If I could climb into my way back machine and have a talk with myself in nineteen  seventy-four, or seventy-five, or seventy-six… I know that I should have thought out a better way to structure the first sentence in something as mind boggling as time travel, but my mind just will not allow me to slow down…., I think the younger me would punch me in the eye, or split my lip, or knock me into two thousand and seventeen, or something really cool like that.

Why?

Because I would try to prepare him for the future and there is no way that he would believe that I wasn’t Looney Tunes.

If you are one of my two or three followers, you know that I love lists, so most likely I would just hand me a piece of paper…. That’s right, a piece of paper, cause that’s how we kept up with things back then, with paper, and pencils, and you folded it up and put it in your pocket. Good grief, time travel is hard.

A list….

A List of Things I Never Saw Coming

• Loony Tunes will become socially unacceptable. I know how cray that sounds but in the future, little children will become unable to understand that cartoons aren’t real and will need to be protected from Yosemite Sam, and Speedy Gonzales because of violence and ethnic stereotyping. You can still get a watered down version but it’s not the same.
• Socialism is going to become huge in this country, and no, It’s not because of Russia. In fact, we kicked their Red asses without firing a shot. Oh, and you’re going to end up in Germany, even though your recruiter swore that they never send soldiers overseas on their first enlistment, and you will end up loving it, and …. back to that socialism thing…. people are going to like taking free things from the government way more than they like working, and the government is happy to help. All they want in return is your freedom. Forty years from now most folks wont know what that even means…. but you do, and don’t forget. Don’t forget.
• There is going to be a huge fight in this country over what a man is, and what a woman is. I know that you know, hell, I know most of the people that are on the fence in my time, knew back then, in your time. But we are smarter now. We have come a long way. You guys only made it to the moon, but we can go to Mars now. Nope. We can’t go to Mars, but we do have one congress woman that thinks that we have been there. We can’t even get into space anymore without Russia’s help. I’m afraid your head will literally explode if I tell you much more about this subject, but the day will come when our government will fight for your right to walk into a woman’s bathroom and pee pee. Or number two I guess…. I feel like punching myself in the eye right now. And apparently gender is now, in my time, something we call fluid. Tequila, I hope.
• Pong is just the beginning. Video games are going to be one of your addictions and just enjoy them and know that they are going to get much better than that little paddle game that you love now. Two words to remember…. Apple and Google.
• People will rewrite the civil war and remove most every confederate monument before you die. If the democrats could figure out how to make it happen, the slave owners would be republicans and Lincoln would be a democrat, killed by a Conservative gun owner who was a Nazi sympathizer. Facts, in my time, are much like gender…. fluid.
• It is going to become outrageous to expect immigrants to step into the melting pot and assimilate into our culture. It will be as though we sent them a personal invitation to come here and do as you please…. oh, and let us pick up the tab.
• Within five or six years, Islam is going to become a big damn deal. Within the next twenty five years, the World Trade Center’s two towers will fall to the ground and  radical Islam will be the reason. We will enter the longest war that we have ever been in and after sixteen years, we will be no better off than when we started.
• Our country will be over twenty trillion dollars in debt and nobody in our government will be  allowed to admit how bad that is for our future, without being ridiculed. Congress will have long ago given up on submitting a balanced budget…. any budget really. The new method will resemble Clark’s boss on Christmas Vacation,”Take whatever you got last year and add ten percent.”
• Football, as you know it, no longer exists. I saved this one for last because I knew this would be the one that would piss you off and I’m sorry. Flags, penalties and rules against hard hits will hurt the once great game of war but the final blow will come from the fear of head injury. Concussions. There is a movement starting to remove football from schools and if that happens I’m not sure how the NFL will survive…. I don’t want to be the big baby here but I just got the NFL Sunday Ticket so if you would devote your life to saving football, that would be great.
• Right now you are worried about a new ice age but don’t worry because in just a decade or so, all those Einsteins will be replaced with new Einsteins that are certain that because of humans, we are in what they call global warming…. When they can’t prove that little idea with actual data, they will begin to call that same idea…. climate change. Anyway, they can’t prove that either without fudged data so, relax. And go ahead and eat all the bacon and eggs you want. Hamburgers too, cause a tick is going to bite you in fifteen years or so and give you a disease that wont let you eat beef or pork. Don’t bother to look it up because it’s brand new. Yep, you will be the first guy on the block to have one.

Alrighty then. I’m going to hop back into my way back machine. As they say in your time….

Have A Nice Day.

ws