NO LESS BRUTISH

Dear Spike:

I recognize many parents have despaired over the world their children will be born into. Indeed, at times, this planet must have seemed as dark and foreboding as could be.

I can only imagine what an expecting father must have felt like during the mid-14th Century, a time when a great plague swept over Europe, killing every third person. The dread and hopelessness must have been overwhelming.

In the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s, a period when much of the planet was suffering under economic strife, those expecting children must have been so distraught at the notion that their troubles may afflict their ability to provide basic, life-giving necessities for their future child.

And I cannot so much as pretend to understand the depth of misery and fear a Japanese father-to-be would have had in August, 1945, as two cities in his nation were destroyed in atomic explosions.

I cannot compare my personal consternation to that of parents who have come before me. Their challenges, as parents, were no doubt greater than mine will be.

But the challenges that you will face — that everyone of your generation will face — will be no less vast, no less important, and no less seemingly insurmountable. For the world my generation and past generations has created for you is no less brutish today than it has been at any time in history — and indeed, it may be more so.

Our species has the capacity for such beauty and goodness. We’ve put men in space and defeated many diseases. We’ve learned to see things that happened billions of years ago and predict things that will occur billions of years from now. But we war as if we do not expect to live a moment longer and do harm to our planet as if we do not expect our children to live long, either.

I wish I could be welcoming you to this world with a greater legacy. But it is our great, collective shame that the problems we’ve created will fall upon you and your brothers and sisters to solve.

Our species survived the challenges I mentioned before. I do not have great confidence that we will survive the challenges we now face.

And yet, for you, I want nothing more.

Love,
dad