The news, video games, TV, movies, sci-fi -- I feel besieged by images of impending doom. At every turn, our collective unconscious seems convinced that the world we know is ending soon and in a bad way.

Science fiction has always predicted a grim future but the amount of gloom has really started to bother me. I say the hell with that.

I reject the doom and gloom and am now consciously looking for ways to make the future better than that.

Now that I am a parent, I think about the future in a different way. My child is the most important thing in my life and I want her to have a nice future. I dont want her wandering the Capitol Wasteland. Maybe she will never eat tuna sushi but I want more for her than post-apocolyptia.

For years, Gene Roddenbery of Star Trek was a voice of hope. He was one of the few futurists predicting that humans could overcome and build a better not a worse future. We need more of that. We need any of that.

I am still not a fan of Obama but every once in a while I think about him and about the idea of significant change.

Forget Bush and the military-oil-industrial complex of the past. Let's invest in fiber optics, clean energy, education in a BIG way. Let's quick bickering over $100 for education while we spend $1 Billion dollars on stealth bombers.

Yes, every once in a while I think about what we could build if we really tried. It is an odd, exciting, heart-moving feeling of hope. We could do amazing things if we wanted to.

Sadly, I am unconvinced that "we" do want to. The human mob, ie the voting public, doesn't seem to have grown any wiser since the days of Caesar. We want entertainment, diversion, and promises of money for nothing. And the subprime fiasco has proven than our educated leaders aren't any better.

It takes much more energy to build something than it takes to criticize it or to break it. As a parent, Im trying to keep hope alive but as a citizen I am still doubtful America will lead the way. We might act in a big way but probably not until things are much, much worse.

As a species, we tend to cling to the past, to our auto worker jobs or our small towns. Its only the mavericks and outliers and weirdos that leave the safety of what we know away for an unpredictable future. Now that the World is flat, its hard to physically move somewhere to start over. The world is large but the capital system of strip malls and franchises has permiated most of the planet.

Lets be honest. Changing the path the world is on will be a huge amount of work. We facing massive challenges.

Our patterns of consumption and our system of pursuing individual wealth are not sustainable. Money is infinite because it is just made up but there are very real limits on raw materials, clean water and food. And there are a LOT of people in the world with more every day, most of which live in abject poverty with no hope of that changing.

Global warming is a reality and the consequence will be massive and probably brutal. Even minor changes in rainfall and weather could have titanic changes on food production.

In terms of economics, we have sent our manufacturing base to China and built a global system where baby milk or vitamins in Ohio comes from a factory half way around the world. It looks like entire countries in Africa are built from old plastic bottles and refuse from the West. If anythign happens to cheap transportation or trade, we are in trouble. We made money in the transition and followed the rules of capitalism but we are now more dependent and less self-sufficient than a generation ago.

These are huge issues, much bigger than anything Obama has talked about. Working within our system, he will be lucky just to create modest health care reform. Radical health care reform, like giving every citizen access to health care, seems impossible.

But we have to try.

2008 was a bellwether year for American capitalism. The biggest setback in a century and the aftermath of our greed and stupidity is still unfolding. After talking about the amazing number of new billionaires created by the boom we are now talking about the number of millionaires that have lost it all.

Maybe the crash will be enough for us to change our ways. To save more, to invest in the future, to think about our legacy.

I am still doubtful but I sincerely hope so. For our children's sake. I just wish I had a better idea of what normal people like us should be doing.