Today people crave to know what lies ahead at least as much as they did in Pharaoh's time. Probably more. Modern times have created a perpetual bull market in futures. Society spends so much time looking ahead that the present sometimes seems entirely forgotten. Still, scarcely a saiient public issue comes up that does not demand at least an effort to read the future. How iong will the recession go on? Whither Centrai America? Will the energy crisis ever come back? WIM Space become a theater for mllitary action? Society flourishes or languishes by guessing the drift of things. if it had guessed right about consumer trends a few years ago, the auto industry might not be in such a sorry State. But in that industry, as Chrysler's chairman Lee iacocca put it, "you make a decision and then wait three years to get the stuft kicked out of you." Gongress has such a hunger to know coming trends that it requires the President to project budget deficits five years ahead — an exercise to whose futlllty Ronald Reagan recently attested. Said Reagan: "I have to be honest with you and teli you that while i have to project... I don't beiieve what l'm saying." There is no respectabie argument against efforts to plan. The practicaiity of looking ahead has been more than proved by the results of occasional faiiures to do so. One usefui symboi of Inadequate pianning might be the S-curve bridge that Chicago had to buiid when its north Lake Shore Drive faiied to end at the same place as its south Lake Shore Drive. Even so, the fact that pianning can heip does not mean that a constant preoccupation with tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) is beneficial. It is not. There are reasons why foikiore and religious teachings warn peopie agalnst giving too much of their attention to the future. Taking too much thought for the morrow can, in fact, insulate a person far too much from the reaiity of the present — and the real nature of the future. It is not what futurologists make it out to be — some paipable thing rushing toward society, projectiie-iike, out of the void. "The future is smashing into US so forcefuliy that it can no longer be ignored," say Edward Cornish and others of the World Future Society in one of their books. They add; "A maelstrom of sociai change has engulfed the worid." if so, what has enguifed the worid is not something out of a menacing tomorrow but oniy yesterday coming to fruition. Actuaily, the future does not exist except as a concept, a cosmic wisp of possibiiity. How people view it can,make big differences. What befalis Society around the bend in the river will not come hurtling out of Space (weather excepted) but will have arisen out of today. "The present", as Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz put it, "is pregnant with the future." The highest prudence consists not of looking ahead but of giving the best care to the burgeoning and, for better or worse, fruitfui moment at band. — By Frank Trippett Time, April 26,1982
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