Culture Shock 2001

By *BOY OF THE FUTURE* Nathaniel Jones

Greetings, inhabitants of the FUTURE! It is I once again, the ever popular conveyor of generationally biased info, with the second ever CULTURE SHOCK. This is a grand day for the staff here at CULTURE SHOCK (which consists of only me) because this is the first ever Culture Shock in the NEW MILLINEUM. That means that we have left the 20th Century in the dust, and I am boldly entering the 21st Century with the same old 1989 computer I had in the last century. Well, enough about me, I'd say it's time for an update on MODERN CULTURE.

The major topics of conversation lately have been those about either A) the presidential "election", or B) the energy crisis. For all of you clever individuals who noticed the "quotation marks" around the word "election", you may have figured out that I am of the sort that was not all too thrilled with the Supreme Court’s decision to appoint George W. Bush to be our next president. If in the future, the Bush administration has wiped away all knowledge about the 2000 presidential election, I'll go through it now. The two leading candidates for the election were Vice President Al Gore (democrat) and Senator George W. Bush (republican, son of previous president George Bush). Nationwide polls showed the country split 50/50 on who should be president, so there was a lot of shady political tricks going on behind both party lines (i.e., Bush paying for Nader commercials to pull votes away from Gore, and Gore going the church circuit to get more religious groups to bring him more votes.) So anyway, Election Day was November 7, and the news, always trying to be the first on the scene, began broadcasting the election results even before the polls had closed, and one state in which that happened was Florida.

Now, with all the polls that they had done, they had a pretty clear picture as of who would get which states' electoral votes. (If in the future, there is no electoral college, it goes like this: each state gets a certain number of votes in the electoral college, based on the size of the state, and it was put into the constitution to be sure that the small number of people who could vote at the time did not have the power to make life suck for all the little people, and so the smaller states would get a bigger say in what went on, so big states wouldn't become tyrannical. So when they hold elections, they look at who got the majority in that state, and that person gets all the electoral votes in that state.) And so when the media broadcasted that Gore had won the state of Florida, (speculatively) many people who were Nader supporters and were going to vote Gore just because they were extremely against Bush decided to vote for Nader because if Gore had won Florida, it looked like he had the election in the bag.

However, when George "Dubbya" Bush heard the news, he was not a happy boy. So he called up his brother (Who just HAPPENS to be the governor of the state of Florida), and suddenly No! It's Bush in the lead in Florida! (Bush supporters insist that it's all good, while Gore supporters remain skeptical.) So anyway, it flip flops back and forth as to who's in the lead until all the states have registered there official bids except for one: Florida. Allegedly, Bush is in the lead with a couple hundred votes, although many people are claiming that Bush used some dirty rotten tricks to get those votes. For example, several thousand votes mysteriously disappeared, and thus were not counted. Another example, many black people were turned away from the polls because they were convicted felons, even though a good many of them had clean records. Anyway, since it is so close, Al Gore demands a recount in some of the democratic counties, and some of the counties do the recount, with Bush fighting the whole thing tooth and nail. That recount greatly reduced the lead that Bush held, and Gore fought to get the counties that didn't finish the recount to finish it, but Bush was able to stop that. So Gore went to the state supreme court (I may have left out a few lawsuits in between. Sorry.) and asked for a full statewide recount, because he was sure that they could find enough pregnant chads, dimpled chads, and even ballots with "Gore" written on the side because they messed up their ballot. And apparently the state supreme court thought so, too, because they called a recount of the whole state. However, Bush too knew that if they recounted the whole state that Gore would win, so he called upon the US Supreme Court to stop the recount, and won in a 5 to 4 decision, with two of the Supreme Court justices having direct connections to the Bush campaign. At the time the count was halted, Bush's lead was down to under 50 votes, but the Supreme Court had spoken, and Gore was forced to concede. Even though Gore won the national popular vote by somewhere between 337,000 and 500,000 (I get conflicting data), Bush stole the election, getting 271 electoral votes, ONE over the number needed to become president. So anyway, even though the election is over, the recount is still going on, just to see how bad Bush would've lost had the supreme court not stopped the count just in time, and last I heard, Gore was leading by over 200 votes. What a great democracy we have, eh? Whoo boy am I winded! Next topic!

The energy crisis was the other thing I mentioned, but after all that typing I don't want to dwell on it, so I'll just mention it briefly. Energy providers in California didn't do something or other, and they sell us our energy, so it's crazy expensive right now, and we're all supposed to conserve. And that's all I know about that.

Well, now it's time to get into the fun stuff, what this thing is all about: CULTURE. The Big Ticket item as of January 4, 2001 is the PLAYSTATION 2, the second video game consol system from SONY. It's got turbo speed, super cool graphics, high resolution (blows previous consoles out of the water), it can hook up to the internet with a 56k modem inside, a DVD player, and all that jazz. And speaking of DVDs, approximately 60% of movies these days are on DVD rather than VHS. (For those in the future, VHS is a kind of cassette that plays movies.) In music news, CDs are still the main way of playing music, although the new thing to have is a portable Mp3 player, which allows you to download music straight into a small walkman-type thing, and it holds a lot more that a CD. However, I'm hoping that CDs remain around for a long time; I would hate to have to replace my whole CD collection (which is inching towards to 100 line.) What's cool right now are still the teen pop stars (N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, the like.), although I don't really dig that scene. Average price for a new CD is between fifteen and twenty dollars.

Cool slang terms of the time would be "Waddup, dawg!", "*FILL IN WORD HERE* is the shiznit!", "Like,", "WAZZAAAAAAAP!" and many more. Too many to write in this paper. Big movies recently. Hmm, not a lot of good stuff out right now. The big blockbuster recently was Jim Carrey in "The Grinch." You couldn't hardly go anywhere without seeing Grinch stuff. It was crazy. Even when you sent a letter, the postage service would stamp "Happy Who-lidays" on it. Must-have Christmas present this year was the playstation 2, as mentioned before. Ty, the makers of Beanie Babies, announced that they would stop creating new beanies, and after that they fizzled away, as the Pokemon craze is beginning to do.

We are still becoming more in-the-car reliable. The newest cell phones can read you your e-mail to you over the phone, so instead of actually stopping the car and using your eyes to actually read something, you can save yourself a few minutes a day by having your letters read to you. Still no in-car toilets though. Internet related, although not car related, news is that Starbucks Coffee will begin offering high speed internet access in all its stores. I have no witty commentary on that, just thought it was interesting.

Computers keep getting faster and faster. The cool thing with computers now is to get them to be able to record CDs, and play DVDs. Internet is still big, but it's getting smaller. In the past year, over 1/3 of all internet companies went out of business. Some predictions for the near future are that we’ll get more of the same. In four years Bush is gonna be out of office, and hopefully a couple of voters will go out and vote. Technology will get faster, better, and cheaper, and everything else will get way more expensive. We should see increased interest in the space program, perhaps even some people living permanently of that space station they're building. After all, this is "2001." If this is being read by someone in the distant future, let me say this. Greetings, Future Being! I do not write this to cause you pain, I do it for the sake of posterity. I do not wish to offend, here, friend. I only wish to share with you the view of the world on January 4, 2001 from the eyes of 17 year old Nathaniel Jones. Thank you for taking time to read this three and a half pages of rambling, and I hope it has served you well. This is Nathaniel Jones, BOY OF THE FUTURE, writing from what is perhaps the distant past. Good day to all, and may the Force be with you.