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Where is My Future?

uploaded: Tue, Sep 24, 2019 @ 4:12 PM last modified: Tue, Sep 24, 2019 @ 4:14 PM (add)

by	Mr_Yesterday
length	3:32
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From some early performances ca. 2011, after ongoing rework.

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Where is My Future (II)
© & (cc)BY-NC D A Ayer 2014, 2018

Where is my future?
…the one with a rocket ship in every garage?
…Zeppelins the size of football stadiums, engines droning, majestically aloft?
…equipped with hookah lounges, tennis courts, swimming pools?
…apartments strung across suspension bridges, as if by easy levitation?
…electric cars speeding silently through endless, gleaming Sunday afternoons?

Where is my future?
…the one without war, tyranny, oppression, [and] man’s inhumanity to man?
…without disease, schizophrenia, cancer, deformity, or AIDS?
…lacking ignorance, greed, the lust for power, and petty despots?
…the morning after the sleep of Reason and the midnight of the hydrogen bomb?
…boon of the workers’ Revolution, the four-day work-week and the four-hour work-day?

Where is my future?
…those future scientists, connecting all the dots?
…impassioned neighbors looking far across the universe and deep into the atom?
…tracing the lives of subatomic particles through a multitude of bubble chambers?
…perched on the business ends of electron microscopes the size of cities?
…unraveling the secrets of every helix, and all in our spare time?

Where is my future?
…the one in polished chrome, heated with microwaves, cooled with liquid nitrogen?
…fueled by the promise of that hockey-stick trajectory we bought with World War II?
…accelerating through the fifties on a binge of jet fuel shaken, not stirred?
…my nirvana of consumer culture, accompanied by rock-n-roll?
…its late night broadcasts filled with jazz played live from every city?

Where is my future?
…the will to cross any unknown ocean just to see its distant shore?
…the faith that one day we, not robot drones, would stand on other worlds?
…our fixed base on the Moon, the stepping stone to Mars?
…the great ships fueled by smaller stars, the fusion-powered biospheres?
…the would-be colonists, our voluntary aliens, fruitful and multiplied?

Is this it, then?
…data networks, smart phones, music downloads, cable shows?
…treadmills, fitness trackers, e-books, talking cars?
…the avarice of industry, the need to sell the news?
…advertisements for diet pills, safe thrills, cheap shoes?
…must we have so much, yet be in want?