What's next?

If the global economy collapses entirely - well, forget it, game over, hope your hunting / gathering skills are up to snuff. If just the U.S. economy collapses, we're still pretty screwed - you may want to start learning Chinese so you can understand what your new mortgage broker is saying. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, let's pretend that there is some path to economic salvation. What happens next?

Well, first we realize that a lot of people were completely surprised by all this who should not have been even slightly surprised by this, because they let wishful thinking guide their prognostications, like an army assuming that the greatest attack an opposing force can muster is always going to be of a magnitude slightly less than the most convenient defense that could be presented in response. Things got bad. Worse than a lot of people who should have known better wanted to believe. About as bad as some other people were expecting.

So now there are a few other things on the horizon, things that can be dismissed as preposterous today and will be considered glaringly obvious in hindsight. Which of these are worthy of attention? Which ones will we be kicking ourselves tomorrow for not thinking about today?

• The looming Social Security crisis. Anybody remember this one? It goes like this: Each generation pays for the previous generation's Social Security. The Greatest Generation was relatively small, and was followed (roughly speaking) by the Baby Boomers. There are a lot of Boomers, so the Greatest Generation did OK in that respect. The Baby Boomers are followed - again, roughly speaking - by Generation X. My generation. The smallest, most demographically insignificant generation around today. Those of us who are not total Slackers are working our butts off, paying into a Social Security system which will be sucked dry by the demands of the aging Boomer generation. And then what? What will tide us over until Generation Y, all covered in tattoos and hopped up on Ecstasy, pays for our sorry asses to be turned into Soylent Green?
• Health Care. Health care costs are skrocketing. Insurance costs are increasing without limit. More and more people are going on the "don't get sick, don't get hurt" plan, while others are in the "here's your pill, what's your problem?" program. Neither is conducive to long-term health, and it seems that everybody these days is suffering from some chronic disease, or is on a regimen of one or more medications a day, or both. Which brings us to...
• National Defense. Iraq and Afghanistan are meat grinders, taking too many of our best and bravest and relieving them of limbs, brain function, or life. This two-front war is consuming an inordinate proportion of our defense capability. Meanwhile, as noted above, a large part of our population is old, sick, and/or dependent on medication. I've joked before that we're getting to a point that Liechtenstein could invade and conquer the U.S. without too much effort. Now I'm not so sure that's a joke.
• Foreign Imports of vital supplies. I once wrote an outline to a story about an outbreak of ergot - a fungus that produces gangrene in the extremities - transforming our nation into one filled with multiple amputees. The ergot was deliberately introduced into imported food as an act of biological warfare. A little while after I mentioned this story to a friend, melamine-tainted pet food using ingredients imported from China began to kill pets throughout the U.S. Now the same thing is happening again, only this time instead of pet food, the melamine-doped food from China includes milk, milk products, and baby food. How safe is the stuff you buy at the store?
• Ports. Hey, remember how vulnerable our ports are? The last time anyone really cared enough to talk about it was four years ago, during the last Presidential election. Nobody's talking about it anymore. Does that mean the problem went away?

That's just a few. Can you think of more? Come on, Douglas Adams may have said that predicting the future is "a mug's game," but it's also fun. Trying to get someone to do something about these things - eh, not so much fun. But at least when something really terrible and heartbreakingly avoidable that you predicted happens, you'll have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so!"