We are shifting into a new culture

Different customs and arts

Embryos raised outside the womb

Buying a fetus in a supermarket

Perhaps carbon copies of ourselves

Breeding races of polka-dot people

With red eyes and green tongues

Producing choice babies

That harbour superior brains

Prime hearing and vision

Becoming unrivalled athletes

At a tender age.

We want science to rid us of

Human defects

We don’t want freaks in our new society

We eliminate diseases or hide them

From the public

While scientific advancement produces

More difficulties

Whether social or psychological

We want science to unburden the public

The gift of better physical health

Could be accompanied by emotional agony

And these are not science fiction fantasies anymore

But real dilemmas

We may be trapped in our future nightmare.

We are going to have to invent new politics

With new ideas and quests

We are playing with explosives

New technologies are so powerful

That they alone could abolish society

We can’t suffer governments to reign free anymore

For they own society

We crave a movement for authenticity

Not actors as politicians

For technology is a shock

To our nervous systems and our politics

It slowly destroys our roots.

People are beginning a search for a leader

A saviour to piece our world back together

A saviour like the one named Hitler

Society will never be as it once was

Because society is in error.

Future shock hits the old harder and sooner

For they breathe familiarity

They could once give good advice

Because in the past the future

Resembled what came before

Now we face a future that is similar

To neither the past nor the present

Both young and old will have to brave

The pressures of the future

As we walk blinded into darkness…..

 

 

 

I wrote this when I was in high school in the mid 70’s after reading Alvin Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’.