time capsule

Queensland Women Writers are creating a time capsule to be opened in 2059 - this was my contribution.
Dear future readers,
What will fifty years bring? What sort of world do you live in, you who open this time capsule and read this letter? It is a question that stretches my mind.
I remember in the year nineteen fifty three when I was at high school our class was asked to write an essay on the topic “The World in Fifty Year’s Time”. The previous fifty years had seen great strides from horses to automobiles, for the first powered flight to commercial flights; so what would the next fifty years bring? We imagined a helicopter on every roof top, and motor ways like giant conveyor belts so that you keyed in your destination then sat back and rested until you car was disgorged at the end of your journey. Some of us imagined a third world war so horrific that nothing was left on this planet but scorched earth, dead bodies and insects. How little we knew!
The reality has proved much more wonderful. We have seen men walk on the moon and satellites photograph the whole earth in great detail. Computers came into being; firstly great monsters that occupied whole storeys of buildings and required precise air-conditioning. Now there is a computer in almost every home and class room in the developed world and almost everyone between the ages of eight and eighty can search the internet and email each other all over the world in seconds. Global Positioning Systems direct drivers to precise locations. Technology has advanced indeed.
But what about ideas? Have we gone forward or backward in our thinking? Wycliffe, Luther, Tyndale, Calvin and later the Wesley brothers were among those who brought Christian enlightenment to the world. Darwin put forth his theory of evolution which led to Hitler’s dream of a master race. This in turn led to the “final solution” and the horrors of the concentration camps. Marx’s theories sort to bring about a world where everyone would be equal. Instead the result in Russia, China and North Korea was the regimes of Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Kim Il-sung – absolute rulers who tolerated no opposition. Now in the year two thousand and ten the rising ideology is Islam a system which seeks to dominate the world through jihad, the holy war fought by “martyrs”, suicide bombers, wreaking indiscriminate destruction on all and sundry.
So what are my predictions for the day when this capsule is opened in October 2059? I predict that technology will have advanced tremendously: that natural areas, our present national parks, will still be treasured: but that many species will have been lost for ever. In the realm of ideas I predict that Islam, like Nazism and Communism before it will be discredited: that Christianity will still flourish especially in China, India, Africa, South America and in North Korea.
By how much have I missed the mark? I wish I could see your faces as you read this letter!
May God bless you all,
Alison Cunningham.

On your wedding day

Your have stepped through the curtain, Kathryn
From one life to the next,
From girlhood to womanhood in one day.
We rejoiced, we celebrated,
we sent you on your way-
Dressed all in white, the veil on your head,
The veil, the symbol of the curtain
through which you tread.
Your friends in pink beside you;
Your family all around you;
A proud young man beside you.
God bless you on your way!