SaportaReport

The economy sucks. Local governments are slashing their budgets. MARTA is facing a $120 million operating shortfall and may have to cut its service by 25 percent. Many people are suffering from unemployment and underemployment. And our region, economically dependent on growth, is lagging.

It’s easy to get depressed, easy to feel that our best days are behind us.

But I can’t help feeling optimistic about the future. Maybe it’s because winter is finally on its way out and spring is coming. Maybe it’s because I’m tired of being depressed and pessimistic.

Yet I can point to two experiences this past week that have taken me out of my current misery and lifted me to take a longer view of the future of our city. And that future is bright.

By Maria Saporta

In the end, the 2009 campaign of United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta raised $79.3 million, less than 1.5 percent shy of its $80.5 million goal.

Given the economic struggles of the past year, United Way leaders were celebrating Thursday night when they heard the news.

Before announcing the campaign results, John Somerhalder, the 2009 campaign chair who is CEO of AGL Resources, set the stage by preparing the crowd of several hundred that bad news was coming.

First, the goal was the same amount

The sci-fi masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released way back in 1968, a year when it seemed as if the whole world was coming undone.

I was an 8-year-old science nerd at the time, and my big sister Gail took me to watch director Stanley Kubrick’s G-rated head-trip at the Rialto Theater on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

I didn’t understand most of the movie but couldn’t wait for the day when I could travel across galaxies talking to computers and scooting between the stars with my very own jet pack.

Better still; the movie imagined a distant future that was an escapist balm to the brutal realities of the times.

“Let the Awe and Mystery of a Journey Unlike Any Other Begin” was that movie’s wordy but inspiring tagline. Cool.

In 1984, the movie’s sequel “2010” was released with even trippier special effects, more ambitious interplanetary excursions and an army of chatty computers.

But the Utopian ambitions of the original had been downsized a bit: an alien intelligence convinced the Americans and the Russians that nuking each other into oblivion would be a bad thing. That’s nice, but I was expecting more than just a futuristic version of 80’s-style detente.

Well, the future is here. Unfortunately, although the technology on movie screens and in our lives is advancing apace, we’re not exactly keeping up.

By Guest Columnist LEE BIOLA, president of Citizens for Progressive Transit and a worker’s compensation lawyer.

Georgia built a world class public transportation system. Georgia destroyed a world class transportation system. Georgia can build a world class transit system again.

It was 1836. Georgia legislators sitting in Augusta voted to fund a taxpayer subsidized rail line out in the middle of nowhere. They wanted the line to run from one obscure dot on the map to another.

It was the best investment the people of Georgia ever made.

One of those dots on the map became Atlanta. The other became Chattanooga.

The tax-subsidized rail line helped transform tiny communities into economic powerhouses. Following the