Speaking of the Future

It feels like only yesterday that everyone was on the bandwagon rolling towards Y2K and the millennium. Of all the doomsday books and prophetic essays on the shape of our future, I find, in addition to Alvin Toffler, Jacques Attali to be one of the most engaging and insightful writers on the topic. His book, "Millennium - Winners and Losers in the Coming Order" published back in 1991, was right on the money in many ways.

The one prediction that jumped out at me when I was reading the book, and later when I was watching all these reality shows, is the concept of people who rushed to conform to some standard of beauty, or normality. With the global domination of American entertainment, the standard of beauty, indeed, normalcy, becomes the twisted anorexic superficial fake facade of Hollywood and magazine models. The seeming popularity of make-overs, not for the purpose of improving one's life, but only for the purpose of improving one's appearance, speaks directly to this symptom of our millennium. Instead of the "Live and Let Live" motto of the age of Aquarius that was supposedly ushered in by the flower children of the sixties, we are not confronted by the bullies of veneers and diet fads. Who would have guessed?