Quote of the Week...from Yogi Berra

The future ain't what it used to be.                   --Yogi Berra

The great New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, who passed away two years ago at the age of 90, was always a welcome baseball card for me to pick up as a kid...but his warmth and humor made him a larger-than-life public figure.  One of Yogi's trademarks was his tendency to twist words around in a funny way...some examples:

--Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
--It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.
--I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field, in answer to a question). They had bags over their heads.
--I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
--I never said most of the things I said.
--Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
And my current favorite:
--In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

The above quote of his that I settled on for this article, though, while on the surface a bit nonsensical and silly, actually contains a deeper truth: in our times, our view of what the future holds has changed quite a bit from what others saw ahead of them in previous times.  In America, there had long been the notion that we could do anything...where there was a will, there was a way, so to speak...and the future was bright, full of technological innovations if not miracles.  After World War II, a different sort of outlook began to take root among the population: an apocalyptic future of nuclear war and its devastating aftermath.  In the early 1960s, another vision of a future...that of a planet sickened by man-made abuse of the environment...began to take hold.  The revival of Christian evangelism in the latter part of the century combined within that community the idea of worldwide apocalypse with Christ's impending return.  And there is now a developing fear among many of a future world run by autocratic strongmen in alliance with the super-wealthy that disposes of many of the individual's human rights and treats people-at-large as simply consumer units. One of the factors creating political tension within our society nowadays is a plethora of competing visions about what the future holds for us...and what we should do to create the best results.  I happen to believe that there are elements of truth contained within the various outlooks: we do have the capacity and can develop the will to solve many of our problems, but we have to come to some sort of consensus about what those problems are...and that is where I fall a bit on the pessimistic side of things.  For it seems that, in this present world of ours, people tend to just follow the "news" sources that serve to bolster their own closely held notions and prejudices, opting to refer to any opposing input as "fake news".  Not a good portent for the future...I wonder what ol' Yogi would have to say about this...