The Unimaginable Life

We are entering a period of profound and previously unimaginable change in American society. The election of Barack Obama and the growing global financial crisis are the threshold events in what is bound to be a fundamental transformation of American culture over the next decade. The period from 2009 to 2020 will be a more dramatic and more challenging time than most of us have ever experienced in our lifetimes.

While some voices have been sounding the alarm about climate change and peak oil for years, the staggering convergence of crises related to climate, energy, health care, and the global economic downturn was largely unforeseen by even the most thoughtful observers. The dangers of this time could conceivably be greater than were those during the period of the Great Depression and World War II. There is no doubt that we are placing immense strain on the ecological and biological networks that function as our life support system.

The Unimaginable Life will attempt to chart the deep currents of cultural change in America without being distracted by the cable television carnival that exalts trivia and freak show diversions. We will take note of the paranoid fictions of marginalized cultural missionaries and the ritual aggrandizement of insecurities among the waning cultural elite because these distortions of discontent help us to understand the existential anxieties created by social upheaval.

The movement over the long run in American history has been toward progress and justice. We will, however, very likely see both unimaginably positive and unimaginably negative developments in American life over the next decade. The Unimaginable Life will document both the good and the bad, with one eye always focused on our shared history. It is over the course of a lifetime, and from the perspective of the overarching story of American history, that events once thought unimaginable become a part of the foundation of our everyday lives. The arc of American history will be our model as we highlight the kind of bold leadership, the technological and cultural innovations, and the American genius for invention and experimentation that will hopefully take us into an unimaginably bright future.

-Charles Dean Pierson