We wondered about how we might be able to eliminate plastics from our day to day routines, and recycled literally everything. We were amazing, you should have seen us. Now and again though, we wondered if these were the right questions.

Sent on by
Ben Carpenter
Send Your Own Message

To my brother’s children,

Your father and I did the best we could with what we had. I was living in Kansas City at the time, and he was in DC. He made videos, I facilitated online arguments between strangers.

Mitigation became a word we used a lot, because that’s all that can be done with the inevitabilities handed to a person. Mitigation is also all that the moral paralysis of a representative democracy allows, and I’m not just pointing fingers at the denialists.

We mitigated our personal carbon footprints by foregoing meat and riding bicycles to work. We wondered about how we might be able to eliminate plastics from our day to day routines, and recycled literally everything.

We were amazing, you should have seen us.

Now and again though, we wondered if these were the right questions to be asking. To ride a bike for political reasons, however fun and correct, still seemed like a privileged position compared to those we saw at daybreak, pedaling down the sidewalks on cheap bikes, ball caps pulled low over puffy eyes; or even compared to the beat-to-hell Saturns from the far eastern neighborhoods. Farmers markets, CFL light bulbs and reusable shopping bags became symbols dripping with class and racial tension. But it was hard to have those conversations; conversations about webs we’re all caught in as dense and old as empire. Maybe it is true we have to mitigate our political goals, the Dems have to win in 2018 midterms after all. So we mitigate our carbon footprints, and your father plans to install solar panels on Mom and John’s home in Hunt, where we’ll live someday. Way out there, we can remove ourselves from complicity with the impending destruction of the planet as best we can.  Maybe you’re reading this on their porch. How’s the garden?

I still feel that if our hands are clean, our feet are still wet. The work is not done, and what is done will never be sufficient. This is a condition of honest self reflection. There is no end to the webs you, my brother’s children, are tangled in. Power never goes away, it just changes. Figure out our blind spots and start there.

Enjoy the sunsets,

Uncle Ben

Share on:
 
Send Your Own Message

More Messages to the Future

 

Dear future me,

I’m doing this work because I see it as the best way to save and improve as many lives as possible. I’m doing it so you, 2050 Ryan, can look at yourself in the mirror. And so you can tell your kids and grandkids someday that you did everything you could.

 

Querido amanhã,

Eu quero esse mundo melhor para você, onde o povo tem voz, seja lá quem você seja, eu vou fazer se tudo para proporcionar um mundo melhor para você.

 

Dear Tomorrow,

I promise to work with my family and neighbors to reduce carbon output.

 

Dear Tomorrow,

I will work to restore the wetlands.

 

Dear Future Generations,

I promise to make as many changes to my life as possible to make yours as great as mine.

 

To my great-great grandchildren,

I don’t know your name
or even if you’re alive,
but I’m doing all I can
to make sure you survive.

I’m your great- great grandmother
who lived a century ago
in a world far different
from the one you must know.

 

Dear Eleanor,

You are so small. So innocent. So beautiful. For you and for everyone else, I will try harder.

 

Dear Tara,

I am sitting in a classroom thinking about you. Which is rare for me. I hope that our family has taken some initiative to do something about changing society instead of building robots and large houses.

 

Dear Students,

My act of love will be to use all the power I have, during the rest of my life, to stop climate change.

 

My dear daughters,

I will use my voice to help bring awareness about climate change.

 

Dear Tomorrow,

I promise I will use less fossil fuels.

 

Dear Tomorrow,

The road I learned to ride my bike on, the field where I kicked my first soccer ball, and the park I ate my first ice cream cone at, could all be gone.

View All Messages

Send Your Own Message