E-Mail This Article to a Friend Seeing things (continued)

Other WFS predictions are a bit more arcane, but might have wider-ranging implications. For instance, did you know that 2005 might see a global worm shortage? "Worldwide demand for fish is creating a shortage of worms to supply anglers and fish farmers," the WFS’s bimonthly magazine, the Futurist, reports. "High-tech worm-storage methods such as cryogenics will be needed to shore up dwindling supplies." On the other hand, worms may be dwindling, but the WFS is predicting that the world’s fly population may double. (Plagues of locusts, perhaps?)

Also look for "water wars," in which sovereign states in arid deserts (hello, Middle East!) might be less likely to engage in real wars once cooperation over management of scarce H2O — say, among Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians — leads to better understanding of each other. Hopeful? Sure. But how else would you prefer we look at the future?

Mack is really looking forward to scads of interesting new technologies. Like computerized fabrics, where "the keyboard is on your sleeve, the screen can be a sheet — or what looks like a sheet — tacked on the wall. It connects wirelessly and for 20 bucks a village in Africa can have a community Internet." Medically, too, the future looks bright. He sees "self-diagnostic micromachines ... [and] stuff you put in your bloodstream that kills cancer cells by identifying them and zapping them one at a time."

But if Mack is rapturous about new technology, or about the possibility for "very, very rapid and dramatic growth in the Third World that wasn’t possible before," he also has words of warning. Communities brought together by technology are wonderful things, but communities "can also be created for destruction." Think Al Qaeda. "It’s possible for groups all over the world to unite for bad ends as well as good through technology," Mack says. "But one of the things I think we’re hopeful of is that this kind of mutual and global communication will lead people to see that we’re not all so different — and that there’s mutual understanding that can be reached through communication."

NANCY MROCZEK, PhD is a veritable Jill-of-all-trades. She’s a psychologist. She howls down-and-dirty rock and roll in boozy hipster haunts like T.T. the Bear’s Place and O’Brien’s (see "Mrock Out!", News and Features, June 13, 2003). And she’s a certified trading adviser with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She likes speculating on the cost of those basic building blocks of human existence, "like wood and butter and interest rates and copper and gold and oil and cocoa and wheat," stuff that’s "as basic as you’re ever gonna get." It’s a game, in a way, to gamble on a commodity’s price fluctuation, to augur the future by close study of the present and the past.

But her financial acumen wasn’t the real reason I wanted to pick Dr. Nancy’s brain about the year ahead. Her weekly public-access show, Toward a Quality of Life (on Boston Neighborhood Network’s channel 23), shows her as a serious student of human behavior, and of the way we deal with the world around us. Her topics have included everything from Vietnam and Iraq to animal welfare to national politics. And, yes, she’s a practicing psychologist, specializing in behavior and neuropsychology. So maybe she can shed some light. As we stand on the precipice of 2005, with one delusional messianic warmonger in a white house and another delusional, messianic warmonger in a dark cave, with seemingly unbridgeable chasms between the rich and the poor and, supposedly, between the blue and the red, with explosions and beheadings turning the nightly news into a Grand Guignol, does it ever look to her like the world has gone, well, completely fucking nuts?

No, she says. "Things swing. Things go in cycles. When the ’60s opened up, it was an expansive time, people put flowers in the guns of policemen that were coming at them, people got naked, people held each other’s hands and sang. There was really true love. All the rules broke down." But can that happen again? For instance, where’s our anti-war movement? Mroczek blames the media. "There is great anti-war sentiment in this country. But when we had that [in the Vietnam era], the cameramen and the people from the Boston Phoenix were out there plastering it over the newspaper. Night and day, with vivid pictures. That is not what’s happening. Really, we are not getting the news on Iraq. We’re going about our lives. That’s because of the media. And when thousands congregate, they either don’t get covered, or they put them behind barriers. Some have been taken to jail for wearing protest signs. There are people out there, so opposed. But they don’t have a voice."

That will change. She’s sure of it. "Evolution continues. Because even while you have some really horrible things going on, there are justices and mercies and right-thinking people who come to conscientious conclusions. People who win the lottery and use the money for doing good, or parents that are trying really hard just to do the right thing. All the young people who are smart as a whip and concerned and capable." Yes, she says, there are "massacres and pollution and hatred. But in tiny, tiny increments, things continue to evolve. The world at large, in a very gross sense, even though it tends to be violent, is saying ‘I’m not gonna take it. I’m going to be counted, too. I’m going to get what I deserve.’ The whole world is captured by that fever. To not be denied. Egalitarianism is on the move."

Whatever next year brings, Mroczek says that, apart from trying in earnest to better the space around us, there’s not all that much we can do except sit back and enjoy the ride — and remember that we’re all in the same boat. "There may have been a time when I looked at the world and said, ‘Freaky deaky! This is a weird world!’ Which it is. It’s a wild world. It’s a dangerous world. It’s a strange world as we’re all more strange to each other." But now, she says, "I’m just accepting that this is the time that I live in. It’s sink or swim. So you just accommodate yourself to the way things are, and move with the tide. And it’s freaky, and it’s going to get freakier. But this is the way things are, and you have to keep moving along with ’em and make the best of what you’ve got. If we all did that, we’d be there. There’s gotta be something inside us that is moving towards something bigger and more mutually respectful and loving. In other words, I am you and you are me and we ... are ... all ... together."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com