I think a great deal of my malaise and ennui regarding the future stems from the fact that the situation we are in (exploding wealth gap, systemic inequity, divisions stoked to maintain the power structure at the cost of lost opportunity to improve the lives of the human race, etc.) and more importantly what is making the future so bleak to ponder is KNOWN, there is just no ability to stop the train at this point.
Inertia propels us towards the cliff that everyone can see coming, and to torture a mixed metaphor further, the only thing that has changed since the band played as Titanic sank in 1912 is the instruments and the tune. The rich are still minimally mollifying the poor (as they always have) and are simply trying to jockey for positions in the lifeboats that they know are too few for the poor souls that will be sacrificed so that the rich may live on to exploit further.
What I mean is this: the powers that be - financial, political, and military - KNOW; not suspect, not feel, not guess but KNOW, that we are heading for catastrophe in the near future. Climate change, water shortages and impending famines are going to transform civilization into something much, much different than what it is at the dawn of the 21st century (which is already an 1/7th of the way OVER). 100 years ago, humanity started an experiment of mechanized, industrial scale warfare and has not let up since. Aside from a momentary pause and introspection brought on by Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the race to build more weapons and kill more people has out paced nearly every other endeavor on the planet in the last century plus.
We have now obtained a century's worth of technological advances in killing and 40+ years of ideological callousness to the impacts of economic inequality. Its everywhere. From Kansas passing laws against using welfare on CRUISE SHIPS!!!! (IN FREAKING LANDLOCKED KANSAS FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!!) to the more hidden ways the homeless are abused and shunted, right down to the efforts to begin privatizing the Veteran's Administration to further sanitize and de-sensitize the population to the costs of war. Orwell would feel very much at home in 2015, Big Brother and Doublespeak were only a few decades behind his vision.
Corporations have become the vehicle for making all manners of abusive and sociopathic behavior "legal". What they have done and are doing will never be "right" or "just" or "fair" and they KNOW this but just do not care.
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