Imagine yourself running down a flight of stairs. You are terrified. Your sweating palms squealing occasionally as they grip the passing banister, the sound of it echoing in the well, the heat of the friction stinging your hands. One thing is certain in your mind, you must get to the bottom, and escape the danger.
Suddenly you are stopped in your tracks. There is a person standing and panting on one of the landings. It is someone you know vaguely from the world you are racing away from. They can go no further, they are winded, exhausted and trembling. Your panicked eyes meet.
In a moment they tell you to go on without them, they will be fine, help will arrive. It occurs to you immediately that your personal safety is not compatible with stopping to help this stranded soul. You are fit and young and well exercised. They are slow and old and heavy. You remember now seeing them eating poorly, taking the elevator, smoking a cigarette around the corner. Your conscience is eased. They deserve to be in the predicament they find themselves in, and you deserve to be free of any attachment to their suffering.
But, what do you do?
Before we talk about the future of human civilization, or even just our own nation, we must first answer this question. Is our own future, intertwined with, or isolated from, that of our fellow human beings? In the end, is it all about us? or is it about all of us? What is the value of the other? Not so much when it is comfortable and easy and everything is in excess, but when it is hot and dangerous and necessities are in short supply. I ask this with a deep sense that the future of this planet will be hot and dangerous, and that there will be less of what we believe we need to live.
The era of the Blue Whale and the Black Rhinoceros is on the wane. Eyes will look back from the future to the end of the twentieth century, and see an age of pristine environs rich with diverse life; seas of fish and forests of trees. An age in which the nuclear waste was still sequestered at the Hanford nuclear site, not yet having crept down the Columbia River to Portland Oregon. When ice covered the poles, and great cities flourished at the edge of mighty seas, before the whole world dreamed the American Dream. An age before the next great and terrible ecological disaster reminded us again that the planet suffered for our convenience.
But where will they be looking back from? Will there be trains? Will there be rooftop gardens? Will people smile at one another and laugh with their children? Will the water they drink be clean, and the food they eat wholesome? Will they care for one another in communities, with parks and schools and hospitals? Will there be peace for those who live in that land, and will they care for one another?
The world is complicated and deep, difficult decisions must be made by each of us, everyday. It is the choices we make that will create the future. There are those who tell us that the strong will survive and the wise will rule, that the competent will manage, and the deserving will profit. These same words also convey a distaste and disregard for the weak and the foolish, for the incompetent and the uninspired.
There is much we cannot change about this world we have inherited. The time to lament what has been lost is running out. Already that time would be better spent building a future that regards the other as highly as the self.