We Got Us Here. We Will Get Us Somewhere Else.

You know, I am often gobsmacked by the facts and the enormity of the many challenges we face. As are my students. Many of them look at the future like something they cannot be bothered to order because they no longer think it will be delivered, as though the future is just another hyped product marketed by an unreliable faraway supplier. But I tell them they need to order the future they want because a future will be delivered whether they order it or not. I remind them that it was billions of individual acts that got us here, just as it will be billions of individual acts that get us where we are going. I tell them that what people do in this regard matters, like it has always mattered. I point to the choices we have, and talk about the decisions we have to make, and impress upon them that the power to act is as much theirs as it is anyone’s. Because whether we take responsibility for the furure or not, whether we admit we participate in its ordering or not, we are responsible for what it will be in our own ways nonetheless. This, to me, is at least as obvious as the challenges we face. So, I say, Denial, your days are numbered.