With Mr. Peabody and Sherman

 

After wrapping myself securely in the new super invisibility cloak I’d won in an interstellar poker game (Jabba the Hut was a gracious loser), I snuck into the back seat of the Wayback Machine and waited until my unsuspecting tour guides got in front.

“Where are we going this time? Asked Sherman with a mix of nervousness and anticipation.

“We’ll be going forward to 2025,” Mr. Peabody said as he set the time control. “I want you to get an inkling as to how much things will have changed for teens sixty years from now.”

I sat as still as possible, sharing Sherman’s mixed emotion. While this would be my first venture into the future as I might experience it, (Space/time travel to other parts of the universe didn’t count as far as I was concerned). What would it be like? Were the Jetson’s episodes anywhere close to reality? Did future teens have Dick Tracy wrist radios? I held my breath as everything outside the car began to blur, turning into a swirling storm of time sparkles.

“How are we going to figure out all the differences?” Sherman was asking the same question running through my mind.

“It’s impossible to see and understand everything,” said Mr Peabody as he parked the Wayback vehicle on a side street. However, we’ll stop at the public library so you can absorb a goodly dose of current events and culture.”

“That car isn’t making any noise!” Sherman had to jump out of the way as something called a Tesla sped down the street. He continued muttering to himself while keeping a wary eye for more stealthy vehicle attacks.

The library was far bigger than the one back home, and when I looked for a card catalog, there wasn’t any. Mr. Peabody solved my dilemma by leading Sherman to what looked like a compressed television screen. It had a keyboard unlike any I’d ever seen and when he touched a key and the screen lit up, I came close to losing my cloak.

This isn’t going to go well unless I divest myself of it, I thought while looking for a spot to change. I found a bathroom on the second floor, but the sign confused me. What did gender neutral mean?

Two hours later, cloak tightly wrapped and in my pants pocket, I not only knew what the sign meant, but a heck of a lot more. Girls were no longer prohibited from wearing pants to school, being gay was widely accepted, at least by teens and younger adults, and they were very concerned by something called climate change. Immigrants were an inflammatory issue, and teens were no longer quietly, well-behaved nonentities. Jobs for teens were more difficult to get, unlike in my time when almost everyone had a part-time job, and summer employment.

If I thought kids in my time worried, I was very wrong. Sure, we worried about being popular, getting a prom date, or getting caught sneaking in after curfew, but those were all small potatoes compared to what I learned by reading, then watching snippets from this future. The whole concept of the thing known as social media was close to impossible for me to wrap my head around.

I remembered when my friend Dale moved from our town to Downeast Maine. He didn’t know his new address and never wrote, so nobody ever heard from him again. In this future, kids could not only call long distance without incurring big charges, they could talk and see each other in real time, not to mention share a thing called a meme.

Their future was scarier in other ways, too. Where kids in my time often came to school with hunting rifles on racks in their pick-ups during deer season, these kids had to go to school knowing theirs might be the site of the next mass shooting, and that social media was also fertile ground for spewing lies, hatred, and for sick people to prey on teens who felt insecure, or unpopular.

What I learned wasn’t all bad. Teens were able to form independent opinions about things and events affecting them, and act. They organized protests, joined groups that supported causes they believed in, and campaigned for candidates who shared their values.

Some kids were homeless, something rarely seen in my time, and drugs, many of them ones I didn’t recognize, were prevalent. It seemed that a lot of teens died as a result. The path teens took in my era—graduating, getting a job, joining the service, going to college, or getting married, were still there, but in markedly different forms, partly a result of a pessimistic future, partly the result of economics, or personal choice.

I was so wrapped up in what I was experiencing that I nearly got stuck, but when I saw a reluctant Sherman being escorted toward the entrance by Mr. Peabody, I snuck into the stacks, wrapped myself in my cloak, and hustled to get into the Wayback Machine before they did.

That was a week ago, and my head is still spinning as I try to comprehend what still seems like an unimaginable future.

Time traveler with siblings, circa 1968.