The Year 2012

And it shall come to pass that:

Mayor Kitty Piercy will leave all challengers by the side of the road and get four more years for littering.

In the Rose Bowl, the Ducks will play Ring Around the Badgers, who will all fall down.

Ellie Dumdi will have a great fall off a Park Block wall. The king’s men will accuse Commissioner Rob Handy of hiding some of the pieces, and Rob will be excoriated by the R-G for having doubts about the county benefit of reassembly.

Landscape architect Lloyd Bond will arise from the dead to explain that he had designed the Park Block walls for outdoor sitting and that the walls and all of the park’s sun, solace and shade were intended for everyone. 

The “butterfly” parking garage will be finally pinned to a board, and a new Farmers Market and public square will emerge from its chrysalis.

Eugene’s city departments will finally occupy all of the new downtown buildings as a “Staff-on-the-Street” strategy for increasing pedestrian movement in the center city.

Most Eugeneans will have lost sight of Envision Eugene.

Springfield’s Millrace will be beautifully restored. Eugene’s will be dutifully ignored.

Eugene police officer Judd Warden will be stunned by an all-expenses-paid invitation to China.

Sarah Palin will misunderestimate the nation’s turn toward a New Progressive Era, form a third Mama Moose Party, lead with her rack and clinch the reelection for Barack Obama.

Climate change will cause increasingly nasty political weather across the nation. Droughts of ignorance will continue to burden Texas. Too much sun will send xenophobia viral in Arizona. Cynical cyclones will twist all knickers in the nation’s capitol. Mitch McConnell’s face coach will tell him to stop eating prunes.

Unexplainable mutations will appear in the form of some little pitchers suddenly having really small ears.

The lowest peak in the Bush 41 landscape will be called Anita Hill. Clarence Thomas will never get over it.

Corporations, now people, will become subject to the draft, paid soldier’s wages and their shipping orders will be outsourced to Asia for processing.

Personhood and voting rights will next be extended to fish, who will be expected to jump in on the eventual removal of Northwest dams. 

The U.S. Postal Service will be run like a postal service.

Paul Krugman will win a Pulitzer for his The New York Times columns on the economics of the Great Recession. The folly of austerity and reduced spending during a depression will be returned to its broken pedestal in the Hoover Museum.

Banks will initiate a new withdrawal fee for people leaving a bank. 

We will celebrate the 151st birthday of the Statue of Liberty by blowing Joshua’s horn at all the highest walls to immigration and use the rubble to rebuild the crumbling wall between church and state.

The Occupy movement will move its permanent encampment into our hearts.

Shoeless Joe Jackson will be retained by Nike to host a reunion of all who have ever played ball at Civic Stadium. School District 4J will reclaim its grandstand to hold the large civics classes that will be required to restore civic mindedness.

A tax on war spending will solve the nation’s debt, Medicare and Social Security problems and leave enough left over for schools, health care and plowshares. 

Greece will admit that its love of the eurozone was merely Platonic.

Consumerism will lose confidence in itself and become unsustainable.

The kidnapped goose that lays the golden egg will be returned to its middle class nest in social justice, goose-labor rights and derivative restrictions.

The over-gilded of our new Gilded Age will be declared redundant.

Smart meters will be found to excel at story problems: If one train leaves Portland at 3 pm …

The first high-speed train, The Mayor Ruth, will travel the 110 miles from Eugene to Portland in under 30 minutes.

Three more people will understand Chet Bowers’ concept of the closing and monetizing of the cultural commons. Meanwhile, the portion of each TV hour devoted to commercials will increase to 40 minutes, causing the number of forensic clues required to close crime show cases to be reduced to two.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution will continue to appear sous rature at the nation’s airports. Stores proffering “adult materials” will be renamed Junk Shops.

The fascination with vampires will vanish with the new dawn, and all manner of right-clawed crazies will crawl back under their rocks to await the next mean and malevolent social tide.

The electromagnetic field effect of a passing asteroid will initiate a new age of global awareness that Planned Parenthood, dark chocolate, plenitude, recycling, EW, films without car chases, and the feeding and caring of the kids we already have are unbeatably good ideas.

Jerry Diethelm of Eugene is an architect, landscape architect and planning and urban design consultant. He is also a UO professor emeritus of landscape architecture and community service.