I found a site a while back called Pandora Radio. It allows you to create stations that eventually play just what you want through a thumbs-up, thumbs-down process.
One of my stations is early-mid '60's and it got me reminiscing.
In 1963 there were 3 million people on the planet. Less than half of the number now.
Life was much slower then. Back then they rolled up the sidewalks at 5 PM. Nothing was open overnight.
FM was not widely implemented and AM stations signed on at dawn and signed off at dusk.
There were 3 television stations where I lived and they were all signed off by 1 AM.
Dave Clark Five, the Beatles and the Beach Boys set the pace and defined a Generation.
It was a very innocent world. Kids fell in love with their high school sweethearts and got married. The wedding night was still a big deal.
People socialized, getting together to play cards on evenings with nothing much better to do. We read more.
The evening sky was filled with fireflies so numerous, kids had fun collecting jars full in the early darkness.
The drive-in and the beach were special outings we all looked forward to.
The future was infinite, clean and bright.
How different from today.
The world is dying. By the 1970's it was already noticibly browner.
That was when we started looking closely to see what was wrong. We knew pollution was a problem. LA was experiencing smog that was opaque purple and rolled up over the hills, blotting out everything.
Science Fiction speculated a world of the future where people lived in domed cities and the atmosphere outside was toxic.
Little did we know we could actually really make the planet uninhabitable. Man just wasn't that stupid or immoral, so we thought.
We had already passed the Clean Air Act and the Air Quality Act and President Carter was putting solar panels on the White House roof. An entire generation became ecologically conscious.
Unfortunately, the 80's brough a new generation, the Yuppies, who were interested in one thing, wealth and the things money could buy.
This was the first generation raised totally on television. Consumerism was poured into their heads right from the start. Commercials were targeted directly at them on Saturday mornings, urging them to drive their parents crazy about having to have the latest toy.
Practically no one realized the danger and insideousness of this device that had become the centerpiece in the American home.
Everyone every evening gathered around the conditioning box, watching TV families with all the luxuries they did not have, making it appear everyone had it but them, and creating an unsatiable hunger.
America went insane. Then spread it to the rest of the world.
The population was double that of 1963 in 2000. The ever increasing demand for consumer goods led mankind to totally ravage the planet, and now we have killed it.
It is too late, we are terminal. There is no way to reverse what we have done and the ecosphere is dying.
In Copenhagen, we were just told to expect a rise in global temperature of 4-6C. That is a lethal fever. A death sentence.
That puts us in the same climate as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a time when alligators swam in the Arctic Ocean. When all the moisture was transported to the poles and the rest of the planet became desert. A time when much of the life on the planet died.
There is no guarantee that the temperature rise will stop there.
So I grieve for the future we will never have, for the lives that could have been, but will never be. For all the suffering that is yet to come.