Post Scripts: The New Year of hope

The Ho-Ho-Ho is over and all of us are facing another New Year. Meetings are being held all over America, especially in prime meeting places like the Rockies and scenic ocean resorts, where the world’s most powerful and wealthy gather for fancy meals like cold salmon and big truths. I have read they are feeling bad. Heck!
I’m told these venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and Washington bigwigs are asking to imagine how things will be by 2050. Whew, that’s a big order! With few exceptions the predictions are pretty much a review of the grim news we’ve all been reading lately: global warming, famine, unending terrorism, etc. The future most forecasters see is something like a Mad Max movie, but missing the style and the thrills.
What’s happened? The predictions were that others would kill to become affluent Americans by 2008. We are longer-lived and with more access to more knowledge and experiences than any king or pope who has come before, ignoring the lives of the countless billions whose ordinary tragedies are considered history. Such luck should make us all hug ourselves with great joy.
The great advances we have made despite all our wars and the nuclear threat we have lived with since WWII, there remains grounds to believe we can solve or work out our problems. Progress over the past few decades in science and technology lend hope that on balance things can ever be better. Except, I’m told, most of us do not feel that way.
Things have improved. A decent future is sure to have problems. Nazism, the crusades and much of today’s Islamic fundamentalism will create some chaos but that doesn’t demand we forecast despair. We must not forget we have gained a lot of power over nature from fertilizers and antibiotics to nerve gas and nukes. In all honesty, though, the down sides are there. Some scientists are forecasting exotic extinction scenarios.
An apocalypse is hardly popular. If our generation creates a catastrophe by the rape of the planet we occupy, then our generation becomes the most important to ever have lived.
Today, due to TV and the Internet, we are all in a much bigger and never-ending newsroom. There is a digital fight for our attention. The alarming news of the present, raised to a level of continual urgency, has taught us to think of the future in terms of ever-present catastrophe.
In the noisy and smoke-filled newsroom at The Kansas City Star, where I decided to become a newspaperman, you read a lot of stories and maybe your heart was broken a time or two over criticism of your work. However, you gained the perspective to resume some kind of normality. Experience taught me that our close world of work and loved ones, continued on, pretty well as expected.
What a great life I have had. I have been a newspaper carrier, a cub reporter and, best of all, owned a newspaper of my very own. Deep inside I wish I could do it all over. Experience taught me that my close world of work and love of newspapers has been a special blessing. Sadly, I don’t have another 50 years to play out the future but I will envy and honor those who remain to report our unique world of work, tragedy and progress.
Hope this new year, 2008, will prove happy and special to all my patient and beloved readers who remain my friends through their faithful readership.