THERE IS NO WORD FOR FEELING NOSTALGIC about the future, but that’s what a parent’s tears often are: a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope. — Comedian Michael Ian Black
My grand-niece, Addy, just celebrated her first birthday at a nice gathering at the City Park this last Sunday.
Addy will be graduating from college in June of 2037, and I would like to address the rest of this diary to her, to read on that day. I will print out a hard copy of this diary and give it to Addy's Mom for safekeeping.
This is Addy, kissing the nose of a stuffed dog she got for her birthday.
Hello Addy — this is your grand-uncle Matt speaking from the mists of history, in March of 2015. Happy birthday! When you read this, you will be taking your first tentative steps into adulthood. You will be judging the generations that, as I write this, are doing our very best to build a world for you that is better than the one we live in now.
How did we do? What kind of world have we given you?
Have we given you peace? As I write this, the country of your birth has been continuously at war since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. I’m sure you've read all about that in your history classes. I hope that we have built a world for you that is at peace as you read this. I hope you are the first generation of Americans that has no direct experience with what being in combat is like. I hope there are no men in uniforms coming to the doors of your neighborhood and breaking mothers’ hearts, and I hope that no parents in your neighborhood are burying children taken from them on distant battlefields. This country has seen too much of war. As a singer named Marvin Gaye sang in my youth, about another war:
Mother, Mother,
There’s too many of you cryin’,
Brother, brother, brother,
There’s far too many of you dyin’…
*
According to climate scientists, the world of the 2030s will be a much warmer place than today, and far warmer than it was in my own youth. Did you know that the Arctic Ocean used to have ice all through the summer?
I hope we have given you a world that is taking world-wide, decisive action to reverse global warming.
You will have read about the “controversy” that global warming deniers tried to create in an attempt to discredit science about which there is broad consensus among climatologists.
How does that denial look from your vantage point in 2037? I want you to remember which political party provided a comfortable home to those deniers.
*
The world in which I am writing this has made tremendous progress in race relations. You may find this hard to believe, but I was born into a world where African Americans could not be assured of being allowed to vote. We now are six and a half years into the presidency of the first African-American to be elected to that office. Barack Obama will be well into elder statesman age when you read this. I hope he is remembered as someone who began a new and better path for America during his presidency, and for continuing that work after he left office.
Addy, since I started writing diaries on this site almost 10 years ago, I’ve been expressing fears about the future viability of American society, given the yawning economic divide between “The Rich and The Rest.” The rich are now taking as large a slice of national income as they were during the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Every other time in history when an oligarchy has been this disconnected from the lives and fates of everyone else, the result has been either reform and renewal, or else collapse, revolution and worse. I hope we somehow found the courage and wisdom to restrain the power of an increasingly unaccountable plutocracy, and found a way to preserve and strengthen the bonds that hold our society together.
Finally, Addy, I hope you think about the world you will be handing to your descendants, and will do your best to hand them a world that is better than the one you found.
With much love - and hope -
Uncle Matt