Last night, as I turned off the evening news, a peculiar thought popped into my head. Suddenly, I was overcome with an idea of my future children. Specifically, I imagined the moment 10 or 15 or 20 years into the future when my child comes home, opens their history textbook to the 2010s and asks me: "What happened? What did you do?"
I wouldn't know how to answer. How will any of us explain to our kids, our nieces and nephews, or our grandchildren, just how we let the world go? If the social, political and environmental trends continue as they have been, we will be living in a world vastly different than the one we currently live in. If nothing is done, if immediate action isn't taken, the world will look more like a dystopian young adult novel than the world once imagined and portrayed in music, television shows, movies and art of the 1960s and '70s. With each news headline, it seems as if we are falling more deeply into a world curated by Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Suzanne Collins or Aldous Huxley.
How will I explain to my child that, in a world of technological advancements unlike humankind ever experienced before, we started wars over an energy source that lead to the pollution of our air, our oceans and our land?
What will I tell my child when he or she stares longingly at a picture of an orangutan, a pangolin, a vaquita porpoise or a black rhino on the pages of an old textbook or on a webpage dedicated to endangered and extinct animals and asks me: "How come they aren't here anymore?" or "Why can we only see them at the zoo?"
Propose a sound way to explain how we allowed corporations and businesses, things as sentient as your house, to gain the rights of people. Try to imagine a way to explain to a child in the future how in the land of the free, our elections were sold to the highest bidder. Though they may learn about our revolution and the good intentions of the founding fathers, it is likely that our country will look nothing like what was envisioned.
Is there a way to explain to a child that loves and trusts you to keep them safe and healthy that the reason that after people declared "Never again!" in the wake of the Columbine school shooting, 141 children, young adults, staff or faculty have been killed in school shootings in the 17 years since? What about the mass shootings at churches, night clubs, military bases and movie theaters? Not even police officers are safe, as 10 have been shot and four killed by two snipers in Dallas as I write this article. How will we ever be able to assure them to feel safe when more than half of congress represents only 10 percent of the population who are against more stringent background checks for guns and assault weaponry because they sit in the pocket of the National Rifle Association?
How will we explain Donald Trump? How will explain that a man who spews blatantly racist hate speech and misogynistic rhetoric was a contender for the presidency? A man who took days to disavow an endorsement by a former KKK grand wizard, a man who praises dictators like Kim Jong Un, Vladmir Putin and Saddam Hussein, has come dangerously close to becoming the most powerful man in the world. How will we explain how Hillary Clinton, a woman who lied just as blatantly and who acted carelessly with national security, was elected as his opponent?
If there is a correct way to explain the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, to explain the deaths of unarmed, nonviolent black men and women at the hands of the men and women who vowed to protect and serve the community, I am an unaware of it. What will I say when my child or my niece or nephew or my grandchild points out that more than 50 years had gone by since the ratification of the Civil Rights Act and racism was still prevalent privately and institutionally?
I will have to explain to my children how the Republican party attempted ceaselessly to control a woman's right to choose. I will have to tell them how so many congressmen and women (but, mostly men) attempted to bar certain people from marriage, and to prevent certain people from using public restrooms simply because of their sexual and gender identities. They will have to learn that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were unalienable rights afforded to a select few.
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children," is attributed as a Native American proverb. If we as a people, as citizens of both the United States and the global community, continue to stand idly by while we wreak havoc upon the planet, we will have some explaining to do. There will come a day when we will have to explain to our children that by doing nothing, by staying silent in the face of injustice, war, oppression, and environmental degradation, we did not borrow the earth from them. We stole it.
