The Future

 The Future

Give me back the Berlin wall    

Give me Stalin and St. Paul     

I've seen the future, brother     

It is murder.

The future for Leonard Cohen may have been murder, because too many people did not believe in a future.

If you do not believe in a future, then money spent on insurance, spent on agencies to deal with future disasters, or money put aside to deal with the future is wasted.  For example, if people do not spend on health insurance, then when, for example, there is a pandemic, they may have no health insurance available to deal with that pandemic.  If an employer does not provide sick days, perhaps his employees will come to work while sick.

Social Security Insurance is a government operated insurance program that was instituted to compel people to save for their old age. Insurance does not have to be government sponsored.  I live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where the ability to register a car is contingent on that car having private automobile insurance.  

That is it wise to put aside money for the future is not a new concept.  Almost 2500 years ago Aesop’s fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper discussed the moral virtues of hard work and planning for the future.  But there are those who do not believe in a future.  That also includes those who believe that the current conditions will not continue because there will soon be a doomsday that is either man-made, (e.g. doomsday preppers ) or divine (e.g. those who believe that we are living in the ”end times”).

But belief in a future is why old men plant trees that they will never see mature and young men go to school to learn something that they hope to use in the future.  The stock market, with its focus on day trading and current earnings, and the political system, with its focus on the next election, may not be the best way to plan for the future.  But those who ignore the future, should not prevent others from planning for a future.   Otherwise the future will be murder.