You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that today, 21 October 2015, is finally the day (the non-Photoshopped day, in fact) when Back to the Future II arrived … in the future.
There have been a ton of articles about how the future has fallen far short of that particular thirty-year vision. And, it's true, we don't have flying cars. We don't have floating skateboards (of the type shown). We don't have cool-looking opaque metal sunglasses. And we have host of geo-political problems, from ISIL to Climate Change, and domestic issues as well, that plague us in a way that we think Future Marty would never have been plagued.
On the other hand, some things haven't changed. Russia is still an opponent in the international realm, but the Cold War and day-to-day fears of an ideologically based nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union are long gone. We're the ones with troops in Afghanistan, rather than the Soviets, but if stability there escapes us as it escaped them, we're not in quite the quagmire they got themselves into.
Israel and Iran remain our biggest Middle Eastern concerns. The Chinese are a threat, but more economically than (thus far) politically.
And, yeah, at home we have the zaniness going on in Washington. But in 1985 (when the movies were originally set, we were less than mid-way through the Reagan Revolution that set those wheels in motion, and we had yet to go through Iran-Contra or the kick-off of the War on Drugs.
(In 1989, when BttF2 came out, we were just beginning an era of a Bush in the White House. Some things have, it seems, changed.)
And while our own woes seem scarier and bigger than the quaint travails of three decades ago, and the advances less showy, that's in part a matter of perspective. Cars don't fly, but they are in aggregate safer, more fuel-efficient, and more comfortable than they were. And most people carry in their hands a computer / communication device more powerful than most institutional computers of 1985; I'll trade a hover board for a smartphone any day of the week.
Hand in hand with the smartphone, neither 1985 nor 1989 had any idea of what the Internet would become (the first T1 wasn't installed until 1990). I'll take being able to publish this piece online and have it read by people around the world to having a family room fax machine.
For those elements alone (and many others as well), I like our actual future better, frustrating and hazardous as it may be. Sorry, Doc.
And it was my birthday! 😀