Twenty-twenty-five

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I understand how numbers work. And yes, it’s a pretty simple concept — when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st and rolls over into January 1st, we add one to the year.

And yes, I did come along fairly late in the game when it comes to the 20th century, so as I began to take note that the 1980s would become the 1990s and then we would be in the far-flung future of the 21st century and the year 2000, I was aware that eventually we would all, God willing, end up living in the year 2025.

I understood this on an intellectual level, but here as we are just a little more than a week away from arriving at a year with a number that sounds more like the date in an episode of “Star Trek” than an actual present-day year, it’s actually a little surreal. We are literally living in the future we all imagined when

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we were young and we watched “Buck Rogers” or “Star Wars” or “Battlestar Galactica” or any number of sci-fi shows or movies.

Fun fact: there are actually a whole bunch of shows and movies that take place in the “future” that are now actually in our past. Even in “Back to the Future,” Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel 30 years into the future to find themselves in — 2015. Yep, basically 10 years ago. Same with “The Terminator,” “Mad Max,” “Blade Runner,” and my personal favorite “Escape from New York,” which, in 1984, predicted that by 2000, the island of Manhattan would be turned into one big prison used for all of the United States’ criminals. Not a bad idea actually, but maybe put it in Wyoming or someplace out of the way?

We never did get those jet packs or teleporters or fasterthan- lightspeed space ships.

We didn’t even get those selftying shoelaces like Marty had — instead, we’ve just mostly gotten rid of shoelaces. I’m not even sure I own a pair of shoes with laces right now.

But still, we’ve got a lot of cool stuff, so while Scotty can’t just “beam me up” I can access pretty much all of the world’s information on a little 2-by-5-inch rectangle in my pocket and watch pretty much any movie I want whenever I want. Which is honestly better for me than a jet pack.