There are advantages in 1997, if you want to look for them. The air is cleaner, and there seem to be fewer colds. The crime rate has dropped. With the police car too expensive, policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king, and people walk everywhere far into the night. There is mutual protection in crowds.
If the weather isn’t too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air-conditioning they get. At least, the street lights still burn. Indoors, few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper.
As for the winter--well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn. But sweaters are popular indoor wear. Showers are not an everyday luxury.
It is sore in the suburbs, which were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. Suburbanites from associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Rushcarts creak from house to house along the posh suburban roads, and every bad snowstorm is a disaster. It isn’t easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open.
What energy is left must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. The American population isn’t going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export to pay for some trickles of oil and for other resources.
The rest of the world is not as lucky as we are. They’re starving out there because earth’s population has continued to rise. The population on earth is 5. 5 billion--up by 1.5 billion since 1997--and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time. There is a high infant mortality rate.
It’s more than just starvation, though. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that nearly two billion people in the world are permanently brain damaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing.
At least, the big armies are gone. Only the United States and the Soviet Union can maintain a few tanks, planes, and ships--which they dare not move for fear of biting into limited fuel reserves.
Machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours, and with lighting restricted, television only three hours a night, new books few and printed in small editions--what is there to do with leisure Work, sleep, and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed.