When I was nine, I lived distinctly and only in the future. My cities reeled with spires and my Jetson-like bridges clung to tinny skies. My shot-put cars flew with such intensity, speed and accuracy that only a commercial selling the same types of cars could adhere the wonder. And, yes, there were robots. I was told I lived in a country that would one day provide these marvels, if only because they were moot points in my father's country of Ecuador.

As Americans, we are historically mad with the future. We strive to not only fulfill dreams of the future, but to pummel them into daily life today with nanotechnology, second-to-second breaking news releases and, of course, robots. As American children, we were convinced by parents and educators that we were responsible for “what may come” technologically, as long as gravity played a critical role, and that we were responsible for “what would happen” socially and politically, as long as we voted and read the morning papers.

And they were right. We wield an immense amount of recognizable influence on the future of not only the United States, but also on the world. But we cannot dismantle “what will happen in the future” from “what will happen today.” Not in this country. And so, at what pivotal point does America lie? As a certain cloud roils over America, as we split into two socio-political camps, as we unleash on each other something fierce that has not been seen in nearly 40 years, what rendering can be made from today? Surely, the economic instability, the re-visiting of culture wars and the War on Terrorism is taking its toll on our psychology. And yes, we have seen this before, but now it is updated on television and on the Internet to fit the times. National and international events are rendered for us by the second; the scope and meaning of those events become ensnared by the immediate and non-linear way we process information through channel and web surfing.

Picture. Freedom Tower, the tallest building ever planned, will be built in New York atop the now paved Ground Zero site.

Picture. An American dog growls a few feet away from a bound Iraqi in Abu Ghraib .

Picture. Nearly a million women and men march on the National Mall for Women's Rights.

Picture. The mapped Human Genome in grade-school classrooms.

Every five seconds a new image surfaces to confront and process. Struck. Unhinged.

We are a country strained by the renderings of our actions, and, of course, those actions happen in real-time. Our recordings hold us accountable. So, under the strain of history and challenged by the great spill of technology and war, we should pause and take into account not only current events, but also the available recordings of those current events as they cast the pattern for the future.

Pause, as those cities cease their spire building, and those bridges bend only halfway in the sky like the backs of sea-docked tortoises. Pause, as flying cars ground themselves from cobalt-churned skies to dated winding highways. Pause before surfing the next five-second Web site. Pause before heeding our leaders' mannerisms and assessments. Pause everything because the future is culprit to today's headlines.