Did we really throw away our chance at a wonderful future?

Who stole the future?

In 1964 and 1965, the summers I was 14 and 15, New York City staged the last great World's Fair to be held in the United States. It was second in size only to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1964, the "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis" fair.

For the kids of the Baby Boom, especially the ones who lived within driving distance of New York, it was a highlight of two summers. A total of 51.6 million people came to Flushing Meadows, and if there was anything about the Fair that was pessimistic about the future, most of us never saw it.

Yes, Jordan's exhibit included a controversial mural about the plight of the Palestinian people, but there were far fewer people who saw it -- or gave it a thought -- than there were people oohing and aahing as they rode through General Motors' Futurama exhibit and saw what the world would be like in the year 2000.



Imagine colonies on the moon.

Men working on the bottom of the ocean to feed the world and harvest its resources.

A research city in Antarctica.

Desalinization  of sea water making the deserts bloom.

Giant superhighways crossing the continent, leading in and out of the cities of the future.

Well, at least we got the highways.

So what happened? Why is it almost none of that future came to pass? Why is it almost all the progress in recent years -- outside of maybe some advances in science and medicine -- has been in relatively meaningless consumer goods?

Is our life really better because we can watch football on a television that covers an entire wall?

Are we really better off now that we can go on the Internet and see porn from all over the world? Or play computer games for hours on end?

I used to think it was wonderful that I could read newspapers from all over the country for free, but now most of them have paywalls? I pay $99 a year to read the Washington Post, which isn't horrible, but papers all over the country are either going out of business or cutting way back at what they do.

Between 2006 and 2012, 30 percent of the paid journalists in the U.S. lost their jobs and much of it was because of the Internet. I was one of them. In 2008 alone, nearly a thousand of us who worked for newspapers in Southern California got the ax.

It isn't just the Internet, though. One of the biggest problems newspapers have started before there were ever news Websites. People just aren't reading anymore. It isn't as if we were great intellectuals who spent all our time reading in 1964, but it was a much better time to be literate.

And we were close enough to idealism, to the beginning of JFK and the New Frontier that we believed there was more to life than consumer goods. We were five years away from the moon landing, and most people weren't even thinking of Dick Nixon or Ronald Reagan.

Except for a few folks out on the fringes -- left and right -- there was a basic civic consensus, and a basic belief that there was more to life than bigger televisions and flashy cars.

One thing we hear often is that the cell phones we carry in our pockets are more powerful than the computers that took the astronauts to the Moon.

Sadly, the one thing they never mention is that it has been more than 40 years since last we went to the Moon.

Did someone steal the future, or did we just give it away?