What ever became of the future promised us?
The flying cars...robots programmed to do menial chores?
And that ever elusive four day work week?
The world has indeed changed, but for the better?
And in this, do things really change at all?

A building’s worth of computers once used
to land man on the moon
now sit easily on a desk top;
voice mail, e-mail...pagers and cell phones
offering unimagined advantages, but at what cost?
Are they truly worth the constant interruptions,
loss of privacy?
Seems one can’t even sit in a theatre
without hearing an all too familiar ring.
A wonder we get anything done at all.
Quiet moments not so long ago, taken for granted,
seem forever replaced by a myriad of stresses
assailing us from all directions.

Someone else raises our children,
while both parents go off to work,
in most cases not because they want, but have to,
if they haven’t already separated or divorced.
And when the family is home, all too often,
television used as a babysitter.

A voyeuristic world,
insatiably hungry for misery and violence of every kind,
or perhaps the way it’s always been?
Technology in fact the culprit
in that information’s brought to us so much faster 24/7.
The permeating message disguised in political correctness:
it’s OK to be dysfunctional.
The only reassurance for too many.
No wonder then, a continuing number
suffer from depression...commit suicide,
or turn to alcohol and narcotics to ease their pain.

We work twice as hard for what in spending power,
amounts to the same salary 20-30 years ago,
and with little or no job security.
The robots have indeed come,
throwing too many out of work,
while just as before,
the few get rich off the backs of the many.
We slave to make ends meet for a couple of weeks vacation,
then gone so fast in the rush simply to exist.
 
Without hesitation, I’d trade a single today
for ten years of the U.S. and Soviets staring down one another.
At least back then we knew who our enemies were;
all the warheads could still be accounted for.
And yet when you think of it, out of those dimming,
uncertain times, came the technology and society we know today.

Ah, what’s the use in complaining?
Think I’ll just grab the remote, click on my 56” TV.
Surely out of 300+ channels,
The Jetsons are still playing on one of them.

© 1999
Revised © 2017

750 hits as of December 2023

05/03/2017

Posted on 05/03/2017
Copyright © 2024 Chris Sorrenti