No one really wants the future anymore. It certainly wasn’t always thus. I was raised on the future’s Jetsonian pledges: commercial space travel, personal air cars, picture-frame TVs on walls. And its threats: first, the Red menace and total nuclear annihilation, and then an ecological doom that somehow included California’s falling off the continent.From the ’30s through the ’70s, Americans thought of almost nothing but the future. Now that a new millennium’s almost here, though, we seem to have turned our collective back on issues like: What must we do to improve public transportation? And where will we put all the hundreds of thousands of new Angelenos who are expected to show up over the next 20 years?I wondered about this last week at Playa Vista, where some reporters were shown models and drawings and heard architects extol their plans to develop all over that wondrous landscape. I remembered the original promises of a new community attractive enough to be a destination of its own. Playa was supposed to meld its populations – renters, small-condo buyers and homeowners – into an amenity-studded context something like an ideal Italian hill town with easy freeway access.