Hope for the Future

It's easy to be optimistic about the future when sitting poolside on a summer's day in a land of peace and plenty.  It is easy then, or at least easier.  But maybe, just maybe, easy isn't always wrong.  Or Pollyanna.  Or simplistic.  Or naive. 

So I offer the wisdom and hope gathered pool side on a summer's day. . .

The changes wrought by technology (and they are many) combined with a new generation bring about the possibility of the elimination of the nation state as we know it and the birth of something entirely new, not before possible -- not globalization -- at least as we now use the term -- but something I don't even know how to name -- a sort of shifting tribalism.

I observe that folks my children's age move easily (at least more easily than I have and do) from group to group -- they're still tribal, these children of mine, but their tribes are not fixed constants -- rather, their tribes are fluid things that they leave and come back to and their contemporaries with them -- so that each time of return realizes a different tribe -- and that works for them.

Things are held more loosely.

Ideas are exchanged more freely.

Possibilities are envisioned differently.

Time is not wasted on what never was nor cannot be.

Authorities are shared based on competencies and vision.

Nothing is taken for granted.

If the world is to be changed, they believe that it is up to them to do it -- and they do it -- one person, one group, one tribe, at a time.

Children matter -- other people's children, as well as their own.

Families are made as well as born.

Needs are met simply because there are needs to be met.

Life continues.

I am hopeful for the future when I behold these people. 

I hope I live long enough to see them come into the fulness of their marvelous potential, for every generation has its place, its time and this, in all its nascent wonder, is theirs.

Kindergarten Day 1: A Sort of Prayer

We’re . . . Off to see the Wizard . . .
Click your heels three times . . .
There’s no place like home . . .
There’s no place like home . . .
There’s no place like home . . .

I imagine my grandson
off for his own trip to the Wizard --
Kindergarten
Day One

So much freight wrapped up
in such a very small package

And so I wonder and worry . . .
Did his shoes fit?
Did they pinch?
Did he take a lunch box?
Did he lose it?
Were there mud puddles
to splash his way home through?
Did he make friends?
Did the teacher like him?
Is there a bus in his future
with all the adventures
and traumas in the microcosm
that is ‘school’?

Did he want to click his
heels three times to return
magically to the place called
home?

Was he scared?
Did he know we were all
watching?  Waiting?  Wondering?

Does he sense how big a deal
this is?  How much we’re all
counting on him for the future
he holds in his paste-covered
nose-picking, paint-under-his-
fingernails hands?

Can he intuit that maybe he
met his wife today?  That he
is soaring into the world
without wings?

Ruby shoes or no, little one,
home is always there just
behind you . . . waiting,
watching, hoping, praying,
loving, laughing, singing,
soaring with you --
high above the clouds
where no wild things are.

Be well.
Be safe.
Fly.

Voting and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Okay, I’ll admit it.  Voting in the primary of the opposite party (a possibility denied me in my home state of West Virginia but available in Virginia where I now live) has a certain appeal.  The chance to vote for the candidate least likely to defeat my candidate in the general election invites a feeling of Machiavellian anticipation and glee.

And even though ethics and love of God should stop me even thinking such things, the real choke hold that stays my hand (if not my conscience) is the question, “what if he wins?”  What if the one I like the least as a political leader would actually be victorious because of our collective efforts to manipulate elections in such a way?

The law of unintended consequences is, in my view, one of the most under-recognized truths when it comes to dealing with the affairs of state.

We cannot know everything now, let alone anticipate everything in the then of our futures.

A corollary to the calculus which disregards the problems of the present in favor of the possibility of a favorable outcome in the future is the notion of the greatest good for the greatest number.

As a Christian, that idea should have been put to final rest with the words of Caiphas in John 11.50, speaking of Jesus, “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”  (NIV)

While Christians have taken that claim and made it uniquely their own, our interpretation is not at all what Caiphas had in mind.  Rather, Caiphas believed that killing Jesus would somehow protect his people from oppression by the Romans.  It did not.  And when it comes to the dynamics of oppression, it never does.

In the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt, remarking on the duty to protect land and animals from exploitation and annihilation, brings the two ideas together:

Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the 'the game belongs to the people.' So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The 'greatest good for the greatest number' applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.  – A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, 1916

“The 'greatest good for the greatest number' applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction.”

Thus, whether we are casting our votes in a single election or making decisions as ‘we the people’, it would be well to consider the generations and not merely our own singular perceived self-interest of the moment.

And make no mistake, the generations will learn not only from the outcomes of our actions, but also from how we attained those outcomes.  If we lie in the ballot box, we teach our children that desirable outcomes make it permissible, even desirable, to lie.

Our integrity is not simply something we owe to ourselves: we owe it to all those within the womb of time.

And lest we disregard this duty and get too proud about our ability to manipulate events to our liking, recall the law of unintended consequences.  Things seldom happen the way we foresee; our vision is simply too limited.  So even if Merton and King should prove wrong (I don’t think so, but I can’t know everything) about the coherence of means and outcomes, isn’t it simply the better course to act with integrity in each moment?

Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

Whether you understand the title tells alot about your age, as it comes from a 1960's sci fi show featuring a campy tin-can robot who alerts the boy Will Robinson to impending disaster by arm-waving (well, dryer vent hose waving, actually) and the verbal alert.  Of course, if you're a hacker, you'll also know what it means.

Yesterday the inevitable happened.  With information already in hand, I have delayed and delayed and delayed getting a new computer, even as my old lap top has gotten slower and slower and s. . .l. . . o. . . w. . . e. . . r. . .

The old gal made my decision for me.  With much alarm-bell beeping (look up "motherboard alarm codes" online if you want to know what those ominous beeps actually mean), my laptop was practically waving its arms at me -- STOP RIGHT NOW!


Of course I didn't listen.  I just kept rebooting, hoping against hope that something magical would happen within the mysterious (to me) innards of my lifeline to the outside world.  Alas, it was not to be so.
There won't be a funeral as such, but it's safe to say that the old Dell has gone the way of such creations, far too soon to suit me, but well past her MLS (median life span).  From the way those more conversant in the ways of computers tell it, I'm guessing she was about 60 in computer years (having bought her in 2005).  I should be grateful she lasted so long.  And I am, sort of.


I appreciate the incredible technological advances, the leaps forward.  But I resent, more than a little, planned obsolescence.


But even as I say that, I have to smile.  After all, aren’t we human beings planned for obsolescence from the very beginning?  Everything and everyone has a shelf life.  Maybe what I don’t like is that my own is winding down.


One of the most grace-filled things I have ever heard came from a professor at Johns-Hopkins on NPR a while back (sorry can’t remember his name and am too lazy to search out the link).  Speaking about the burden of perpetual memory, in light of things like FB pages and e-mail maintenance accounts for the dead, he reminded his listeners, me among them, that when we die, it’s out duty to exit gracefully from the stage and allow the living their turn, rather than to seek some false version of immortality by seeking to require future generations to maintain our web presence into perpetuity.


I like very much the idea of exiting from the stage gracefully.  It’s freeing, really, to allow myself to allow others to simply let me, all of me, go. 


Dylan Thomas was wrong, I think.  It is not rage that we should carry into our dark nights.  It’s gratitude.  Gratitude for the time.  Gratitude even that the time has passed.


And thus do I say a grateful good-bye to my faithful computer, even as I know that some day, those near and dear will say such farewells to me.