Free-thinking 1st ladies

Isn't it great to have a pair of free-thinkers in the White House again? Thinkers period?

As I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted. And I think I might have been a quite difficult person to live with if it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband once said it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things, so why not let your children learn them? When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.

And that gave me a feeling that perhaps that’s what we all must do—think out for ourselves what we could believe and how we could live by it. And so I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.

I don’t know whether I believe in a future life....

A future life elsewhere, post mortem, and as herself, I think Mrs. Roosevelt meant. (I like what Andrew Carnegie said about this too, btw: it's not our place to worry about a future life, but to "pitch this one as high as we can.")

But she did believe in our collective future. That's a form of faith, too. I prefer to call it hope.

Half-full

“A lot of science-fiction is nihilistic and dark and dreadful about the future, and ‘Star Trek’ is the opposite,” Mr. Nimoy said. “We need that kind of hope, we need that kind of confidence in the future. I think that’s what ‘Star Trek’ offers. I have to believe that — I’m the glass-half-full kind of guy.”

"Clock of the Long Now"

I noted in a recent post the unfortunate trend among youngsters to say they expect a bleak future (at best) for humans on this planet.

The Long Now Foundation's Millennium Clock project is designed to rescue us all from the blinders of short-term thinking, and to encourage its hopeful opposite. Novelist Michael Chabon:

When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations.But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children.

And, having them, how you can indulge the attitude of despair. Let's wind that clock.

Hope

I have a bumper sticker on my car: "Evolve - every day is Earth Day." It's a message of hope. A better, cleaner, safer world inhabited by evolved, evolving humans who care deeply about the conditions of life for themselves and their progeny is imaginable. But we must not be content merely to dream it. The inestimable Wendell Berry says if we care about creating a livable future we must "give all to the present."

And so, it's very sad to learn that many young people say they're presently hopeless. That's what Earth Day can and must address: the need to give children authentic grounds for hope. "Yes we can" etc. Just as Al Gore says political will is a renewable resource, so is a spirit of hopefulness. Expect the worst, hope for the best, Berry says:

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

And consider the fact that our own hopeful disposition, even in the teeth of disappointment and setback, may be one of the conditions of ultimate success.