Happy new year — hopefully

Evanston RoundTable, Dec. 27, 2023

The human brain is a remarkable organ, often characterized as the most complex structure in the universe. We learn from Bill Bryson’s wonderful 2019 book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, that the brain actually projects ahead of reality by a fraction of a second and relays that information to our sense organs so we can react in real time.

Unbelievable? “For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time – about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second – for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted,” Bryson writes. “To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”

I find this a compelling metaphor for seeing into the future, which is especially timely now, the last week of the year, a time when people tend to think about what’s ahead.

It’s a human penchant, and not just something pundits do with their annual forecasts, to want to assess the coming terrain, perhaps an evolutionary trait we developed tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago to avoid the pitfalls of our ancient landscape.

My birthday gives me a good perspective on this. I was born on the last day of 1945 and for many years was known among my family and friends as Butch, supposedly because a Chicago newspaper on Jan. 1, 1946, showed a cartoon of Father Time passing the hourglass to a newborn, who was captioned by that name.

Around high school I had grown tired of the goofy moniker (not that Lester was much better), but I’ve always been partial to my birthday: easy to remember, parties and celebrations everywhere, and a holiday the next day.

Despite the looking ahead-looking back Janus-like nature of my birthday, I’ve never indulged in making predictions. The future is too slippery and non-linear to divine with much accuracy, and in a way it’s more fun to take it as it comes, as Steve Winwood advises. The New York Times reported on Dec. 24, in a story about Wall Street’s annual prognostications, that they “are usually wrong, and when they’re right it’s only by accident.” Case in point: at yearend 2022 financial analysts’ mean projection for the S&P 500 for year-end 2023 was 4048. As of Dec. 26, it’s 4774, a whopping 18% off.

Notwithstanding the difficulties of prognostication, it’s hard to avoid foreseeing that 2024 presents a uniquely worst-case possibility. In addition to the “usual” serious problems – worsening climate change, political and civil divisiveness, congressional dysfunction, wars in Europe and the Middle East, gun violence in America – there’s a Category 5 hurricane on the horizon: a major U.S. constitutional crisis. Reports Politico, “January 2025 could make January 2021 tame by comparison,” and we all remember how that went.

But as a glass-half-full guy, I prefer to dwell on and hope for the best. So aside from somehow imagining the next election will proceed more or less smoothly, here are a handful of things to celebrate about our near-term future:

• As described in Larry Gavin’s recent RoundTable article, there are safe and effective vaccines and many preventive actions we can take to avoid serious COVID infections. Considering how disastrous and dangerous the pandemic was just three years ago, it’s little short of a miracle that it can, for the most part, now be kept at bay.
• Staying with health care, a new drug in clinical trials appears to be effective in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. “Lecanemab – a monoclonal antibody – has been found to slow rates by 27% after 18 months of treatment, by clearing amyloid from the brain,” reports one news source. Alzheimer’s affects millions of Americans and is the seventh-leading cause of death in the U.S., according to the National Institute on Aging, so this seems to be very good news indeed.
• Global oil demand is down, thanks to the increasing proliferation of electric vehicles, and with that trend is a concomitant decrease in gasoline prices at the pump, nearing the longtime recent low of around $3.20 a gallon on Dec. 26.
• Violent crime continues to decrease, according to the latest FBI report, extending a trend that goes back to 1991.
• Somehow and against all odds it looks like the Federal Reserve has succeeded in lancing inflation and is on track to get us to the elusive “soft landing” for which economists are always striving. Hiring remains strong and the economy is chugging along while rising prices have moderated. Anyone who remembers the hardships of “stagflation” or the incredible tribulations of Paul Volcker’s 1980s reign as head of the Fed, engineering two massive recessions, will be grateful for today’s mild recovery.
• Notwithstanding the current controversies over campus antisemitism and “wokeness,” America is still considered to have the best system of higher education in the world. Young people everywhere understand that, which is why international applications have been “surging.” I’m old enough to remember when tuition was just $97 a quarter at the University of Illinois’ Chicago “Circle” campus, where I graduated in 1969. Despite sticker shock over today’s college costs, nearly everyone can access a high-quality public education at the nation’s booming and reasonably affordable community colleges.
• Finally, and closer to home, is our beloved hometown. According to some accounts, no less a figure than 19th century social reformer Frances Willard invented the phrase “Evanston is heavenston.” Wherever it derived, it describes our gratitude for living in a city open to and celebrating diversity; striving to end homelessness, reduce student achievement gaps and address other challenges; a national pioneer in providing reparations; and filled with strong not-for-profit groups and staff working hard to improve our civic life. As Gilo Kwesi Logan says, on a sign hanging at the Robert Crown Community Center: “There is a fire that burns within us that fuels our love for Evanston, our commitment to its people, and our efforts to help it live up to its reputation. This fire sheds necessary light on the work before us to make this city a safer, better educated, and more just home for ALL of Evanston.”

It’s easy to complain about things, including the future, but far more important and therapeutic to work to improve them while celebrating the good things we have.

Here’s to you – Evanston ­ and RoundTable readers – for a wonderful year ahead.