I saw a billboard while driving on the NJ Turnpike this weekend with a photo and a quote from Yankee great Yogi Berra. The quote said: "The future ain't what it used to be." I thought about the various meanings of this simple contradiction and found like many of Yogi's sayings, profound truth. Who knows what he was referring to when he came up with this one, but the future is not what it used to be. In the past, I thought about the future as a time when we as a society and a world would progress towards ever greater prosperity and peace. This optimism is ingrained in the American character. Now however, we, or more accurately I, seem to struggle with what the future holds. The one tonic to this is the knowledge that history has demonstrated that despite the odds, our economy manages to employ the ever larger numbers of workers; our companies manage to compete against the world's greatest companies and we somehow or another figure out a way. So I close with another quote: "Keep the faith, baby".
