The most frustrating thing about my minimal daily interaction with other human beings is that most of them seem very much far behind me. I don’t mean to say that I’m smarter than them, as there are many people in the world far smarter than me. No, I mean I tend to spend my time using my brain to imagine what will be, or what could be, while most people seem to me to spend their time fixated on what is happening right now, as if they are wearing blinders on their own imaginations.

Celebrity gossip, politicians’ personal lives, what sports team is winning this year, what song is everyone else listening to, what TV show is everyone watching; these are the things that seem to weigh heavily on most people’s minds. We are bombarded with constant advertising for things we will use or consume once and throw away, both in reality and mentally, and we waste perfectly good personal conversations talking about ephemera that will seem laughable and dated a decade from now.

We don’t seem to be able to learn that everything which is hip and now today will be old and square in the future; so that our obsession with Jay-Z today will one say seem as silly to us as our obsession with Menudo in the 1980s seems now. We can all look back and laugh at the silly things we obsessed about as our younger selves, but we don’t seem to be able to apply that lesson to our current selves.

And so our electoral politics is suffering, our economy is suffering, we are personally suffering with preventable health problems, and our ecosystem is suffering all because most people refuse to take the long view. The way we make and sell goods is destroying the planet because business leaders have been largely unwilling to consider or care about the future consequences of their current actions; people are suffering today from preventable diseases because they were unwilling to take the long view and change their habits in the past; and our economy is suffering in part because for too long making money has been all about pandering to where people are, instead of helping to advance people to where they ought to be.

Astronaut Frank Borman, when speaking of the Apollo 1 disaster that killed three astonauts on the launch pad in 1967, is credited with saying that the tragedy was a “failure of imagination.” No one at NASA imagined that something could go so horribly wrong on the ground, and so when it did they were caught completely unprepared.

We are suffering from a similar failure of imagination today. Imagination for the possibilities of the future, imagination for the possibilities of existence in this universe, wonder about the discoveries that lie ahead and when and where they will be made, and the drive to better ourselves because of the mere possibility of a future where everyone lives fulfilling lives, and where this is no war, no poverty, no petty turf squabbles.

We are hit over the head with a constant barrage of moralizing, yet one of the greatest moral duties we have is protecting our shared future, our shared unknown; and this is the one moral that goes largely unmentioned by those obsessed with abortion and gay marriage. Those moralizers have supplanted their own imaginations with moral strictures, and they inhabit very narrow minds where even to imagine certain things goes against their dogma. I actually feel sorry for those people; they have made religion, which is at its core a very imaginative thing, into something rigid and pedestrian. They have turned what could be an outlet for their imagination into a doctrine, and they have sacrificed the rather mysterious long view for the easy-to-understand, moralistic short view.

Our political season is almost - mercifully - at an end. Yet, we seem to be slogging through the bitterest and most divisive month we’ve had so far. There is much anger coming from the McCain/Palin side at their rallies, with people yelling and screaming and seeming to be very angry about something. We all say that we are tired of divisive politics, yet we are the ones who, in the end, perpetrate the division. We have gotten to a very bad point in our politics where we now think that every election is the most important one we’ve ever had. Yet, in the long view, each President has their place, each four or eight years has their own ups and downs, and life goes on regardless. The earth keeps on spinning, no matter who wins or loses.

Elections are important, don’t get me wrong. They are just not as important as making sure that life can continue into the future, or that people in the future have enough to eat and a place to sleep.

Our imaginations are constantly being suppressed by mindless entertainment and now-centric politics. This, not terrorism, not any other bogeyman, poses the gravest threat to humanity’s future. If we cannot imagine solutions to our problems, then they won’t be solved. If we cannot imagine a future where things are better than they are now, then it won’t happen. If we cannot take the long view, and look beyond this decade, and this election, and even our own lives, and make selfless and forward-thinking decisions in everything we do, then we do not deserve the feeling of superiority many of us wake up with every day.

Our future, and all of the hopes and aspirations of our species, lie not in this one election, or with one political party, and in fact not even in our own lifetimes; that’s the short view. Rather, our greatest hope lies solely in the long view of the road far ahead, just out of sight, where only our unfettered creativity and imagination can take us.