How humans perceive the future

            The short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury illustrates a dystopian future from the viewpoint of the 1950s. This detail is important to how we interpret the story, because the author wrote during a time of great political turmoil, not unlike today. The United States was gripped by the fear of nuclear war and communists. Bradbury writes of a world destroyed by a bomb, essentially turning it from a utopia to a barren wasteland with no humans left. This plot leads me to the conclusion that Bradbury felt there was a possibility of this happening in real life. The thing that is interesting is that this story is influenced by a poem of the same name written in 1918 by Sara Teasdale. So we can see that 30 years prior to the Cold War, people were already having thoughts about their world ending. Teasdale’s poem shows that every generation feels that their generation is the last one before the world implodes; when in reality, humans have consistently faced turmoil in the past and will continue to face turmoil in the future.  

https://pacificislandparks.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/operation-plowshare-2/