As I, and I suspect the rest of you, survey the pages of today’s reporting, we might think that our collective hair is on fire.
We need to step back and try to separate the many surfaces of the present from the deeper flow, the raveling complexes of the future.
I think most of us, young and old, aspire to be positive agents of change. Most of us are not committed to a “fortify the castle gates” approach to the future. But it is easy to get entangled in the sheer number of cruel, stupid, thoughtless, misdirected acts and agencies of the present. And play defense.
If I were on a boat in such a violent sea, I wouldn’t blame myself if I lost track of the destination, as I bailed.
Yet the vessel sails on.
Several perceptive writers, rightly I think, ask us to imagine utopian rather the dystopian futures. The development of new sources of energy, potentially boundless and cheap, will impact our ways of life across all pathways of society, upending, as changes in energy abundance has in the past, all our economic, political, and personal lives, structures and aspirations.
To continue the overall metaphor (indulge me), let’s help make the ship seaworthy, train the next generation of sailors to hoist the sails, read the charts, hold steady the wheel.
For those, less inclined to second-rate poetic rhetoric (I keep trying), translation is: build, support and cherish an educational system that respects our children and believes in their future. The future they will make.
And write a comment or answer someone’s comment. My hope is that we can “jar” a person’s thinking just a little, and have them join the “movement,’ i.e. the unsettled future.