moon. I used to think the political issue of the 1990s would be orbital republics breaking away from their Earthbound colonial masters. Give me a break...
When I was a teenager I though we were going to get genetic engineering - like someone would be able to graft gills on to your neck, or you could pay to get changed from male to (functional. i.e. give birth) female or vice versa & back again. All we get is different flavours of oilseed rape.
When I was a teenager I thought we would be talking about rebuilding our shattered lungs so we could live to be 300.
When I was a teenager I thought I might go to the moons of Jupiter.
I still want to discover life on Mars (and I am taking steps to give myself a chance)
When I was a teenager I thought artificial intelligence would work.
When I was a teenager we talked about nuclear destruction. We talked about developing sound weapons (big 8 Hz vibrations) that would knock troops our before they fired a shot. We talked about living in Britain with 10 million unemployed because they had all been replaced by computers. It never bloody happened. We're not living in the 1990s - we're not even really living in the 1960s. This is Act Three of the 1950s. IT IS ALL SO BLOODY BORING.
I used to think Socialism would save the world. But it never got tried, and the world is deeply unsaved, and lying Tory fuckbastards say Socialism is dead because it didn't work but what they call Socialism was Toryism with a different shaped stick. All Tories are just as much bastards as they were 30 years ago but some of them are now in the Labour Party. I used to think we'd have converted them by now. But we didn't.
And what do we get? Replays of the Balkan Wars of 1912. I used to think that the school subject that would best equip me for life in the 21st century was biology (but I was prepared to listen to arguments for Physics). It turns out to be 19th century European History. We still haven't answered the Eastern Question.
I'm pissed off. I think I will listen to Vaughn Williams's 9th Symphony.
Ken (who just walked out of his job running Internet & email for a major multinational company at least partly because the rate of change wasn't enough to keep him awake - literally - I used to fall asleep each afternoon, desperately hoping for computers to make a difference)