LEFT BRAIN / RIGHT BRAIN

History will show that the Twentieth Century will be the shining end to a millenium filled with staggering advances of mankind, of fantastic human achievement and the growth of knowledge and understanding. In the last century alone, the world has become a technological miracle, a world where the once impossible has become feasable, and the wonders of only a few years ago has become today's commonoplace.

This century will likely be known as America's Century, where the convergence of the vast industrial, militarial, financial, and educational output brought the country from being simply a former British colony to the world's only superpower. Barely into the century, we were learning to fly. By the end, we are reaching ever further into space. We fought our wars, and though we stumbled, we regained our military edge. We've produced countless technological achievements - the computer, nuclear power (actually a safe and viable means of producing electrical power), the airplane, velcro. And with our technological achievements, our median standard of living has continued to get better. Hell, the Dow is up over 11,000 and the NASDAQ is over 4,000. Consumer confidence is booming, unemployment is at near historic lows, our military is able to successfully fight a war on two fronts. The Cold War is over - we won!

However, there are some dark spaces in our history. Prohibition in the Roaring Twenties showed us what organized mobsters with access to automatic weapons could do. October 1929 brought the Great Depression, a time of widespread hardship that didn't end until the outbreak of WWII. The 50's brought atomic bomb tests, the Cold War, and McCarthyism. The decade of peace and love was anything but. Vietnam, the assassinations of Kennedy and MLK, race riots, and antiwar protests (LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!) nearly tore the country apart. The terrible crash of the Seventies brought the end of an unpopular war, and the end of a Presidency. The Watergate scandal rended Nixon's political ambitions, and showed us how dirty holding a public office, even a position so high, can be. At the end, terrorism came home for 444 days an Islamic militants held American hostages in Iran. The 80's brought Ronald Reagan into office. Greed became the buzzword, along with cocaine and a lifestyle build upon trickle down economics. The 90's showed us how ugly we could be. Crack hit the streets. Kids killing kids became the hot topic, until in the end, there seemed to be a big school shooting every month.

But all is not so bleak. The century also showed mankinds glowing moments all in Technicolor Cinemascope with Hi-Fi stereo sound. Just after the turn of the century, two men, a rickety frame of cloth and wood and wires and dreams sent man into the air. Public works projects such as the Tennessee Valley Project and Hoover Dam came as a godsend to the unemployed masses of the Depression. WWII showed America what a people, collectively striving towards one goal can achieve. After the war, the U.S. saw a rebirth of industry and prosperity not seen for two decades. The 60's brought the beginnings of civil rights reforms, greater scientific advances, and we put a man on the Moon. Technological advances continued through the seventies and eighties, tempered with a growing awareness of the environment. And the technological climb continues to this day.

Mankind still has a long way to go. But looking to our past, a bright future seems most likely.

Bright future my red-rimmed eye! If the past is any indication, the future should look like the ending of Apocalypse Now, only not so up-beat.

Mankind is headed towards the sewer, if not by circumstance, then by his own filthy hands. Beginning just before the turn of the century, in the 1890's, the industrial revolution began, giving us such new terms as child-labor, sweat-shops, union-busters, hand-chopped-off-by-a-lumbermill-saw, and others. Pollution poured into the atmosphere and into the water, each year worse than the previous, and has continued unabated to this day. Cars, once a rare toy for the well-to-do, became everyman's horse and buggy, filling the air with hydrocarbons and smog and the curses of road-raging drunk drivers.

Technology has helped the few, sure, but it's effects have been two sided. The airplane, once a frail wood and wire contraption became a weapon of war only a few years after its birth. WWI wiped out an entire generation of Europe's children (like it was a great loss) and showed men newer better ways to kill each other such as the tank and the machine gun and the fighter plane and the British prostitute. The Great Depression wiped out millions of average investors, many of which jumped from high buildings. The thirties showed us all that an entire decade can be so boring that nobody can remember anything memorable happening in the thirties except for some obscure corporal building a political machine and gaining in popularity in Austria and Germany. WWII brought science into the development of newer ways to wipe out the other side, culminating in the bombing of Japan into submission. Then the Ruskies got the bomb, and we built up our nuclear forces, and they built up their nuclear forces, and NOTHING HAPPENED DAMMIT! Hell, a World War in the sixties and seventies would've been a GOOD thing. Vietnam woulda been turned into a self-illuminating, glass-covered parking lot in the first twenty minutes. No summer of love here...it woulda been the summer of sizzle baby! Watergate woulda been Waterrubble. We wouldn't have to have had Carter turning the White House into a yawn festival. We wouldn't have had to endure the crappy hair bands in the eighties. Walk Like an Egyptian? I'll make you walk like a cripple, you bangle-headed fashion-disaster. Have some crack...just SMOKE IT damn you! The nineties? Yo! Nine-oh got us some dope sayin's and clean gats to pop caps into yo' ass to shield my homies from yo' smack down, bitch. The end of grammatically correct speaking has come at last. All hail Ebonics!

So what does the future hold? If we're lucky, the warheads should hit us about twenty minutes after midnight and we won't have to worry about our hangovers. If we're doomed to survive, I guess mankind will keep hold of it's facination with technology. The west will continue to consume while the rest of the world slips into disease and famine. The planet's environmental organizations will scream about inevitable disasters to the environment while the industrialized countries' leader hem and haw about what to do until it's too late. As the rainforests get chopped and immigration continues to throw cultures together and antibiotic abuse creates more antibiotic resistant viruses, disease pandemics will wipe out big chunks of the population. Pink eye will run rampant. To keep control of an increasingly panicky population, martial law will become normal until the only state is a police state. The dumbing down of the population will continue unabated, further widening the gap between the haves with the college educations and MBA's and management jobs, and the have-nots with substandard edjamikashuns in hi skule where the senior class finals consisted of repeating ten times the phrase: "Ya want fries wit' dat?"

Or mayhaps the apes'll just take over.