Future thinking is a process where political parties try to plan for growth or permanence. The Republicans are looking forward for eight or sixteen years beyond Mr. Bush’s four-more-years. The Democrats are licking their wounds and are trying to think where they will be in four, eight and sixteen years.  And so it goes. 

It is interesting that the planning is for acquisition of power. Power first, then plans for change, expansion, deletion and subjugation of the other side, perhaps into perpetuity. But no matter how good the plans, nothing is forever.

All of us have grown up in families where at least one adult member was responsible for planning for the future.  At its basic level, the food we consume must be found, prepared and doled out.  All the rest is secondary.  If we have no roof, we must find one. If we find one we must pay for it and thus we must seek, find and fulfill work requests demanded of us to earn the payment we pay for transportation and on and on. Then we have to make provision to pay for much of this in taxes.

Future thinking was once a large portion of city planning and trying to figure out what future towns would look like.  Some of my memories include the results of artists predicting utopian musing of thinkers who used inventions of today to create futuristic worlds. My fascination with the future morphed me into utopian scholarship and as a World Future Society organizer for a desolate section of New Jersey. I also participated in a group that tried to collate planning for Colonia, N.J. in meetings where talk about directions and endings was often loud and excited. I’m afraid that my rooting in a thesis and dissertation in utopian ideology threw wrenches in many discussions.  We were all talking about different things and different futures. I knew a little in a general way but lacked the depth of others.

I have noticed that city planners here in the Miami/Dade area are concerned about growth.  Population increases have placed tremendous demands on services and the people who live here are not bothered that huge numbers of northerners want to come down and share the tropics.  Actually, this is an historical process everywhere with which every civilization has had to deal.  We find the evidence in the mounds where ancient civilizations were built on the ruins of earlier settlements and expanded beyond the low protective walls to higher and wider walls far out in what would have been suburbs of the earlier towns. Buildings got higher and higher.

Here in Florida the northern section would like to be connected with the southern end with a bullet train. We like that idea but don’t want to pay for it. Future thinking is hard work and we’d like it to come without our working for it.