My son was born last Saturday at 1:45 p.m. He's perfectly healthy. He has all the right parts in all the right places. He's sleeping in my lap under my keyboard right now. Since about five minutes after he was born, I've been thinking I owe him an apology. You see, he has come into a world that is very difficult to explain to a child. Some of you may share this feeling.
It's not just that I can't explain to him the purpose of life, the problem of good and evil, or why I just love him so much already. It's that I can't explain to him what his future holds because his world is not going in the right direction at the moment, and the most recent moment where we thought we may have corrected that is quickly turning out to be a total illusion.
Some generations build great monuments. Some walk in their ruins, going about their business hardly taking notice of the weeds overgrowing them. Sometimes in history, these generations are next to each other. I think of the generation of the Tannaim in Ancient Judaea. One day, their temple stood. One day, it was destroyed. Or the generation who lived among the hustle and bustle of the Roman empire, and a generation that came shortly after them that lived in mostly empty cities.
My childhood was filled with the great monuments of the American civilization. There were space shuttles and the emergence of computers. There was the "end of history" when the Soviet Union collapse and the shadow of nuclear destruction seemed to lift. We were born hearing the stories of our parents remembering where they were when men landed on the moon and our grandparents who destroyed the Nazi Reich and built the great infrastructure of our country that is not crumbling.
So, here it is.
I apologize that the planet is heating up because almost no one cares. It will change the face of the Earth and probably kill tens or even hundreds of millions of people in your lifetime. And it won't be because we faced a life-and-death choice; it will be because we were lazy, apathetic, and in denial.
I am sorry that most of the wild places I enjoyed when I was a little one have been polluted or "developed" and that you won't get a chance to enjoy them.
I am sorry that a small percentage of the world treats most of the rest of the world so bad. We used to just grab their land. Now we grab their food, dump in their water, extract their mineral resources, enslave their people to do it, eliminate their cultures, and in exchange they get Twinkies and a bunch of food made out of High Fructose Corn Syrup. I have no explanation for this.
I'm sorry that you won't be able to attend the kind of schools I attended. You see, some people with a lot of money decided they need a lot more money to pay for the aforesaid mineral extraction and Twinkie exportation. So they don't want to pay for teachers, schools, or anything like that. They just want to keep the money, even though they made that money because of the stuff your great-grandparents did sacrificing for each other. It's not fair.
I apologize that people my age didn't do something like a general strike or something when it became clear that George Bush was going to steal the presidency. We were outraged and stuff, but like a lot of our outrage, it really hasn't done shit. After Bush, all of this became almost too much to know where to start fixing it. At least, the current president can't seem to figure that out. I think making sure you will probably have health care your whole life will help.
I'm sorry that they want you to eat cat food when you retire.
I'm sorry that tens of millions of people stopped caring about you once you were born. You were never any danger to your mother, and you were perfectly healthy. Your mother and I always were going to have you even though our lives have been turned upside down a dozen times in the last year. This is a complicated subject, but it basically means right now that you don't count anymore to these folks.
I am sorry that your religion—if you choose to keep it—will probably make you a target at times. I hope you gain more from it than you lose. Being Jewish isn't easy, but it's worth it, I think. I just hope that what was going on when you were born won't snowball into a total deprivation of your right to choose to continue being Jewish. A lot of stupid people think that you can oppress one minority religion without eventually coming around to the others (especially us Jews). It doesn't work that way. That's why those smart guys in the wigs on the money made it so that that shouldn't be a problem. But a lot of people paler and more doughy than you who really like this shrew from Alaska think it would be fun to change that.
I'm sorry that our government is turning into one giant secret government that will probably swallow the regular civil service before long. It's just like how the Roman government was more or less replaced by warlords. That worked out great. But, again, due to the previous need to export Twinkies® and not pay for schools, almost no one knows this.
If you're straight, I'll love you anyway. (= But no matter whom you love, I'm sorry that it won't be liked by many people. Whatever way you swing the bat, just don't become someone who wants to interfere with whom people love. Bad. Anyway, if you're not straight, I apologize that you won't be treated very well. We're working on making some important things for you equal... but there's a lot of work to do.
You're a very lucky boy in a lot of ways. Never forget the blessings we have in this house, but don't be proud of them. Work to spread them to others, (including, hopefully, your own kids—no pressure).
Oh, and now that you're four days old—it's time to talk about college. You want to be a doctor, right?