That's right, we are our future. OK, where the heck did that come from? It's a response to the popular platitude that our children are our future. As a platitude, there's nothing wrong with it, or untrue about it. After all, the people who are children now will some day grow up and assume important positions in our society.
But every time I hear it, I'm reminded of a very deep concern I have about what we might be saying about ourselves and our world. It always seems like we're putting the weight of the world on their shoulders. All of the problems that we inherited from past generations, and all of the new problems that we're creating, get passed along to them, because they are our future.
Meanwhile, what are we doing?
Not nothing, to be sure, but nothing very different from what the people who came before us did. The technology may be shiny and new, but the things we use it for are essentially the same: making money, accumulating things, paying bills, fueling the consumer economy, and in general using up natural resources at an unsustainable pace. Now you may call me crazy, but I suspect that is going to have a pretty significant impact on what the world looks like when our kids get old enough to take on some responsibility for dealing with it.
In other words, we the grown-ups of the world are already creating our future. And if we keep at it the way we presently are, deferring responsibility to somebody else (the government, the "job creators", the philanthropists...our children), I don't think we're going to like the future we end up with. It'll look a lot like today, only all of the problems we've been waiting for somebody else to solve will have another twenty years of band-aid fixes and neglect piled on top of it.
That's the bad news.
The good news is, since we're responsible for our future, we can create something else. Something that we'll like, that our children will thank us for, that our parents and grandparents will weep for joy to see.
Our move, my brethren. What's it gonna be?
