Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Downsizing for an old-school media junkie involves lots of newspapers and magazines, the hardcopy kind, where the first draft of history was laid out for all the world to consume through linear reading.
I’ve got an intimidating number of newspapers laying around my house; almost as many as I’ve got laying around my newspaper office. So I opted for an easier path, though still daunting, by jumping into the boxes of magazines I’ve kept in storage all these years.
I suppose I was waiting for the day when historians, or at least my kids, would parse my archives for great insights on our life and times, but now that we have Wikipedia, I guess it’s not necessary.
Still, I must pause frequently in my downsizing to examine these relics. Like Time magazine’s “Beyond 2000,” written in the twilight of our last century, on the eve of the 21st.
As the magazine is wont to do, Time launched a special series dubbed “Vision 21.” This particular issue was dedicated to “health and environment,” with various writers, often experts in their fields, looking ahead to the future we’re living in now.
Top of their list of future-centric questions was, as we might expect, about sex: “Will we still need to have sex?” the magazine asked.
No, but we’ll do it away, just for the fun of it, writer Matt Ridley postulated. Well, duh.
That seems like a no-brainer now, but at that time, about 100,000 “test tube” babies had been born and a lot more were on the way. Now we have an estimated 8 million people born through in-vitro fertilization.
The question, “Can I live to be 125?” was another Time question in 1999, as was a second inquiry: Will we want to?
Regarding the first question, the answer is still no. The predictors of yesteryear overestimated the rise in life expectancy, perhaps because they underestimated quality-of-life issues in our current day and time. Many people opt not to prolong their lives through today’s medical and technological advancements because longevity has become less important to them than how they’d live those extra years.
My father opted out of a third round of major surgery because he never fully recovered from the second round and he didn’t want to deteriorate into helplessness. And my mother opted not to fight her cancer because she also had dementia and she didn’t want her body to outlast her mind.
Perhaps you have your own family story; tough, tough decisions being made because modern medicine can keep death away, sometimes longer than it should.
Perhaps even more interesting than Time’s questions and predictions on the eve of the 21st century is the amazing amount of history that has been packed into the 22 years between then and now.
All medical and technological advancements aside, I’m certain I won’t be here in 2099 when Time does its “Beyond 2100” special edition. But I hope they put one out — because that’ll mean civilization will have survived.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: