Daze Of Future Passed

Back in the 1990s sometime (I think 1996), there was an episode of The Simpsons that involved Bart and Lisa visiting a carnival. During this, Bart and Lisa encountered a fortune teller who predicted that Lisa would go on to great fame as a future president of America while Bart languished as a dysfunctional adult.

What seemed to be the most "interesting element" of this episode was the depiction of The United States as a "has been", completely bankrupted and left to the mercies of the other nations of the world to maintain its solvency. The timeframe for this was about and around 2010.

This wasn't the only "doom and gloom" portrayal of America in this light - Star Trek Deep Space Nine had an excellent two parter that aired also around the same time (1995 I think) titled "Past Tense" which involved some of the series primary characters involved in a transporter accident, landing them in the year 2024. At this time, American society had economically collapsed leaving two very distinct groups of "haves" and have nots". The "haves" of course were the elites and a minority, of which maintained tenuous control over the "have nots" underlings. Many of the "have nots" were dismissed into "sanctuary sections" of cities, left to fend for themselves amongst the needy and desperate.

For those interested, the main protagonist Captain Benjamin Sisko ended up playing a pivotal role in maintaining the timeline's natural course of events (after a riot ensued that killed off the original leader of an uprising that helped reform society ultimately for the better). At the end of this episode which had the displaced characters returned to their own time in the 24th century, there was a great disbelief expressed at how society could have unraveled and existed in a chronic state before finally being painfully corrected.

It was noted however that despite how desperate things had became, those adversities helped paved the way to the virtual utopia of the 24th century. Of course, this is only a work of fiction albeit a seemingly prescient one. At the time these shows aired, I wondered why such a dour view of the future was being depicted - this during the "go go" halcyon days of the 90s when above the sky was the limit and everything overall seemed rosy. Sadly, I seem to stand corrected. Perhaps I was simply an overly optimistic fool.