Just around the corner

I just visited an old friend who is a collector of odd things. On a shelf in his kitchen he has two boxes of Millennios, a commemorative version of Cheerios put out in 1999 for the popular millennium (As opposed to the calendar millennium, 2001, or the true millennium, 1997. I don’t want to get into it right now.). On the side panel of the box there is a set of fill-in-the-blanks predictions.

A brief selection:

By the year ____, scientists will have developed special suits that will allow people to fly.

The Boston Red Sox will win the World Series in ____.

We will be able to teleport people and objects in the year ____.

It was interesting to see that in 1999 the Red Sox winning the Series was as improbable as flying suits or Star Trek style teleportation. Five years later, on October 27, 2004, the Sox did it in a four game sweep against the St. Louis Cardinals.

On Monday, Ian Paisley, the hard-line leader of the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, sat down with former IRA member Martin McGuinness to begin working out the details of power sharing in Northern Ireland between Sinn Fein and the DUP. Even a few years ago, who would have thought that “No surrender” Paisley would have a cordial face to face meeting with one of his sworn enemies? After much struggle and many setbacks, it looks as if Northern Ireland might have a lasting peace.

It reminds me of my visit to Berlin, both East and West, in 1988. I went from Austria to West Berlin through East Germany, watching machine gun toting guards patrolling around the train when it stopped. My friends and I went through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin for the day. It was a 40-year time warp from modern concrete, stainless and glass buildings to brick walls still showing bullet pockmarks and buildings left bombed out. An East German we met said goodbye some 300 yards from the wall, for fear of being shot if he strayed closer. It seemed as if the wall would be there for the next hundred years. It fell within a year.

I write about these events because I sense despair around me. George Bush looks impeachment-proof. The occupation of Iraq drags on and the death toll rises, while the Democrats put up a generally feeble opposition. The White House uses our constitution like so much toilet paper. Global warming inexorably advances as SUV’s drive past the brightly lit McMansions. And so on, and so on, with no letup.

Well, imagine being an East Berliner in 1988, a resident of Omagh in Northern Ireland in 1998, or a citizen of Red Sox Nation in 2003. That could be where we are in 2007. Chin up. Keep going.