Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, 2024!

Here we are. Yet another year where it’s nearly impossible to determine what will happen. It’s a traditional (and best) practice for us to pause and take stock of where we are now, and also look ahead and plan for the future of our work.

As we all know, both taking stock and looking ahead has been increasingly challenging in the last few years.

After shutting down and sheltering for much of 2020 and 2021, we’ve been climbing back to find ways to look ahead optimistically. But it’s hard.  

As for our planning….

Did any of us truly plan for the pandemic that shut us down completely in 2020? Did we expect the impacts of climate change to become so dramatic and destructive this quickly? And here in the US, was the possibility of the complete collapse of our Democracy on anyone’s planning bingo card?

I suspect we’re all getting a little tired of living in ‘interesting times.’

Years ago, in the summer of 1960, on a beautiful, clear day US Navy test pilot Major William (Bill) Alison climbed into an X-80 experimental aircraft for a sub-orbital space flight. The trip was a test as part of NASA’s goal of creating a Sattaloid, a manned spacecraft.

The plane launched successfully, and Major Allison reached his altitude goal of 500,000 feet. But suddenly, he lost radio contact and something mysterious occurred. When he landed, the modern and active air base he took off from not an hour beforehand was now abandoned and crumbling. The land around him was barren, save for a few strange looking structures in the far distance.

As he arrived at the mysterious settlement, the Citadel, Major Allison was captured and held by a society led by a man named The Supreme. Only The Supreme and his second in command, the evil Captain, could speak. The rest of the Citadel’s inhabitants were deaf mutes. The facility kept them all safe from the dangerous mutants who still roamed the countryside in search of any form of food. Major Allison soon learned that although his flight had taken off in 1960, he’d landed in the impossible to imagine year of 2024.

Sound like a crazy science fiction story? It is. Beyond the Time Barrier was released in 1960 (before JFK’s promise to land a man on the moon during the decade of the 1960s) and predicts that the world has all but ended by 2024.

For Major Bill Allison (played nobly, and with a straight face throughout, by actor Robert Clarke), it’s not until he’s in the Citadel for a bit when he learns that his flight hit ‘the relativity paradox’ and slipped from his time sphere to this strange new time sphere from the future. Luckily, he’s not the only pilot to have hit the paradox. Russian Captain Markova (Arianne Arden) hit the paradox in 1973. General Kruse (Stephen Bekassy) and Professor Bourman (John van Dreelen) arrived not from earth but from colonies on other planets in 1994.

Unsurprisingly, they explain, it turns out that it was nuclear weapons testing that damaged the Earth’s atmosphere, letting through dangerous cosmic rays in 1971, resulting in the ‘Cosmic Plague’ that had wiped out most of earth’s population and mutated those who weren’t killed.

Now, if only there was a way for Major Allison to go back through the paradox to 1960 and warn the scientists, military leaders, and politicians of earth that they can avoid this dystopian future by simply caring for the planet and avoiding the testing of man-made dangerous weapons such as nuclear bombs.

There are some subplots, lots of drama, some unconvincingly choreographed fighting, and even a little love story in the campy sci-fi Beyond the Time Barrier, so you should look it up.

However, it turns out the message from 64 years ago is pretty much the message we have now: We need to change course, or it doesn’t end well for us.  

But the bigger message becomes evident when Major Allison successfully navigates his way back through the paradox and returns to 1960. He’s aged more than 60 years and shares the shocking tale with all the necessary officials. Not surprisingly, it is made clear that the wheels of progress are likely to turn slowly as a grim looking official utters the last line, “Gentlemen, we’ve got a lot to think about.”

Luckily for us, we don’t have anything to ‘think about.’ We have more than an abundance of compelling evidence that the threats are real, and we know the stakes are higher than ever.

So, as we head into what will surely be a turbulent and challenging year, pull your organization together, ground yourself in your mission of doing important work to help your community, and dive in. You have an opportunity to make your organization more valuable and relevant than it has ever been. Don’t wait. Act decisively. And let’s make sure it’s a Happy New Year!