A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity;
an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. – Winston Churchill
Let’s not give up on the entire 21st century yet.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about the future,
maybe partly because awful is easier to imagine —
and kinda more exciting.
You probably never saw “Death Race 2000,”
a 1975 film starring the pre-“Rocky” Sylvester Stallone,
in which dictators rule the whole world in our era
and entertain the common folk
with cross-country races
in which the driver who runs
over the most pedestrians wins.
Or “Soylent Green,” from 1973,
in which New York has a population of 40 million in 2022,
unemployment is 50 percent,
three cans of food cost $279
and dead folks are recycled into crackers.
Or, as Charlton Heston bemoans,
“Soylent Green is people!”
In other words,
things can turn out a lot better
than you imagine.
Just try not to think of those crackers.
Poetized excerpt of an editorial by opinion page writer Gail Collins of The New York Times.