By Richard D. Lamm

"He who has a crystal ball, usually eats ground glass." --Arab Proverb

History suggests that democracies are reactive and wake up to serious problems either late or, occasionally, too late. Public policy in a democracy is always playing "catch up." We shall begin the 21st century paying a price for three neglected policy areas that will test the very core of our country.

The first policy area likely to cause political turmoil in the next century will be retiring the baby boomers. Not long into the 21st century a massive tsunami of 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 will begin to retire. They will impact public policy for a long time; in 2030 baby boomer Bill Clinton will be younger than Ronald Reagan is today.

Not only have we not adequately prepared to retire the baby boomers, but to retire them we shall have to do something unique in recent history: downsize public expectations.

We shall have to take back promises we made to people that they are counting on and upon which their retirement depends.

The New Deal is "demographically obsolete." We cannot continue the existing Social Security and Medicare systems without substantial amendments. This is a major political problem because these are the most popular programs in America. But to continue the status quo will lead to insolvency for those programs and economic dislocation for our economy.

Retirement programs need to be built on realities, and we need to anticipate and make course adjustments. Everyone who turns 65 in the year 2050 has already been born, and we know now more about the future than we pretend to know. We are ignoring many fiscal pressures that clearly will cause us pain. The numbers are staggering: Medicare is projected to run half a trillion dollar deficits yearly when the baby boomers get fully retired, and Social Security will turn from a great deal for seniors to a raw deal for your workers who will have to bear the cost.

The Challenge of providing retirement income, health care, and long term care to this generation is achievable, but only by adopting many unpopular amendments and confronting many ethical problems that will make our moral compasses spin.

Should I be able to charge the taxpayers for a new knee at the age of 80 so I can continue to ski? Shall I be able to charge my Viagra to Medicare, paid for by workers whose own kids often do not have any health insurance? Why are we subsidizing the well-to-do elderly? What happens in California, Florida and New York when a majority of minorities find they are supporting programs for a minority of Anglo aged?

How do we run a nation with an average age of over 40, when instead of 13 workers per retiree we have three or less? Age will join race as one of the great social fissures of our time.

The second source of conflict in the early parts of the 21st century will be the rise of a "Hispanic Quebec." America has forgotten in its new emphasis on multiculturalism that the secret of our national success and civic peace has been the "unum," not the "pluribus."  Melting pots that do not melt become pressure cookers.

We are not assimilating our new multiethnic immigrants fast enough to prevent some serious cultural conflict. We can truly take pride in being a Joseph's coat of many races and ethnic groups, but only if we form a true community-a community whose members speak the same language, share a national culture and feel that they truly have a stake in each other. We have to be able to talk to each other and to share something with our neighbors beside a zip code.

The national culture should celebrate Cinco de Mayo as well as Octoberfest, but the social glue that holds diverse people together cannot be taken for granted. Diverse people live together in peace only if they feel their destinies are intertwined; that each has a real stake in the other. We are not economically, socially or linguistically integrating our newcomers fast enough to prevent increasing ethnic tensions and perhaps violence.

It has been our insistence on assimilation that has prevented the type of ethnic tension that plagues virtually all other multicultural societies. Not having solved the problems of our own black underclass, we are importing a second underclass-recklessly ignoring that "diversity" seems to be a failure virtually everywhere in the world.

Can you name one country outside of America where diverse people don't hate each other (that is, when not killing each other)?

The third challenge that I think will become apparent early in the 21st century is the sustainability revolution, where we go from blind adherence to "growth" to a new policy of sustainability. Most of the world is now convinced that population cannot grow forever, and birth rates are coming down in most of the world. But we still add 78 million new people to the Earth each year, and both the demographic and ecological changes will be significant.

Are there limits to population and economic growth in the physical world, or are those "limits" only limitations of our vision, creativity, technology and ingenuity?

I suspect like all other God's creatures, humankind stands a great chance of overrunning its carrying capacity and slipping into chaos. It is my passionate belief that economic theories cannot be at variance with ecological reality. Nature, after all, bats last.

We are blinded by our own past successes-successes that make it all the harder to change our policies and meet the new realities. My generation of politicians has pandered to the short-term interest of voters instead of seeking the long-term interest of the public. The next century will see us painfully adjusting to finitude.

The assumptions that underlie our whole society presume infinite resources and infinite growth. But there are always limits on geometric growth. Creativity, innovation and technology can delay the impact of those limits but not the inevitability. No trees grow to the sky and no finite globe can absorb endless population or economic growth.

Our globe is building up CO2, our forests are shrinking, our ice caps are melting, our ocean coral is dying, our fisheries are being depleted, our deserts are encroaching and our water is more and more a source of conflict. Technology will help, it will buy us some time, but ultimately we shall have to adopt a new mental map of the world.

Anyone who knows history knows how hazardous it is to speculate about the future. Wise people should always expect the unexpected. But as George Orwell showed us in 1984, we can also use the future to warn against what may happen if we don't change our ways. All of my three anticipated problem areas area amenable to solution or mitigation. The extent these areas of concern become disruptive or disabling depends on whether we react and correct in time.