For Thursday, March 30, 2000 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 692 words

Being a brand new being

It's 2000 now and I want to live differently. We had the big whoop-de-do at New Year's and all the millennium brouhaha across the airwaves and printing presses, and then it all just settled down and fizzled out. We are left working and living like we did last century. Not much has changed on the revolutionary science front. It's still all just potential, potential, potential.

I want to be new age. I want to live like George Jetson's cousin. I want the future to hurry and get here. I want all the conveniences of technology to come to life like Pinocchio. I want to drive my car 100 miles on a gallon of gas, better yet 1000 miles on a gallon of hydrogen packed in nanofibers. I want natural gasses and sunlight to provide power and heat to my home. I want my laptop computer to be made out of paper. I want my cell phone to work anywhere in the world, for 10 hours straight. I want to store a mirror image of the Internet in a holographic cube next to the Net-phone. I want all my household appliances to be voice-activated. I want to see and talk to my family and friends on my flat computer screen, which sits next to my HPIII printer.

I want to see ducks and owls and glaciers. I want to pull over to the nearest stream whenever I'm driving around California and refill my canteen. I want to take my shirt off in the sun for about ten measly minutes without worrying about skin cancer. I want to be able to jog along the highway without wondering what else I'm inhaling besides air. I want to eat the fish I catch. I want to eat the wild deer and boar and turkey that hunters might put on my plate. I want to see needles or leaves on trees. I want to see a white dinner plate 100 feet below the surface of Lake Tahoe. I want cars out of Yosemite. I want to see all the oily soil cleaned up where city vehicles and rural citizens around the country pulled off in their back lots and changed their oil onto the ground. I want to see MTBE go the way of DDT. I want to see rainforests on TV.

I want to see defective genes replaced and people regain their lives. I want to see drugs that cure or arrest or delay most of our worldly ailments. I want to see hands, feet, arms, legs, eyes, ears, larynxes reattached or transplanted. I want people's lost senses to be returned to them -- sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.

I want to walk the streets of the Bay Area cities at all hours of the night. I want to leave my car unlocked when I go to the store. I want to be able to find my wallet and keys at the nearest lost and found. I want to be able to wear a white turtleneck sweater and creased tan pants into a biker bar at midnight on a Saturday without being harassed…O.K. maybe that's asking too much.

I want to work at a public school that is funded not simply by tax dollars, but by corporate sponsorships from companies that realize they must invest early in nurturing talent in their future employees and customers. I want to work at a school that can train a child for virtually anything life might throw at them in adulthood, regardless of the cost of the simulations. I want to live in a society where slick salesmen do not snatch nest eggs from senior citizens. I want to live in a society where we invest in our youth, respect our elders, and appreciate the work.

What I really want to do is wear a chrome spacesuit around the house and talk to my wife via a transmitter pin on my chest. "Honey," I will say from the next room. "Come in here. I need you."

She will say, "I can hear you without that silly transmitter. You're only seven feet away. Take off the spacesuit and come to dinner."