What I Learned from Back to the Future

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. If you watched television news, engaged in social media, or weren’t living under a rock last Wednesday, you probably know that October 21, 2015 is “Back to the Future Day,” the date to which Marty McFly and Emmett “Doc” Brown travel in the 1989 sequel to the smash 1985 film. Special events across the country were held, including a coordinated showing with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra playing Alan Silvestri’s score, which I attended. I am a HUGE fan of the trilogy – I even held a Back to the Future 2-themed 10th birthday party shortly after the second film’s release. To me, the most fascinating element, and subsequently, the biggest takeaway, from the film series is the significance that a single decision can make on the totality of your life and the lives of those around you. We saw these small changes affect the McFly family and parts of Hill Valley in the first film. In some cases, those decisions can have a profound reach beyond your circle, as we saw in the Alternate 1985 tangent, where Biff Tannen is incredibly rich and powerful and the Hill Valley that Marty and Doc knew was never realized. Regardless of the size of the decision, we CAN affect change. What might have been, had the Sons of Liberty not met in those taverns in the 1760s and 1770s to fight the tyranny in the colonies? With that in mind, how will you harness that power to affect change? You may not have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor that facilitates time travel, but you can alter the course of events with your actions. How could you affect change by brainstorming about market disruptions, instead of watching Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and/or How to Get Away with Murder tonight? Could you create the next Uber? What if you chose to make phone calls for a libertarian candidate for office tonight, rather than watching the Bengals and the Browns on Thursday Night Football? Could you elect a candidate who puts liberty first to office? Suppose you begin a recurring donation to a liberty organization (like the Advocates) this evening, forgoing your morning coffee a couple times a month? Could your support fund the efforts to move society in a more libertarian direction? Whatever you decide, keep in mind that your decision can alter the course of history.