The Future from 2026.

Flying cars don’t make the cut. Nor does ostracizing transgender people. We can also say that we don’t want more gerrymandering, more pollution, more medical bankruptcies, more trade wars, more inflation, more real wars.

Most people want the same things. Good health. Our daily bread. Something useful to do with our labor. Enough time off to enjoy being alive. Decent schools to learn about the world, for ourselves and our children and others and their children.

Most want reasonable laws and courts to sap crimes and ensure those who commit them are restrained from continuing, while hopefully putting them in a better way so that they can join us on the right side of things. We want institutions that respect and protect our rights to live, to live free, and to do our thing so long as it’s not harming others.

We desire to have a planet full of countries with our differences in language and custom, but quite the same in respecting human rights and civil rights. Where we can come and go, visit and stay, work and play, getting along and settling our differences through actually cooperating to find beneficial settlements.

We as a species are from nature, and we seek to enjoy the natural world, not conquer it and abuse it, as we recognize that we are not advanced enough to maintain such a complex system as the earth directly, but instead must rely on its own built-in cycles and its self-regulating ecosystems to help us. We cannot afford to ruin it, or else we will be ruined with it. We must work with it.

We all want reasonable built infrastructure and environments to protect us from nature. We like cities and we like houses, with all the amenities they bring. But to have nice places to live, we recognize we need to have thoughtful conversations to ensure we build them well and can keep them operating.

There’s much to be done, so flying cars don’t make the cut.

Instead we seek regulations on businesses who refuse to do the obvious and sane business. When an irrational corporation harms us, we demand the law restrict it just as it would for any other crime. That’s whether it’s polluting, it’s distorting the market, or it’s committing fraud or other harms.

And the same goes for politicians and their parties. Those who divide us up, seeking to conquer us in the confusion, have no place as officers in our governments. The same goes for those who would take the reins of our labor unions to enrich themselves. Get out.

We want our leaders to properly study the problems, to figure out what will work, and then to implement the solution. That’s the job, but too often they don’t study it, instead doing what a corporation tells them: ignore the problem. We see that repeatedly in immigration, healthcare, schools, regulation, foreign relations, and government reform. We reject that vision of the future in favor of one where officials and legislators do their jobs professionally and uphold their duty to the people, for they are our servants.

In short, the future is the same future we’ve always wanted, and it’s the same future we will always want: a good planet of good people doing good things with their lives. Flying cars were always meant for societies that could get their act together, elsewise the crash rates would be too high. That ain’t us, at least not yet.