Is change coming?

How much have things changed since I was 18 years old?
We all thought Marijuana would be legal by the time we were 30.
Abortion was legal and we assumed it was going to stay that way.
We though the end of the Vietnam War would bring on an error of peace.
We believed the massive military, our nuclear weapons and NATO were needed to protect us against the Soviet Union.


Fast forward:
It's 2007
Drug laws are tougher than ever.
Abortion is under attack with constant legal tricks by right-wing Christian-nut jobs.
By 1980, we had a president sending troops and weapons to Central America to fight against revolutionary Democratic Socialists. We protested against the war for nearly a decade and in the end, the revolutionaries gained very little.
The Soviet Union fell. We now have the largest military spending budget in history, NATO has expanded and we still have the same arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Probably the biggest canker sores, in my life time, has been these little wars. We lost Vietnam, yet we keep getting into wars in small third world countries. Grenada over communism, Panama over drug dealing and now our second war in Iraq and this one has been going on for years. There's no reason to believe this country will see peace and prosperity in the near future. We seem to go from one war to the next.
So will there be change in my life time? At my age I don't hold my breath. However, change may come some day as a country that uses most of the worlds resources for less than 20 percent of the Earths population, uses military might with out hesitation to get what it wants, and destroys the environment for short term gains, is bound for destruction. The question is simply when will it happen and it probably won't happen in the near future.
If I were 20 today, I would look forward to the day when this house of cards simply falls down. But I may not live long enough to see it. And when those cards fall, there's no guarantee the left will triumph. We may end up with a system even more idiotic than this one.
In the meantime, I'm left to survive and work in a hostile environment, with an uncertain future, wondering if the far left or anyone on the left can figure out how to make a difference.

Change is coming, but will I personally see it?