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This is The Monthly Aspectarian’s 30^th anniversary. My column last month was a look back. This month I’m taking a look toward the future.

It’s easy to get discouraged when we look around today. We all know we have the resources both financially and innovatively to thrive, but it’s apparent that there are problems in nearly every facet of our public life. Our air and water are polluted; the soil is becoming more eroded and depleted. We spend more on healthcare than ever, but we’re not really healthy. The quality of our food is questionable. We continue to burn too much oil and have not yet embraced the challenge of getting beyond it. We are wary of our lawmakers and believe many of their votes to be routinely paid for. We as a society skimp on the education and training our children will need to compete in the world. Our major religions are becoming less relevant, and their loudest voices speak of fear, hate, violence, and intolerance.

We look at things and assume they will continue to trend in their current direction. Taking the above and anything you else want to add, the future can look pretty bleak. The post-apocalyptic scenes we see in movies may not seem so far fetched. But everything always changes. Have you ever thought about the role of oil? It has been a dominant player for fewer than a hundred years. Who thought the Cold War would end? Health care used to include bleeding, heavy metals, and dirty hands. As structures become irrelevant or ungainly, they fall. When a population tires of the status quo and demands change, it happens. As societal attitudes shift, new forms emerge to support them.

Most of our problems are due to a handful of misperceptions. We’ve felt that nature was deficient somehow and that we had to conquer her. We’ve believed that some of us are more entitled than others. We’ve thought that it was okay to do anything without regard to how it affected the future, and we have forgotten that everything is connected to everything else. Materially, this seems to have worked okay for us, at least in the developed world. Our standard of living is relatively high, even in the face of current economic conditions. Few of us fear hunger, thirst, or perishing in the elements. Medical advances have eliminated many of the diseases that ravaged us in the past, and in general, life is fairly safe and comfortable. Much of what we’ve gained, however, has been at the expense of the environment, of poorer nations, our bodies, and the future. We simply cannot do this forever.

I think we’re due for huge changes. Many Third World nations are now developing themselves, helping others to do the same, and becoming players in the world’s arena. Today, for the first time in history, we have a large number of independent, financially influential, older women. We’ve recently seen the power of communication devices in skirmishes around the world. Although she has always been with us, squeezing out between the cracks of patriarchy, the emergence of the active feminine principle is becoming greater and harder to ignore. I don’t see us continuing to do business as usual. We will have to adjust and begin to pay the real price for goods we buy and stop expecting people around the world to sacrifice their standard of living for our convenience. As the influence of women grows, the view of us as second class citizens will fade and hopefully disappear. It will be harder and harder for corporations and governments to operate in the dark as communication becomes even faster and more widespread. As we allow the feminine to influence our beliefs and decisions, we will become more conscious in dealing with each other, the planet, and the welfare of those who follow.

These changes will not to come to fruition in the next thirty years, but I’ll be sorely disappointed if we don’t see the beginnings of it fairly soon. I’m not expecting some kind of utopia. Change, even at its best, is a mixed bag. We tend to think of balance as a static state, but it’s really the constant shifting between two forces. The way I see it, we’re way out of balance and some pretty big adjustments are going to happen fairly quickly. History has seen a number of pivotal moments; I am not alone in believing this to be one of them. Ever wonder what it would be like to experience the beginning of a new era? Look around.