Advertisement

“Computer Mugs” and Nuclear-Tinted Homes : When Kids Envision the Future, It’s Still Through a Technological Lens

Share

We are living in the future

I’ll tell you how I know

I read it in the paper

Advertisement

--15 years ago

We’re all driving rocket ships

And talking with our minds

Wearing turquoise jewelry

And standing in soup lines

--”Living in the Future”

by John Prine, 1981

When I was in grade school in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, scientists seemed like gods and the idea of a future based on nuclear power was virtually a religion.

Advertisement

My friends and I wanted to be rocket scientists or astronauts when we grew up and we eagerly anticipated the day that miniaturized atomic engines would allow us to cut the umbilical cord connecting automobiles to the gasoline pump.

In our eyes, at least, there was little of the mixed blessings awaiting us in the future that singer-songwriter John Prine so cleverly pointed up.

Every now and then I wonder what kind of image of the future kids must have today in the wake of devilish disasters with Three Mile Island, the space shuttle Challenger, the Stringfellow acid pits and terrifyingly too many others.

An exhibit at the Fullerton Museum Center addresses that very question through youthful imaginings that are occasionally disturbing, but mostly charmingly wacky.

The exhibit, which closes today (a week earlier than planned to make way for a show from the Smithsonian that opens next month), is entitled “Document Orange County, Part 3” and is paired with “Looking Forward,” a show featuring futuristic adult visions supplied by members of New York’s American Institute of Graphic Arts.

There are a couple of interesting entries among the graphic artists’ show, but for the most part, these posters and magazine or newspaper illustrations often only loosely conjure images of the future.

Advertisement

It was the kids’ section that most intrigued me, perhaps because I still carry one dark memory out of all those duck-and-cover civil-defense drills that supposedly were preparing us to survive nuclear war: the fear that I’d never live long enough to die of old age.

As Albert Einstein observed, in a quote used on one of the AIGA posters: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

What do you suppose today’s kids, who may retain visions of Chernobyl, of rockets’ red glare and the space shuttle bursting in air, imagine life will be like when (and if) they reach adulthood?

For a surprisingly large number, technology still appears to represent a kind of savior, as it has to people throughout the 20th Century. Robots and other clever machines will deliver kids of the future, if not from evil, at least from the horrors of homework and washing the dishes.

Few imagine devices to eliminate poverty, hunger or disease. Most are far more pragmatic.

My vote for Invention Most Likely to Succeed goes to fourth-grader Phoenix Sanchez for his “Computer Mug.”

“The computer mug will be used for drinking coffee and doing work at the same time.” Think of the time-wasting trips to the coffee machine that will save. “It will come with a handle for transporting it easily to work or to school. It will come in all the rainbow colors. It will cost about twice as much as a plain coffee mug.” C’mon--it’d be a bargain at thrice the price. “It will be used for art projects, homework and games.”

Advertisement

Wait till the Ronco folks get hold of that one.

Two entries predict resurgences of fashions from the past. In 2189, writes fifth-grader Melissa Merrell, “children and adults will wear long dresses and suits like were worn in the year 1889, because fashion repeats itself.” Fortunately for our descendants, none of these kids is figuring on a big comeback for bell bottoms.

Fullerton fifth-grader Greg Baines envisions the nuclear-tinted house of the future: “The dark squares in my drawing represent the rooms where our faces will glow in the dark in order to save on electricity.”

And, of course, we will make contact with extraterrestrials in the world of tomorrow.

Accompanying a picture of a creature that looks like a man with a head resembling a two-slice toaster, fifth-grader Jim Freeman says: “U.S. astronauts will discover this alien on Mars. They will find out that he is human in some ways.” In other words, he’s not a lawyer. “He also has alien features, for instance, his eyes and mouth and three fingers are very alien. He has a badge indicating he is Captain of Mars.” Sort of the Joe Friday of the Red Planet.

There are, however, a few signs that not everything will be rosy in the year 2525.

As explanation for her city in the sky, Kerri Devonald expects that “the world will explode before the year 2489, so everything will be up in the air.”

Angelina Gonzalez, another fifth-grader, put together an illustration that she describes thusly: “My picture is of a spaceship going up in the air. A man is looking out of the spaceship, and he looks a bit scared.”

Under a computer-generated picture called “The Kid Robot,” one fifth-grader painted a psychologically revealing analogy of the model child-student as automaton: “My robot is very intelligent. She can do any problem on your homework. She is programmed to clean rooms, wash dishes and any other chore you could ask her to do. . . . She looks like a human being, but she’s not.”

Advertisement

When asked to describe what Orange County will look like in the future, most kids drew pictures including vehicles that will be able, in one student’s words, to “fly through the air with the greatest of ease.” Obviously they’ve spent some time on the Santa Ana freeway.

And some of us can find reassurance in knowing that at some point, as pictured in one drawing, Orange County apparently will be defended by a giant walking a tightrope shaking his fist (or is he throwing punches?) at low-flying planes.

Several of the houses that will occupy the county in years hence have windows emblazoned with dollar signs. Are they all banks, reflecting the county’s affluence? Or are they an indication that kids are aware of the astronomic cost of housing that will price most of them into futuristic suburbs somewhere outside Fontana?

There is, however, one image of Orange County’s future that stands apart from the rest: a picture of green hills and flowers and a rainbow and a blue sky and a shining sun.

I don’t know what kind of student drew this one, but I’ll predict that this kid may have the brightest future of all. At the Orange County Chamber of Commerce.

Advertisement