An apology to future generations
By now, you certainly know us better than we knew ourselves. You have shaken your heads in amazement. You have, no doubt, wondered at our disregard for you. You know how opulently we lived, how we gorged ourselves daily, how we lived beyond the means of ourselves and of following generations. You know that our desires extended in every direction in time and space, that our capacity to take was monstrous, and our restraint absent. Because we lived in our time, but irreparably harmed the world for those beyond it, I offer this unsatisfactory apology.
I imagine that you are breathing the exhaust fumes of our disregard. If large metropolitan areas are still inhabitable, your citizens must certainly …show more content…
But as it shrinks into the past, its internal tensions and dissonant voices fade, and the telescopic lens of history sees it as a unity. And certainly, this fate will befall our time. The material conditions created by our time will frame us all as guilty, as complicit in the deterioration of a socially and environmentally uninhabitable world. And this is no defense of our dissonant voices—those who tried to warn us. They too enjoyed our opulence.
As a collective mass of consumers, we all created the conditions that you presently endure— whatever they may be.
Although it is probably impossible, I hope you do not look back and characterize us as purely self-serving and wicked, but as trapped in our own enterprise. We were a young culture with no parents. In fact, we stumbled over ourselves to appear perpetually immature and restless. We packaged restlessness and sold it in the form of hair dyes, fake breasts, and sexual stimulants. Like a mass of delirious adolescents, we made ourselves increasingly giddy, posing for ourselves and for one another, posing in every aspect of our lives: our homes, travel, clothes, food, water, and vacations. It was a mammoth parade of teenage delirium that began in …show more content…
We grew outward and consumed everything because we told ourselves that we could, because our parents said we could, and because their parents said we should. Relentless growth was part of our mythology. It was hard-wired into our daily lives and our nightly dreams.
Perhaps it was our conflated notion of private property that eclipsed our potential concern for those outside our fences or beyond our calendar years. Perhaps it was our bloated pride at overcoming nature; we were utterly smitten by the idea that nature could rarely infringe on our desires to move whimsically about the world. Perhaps it was some instinctual drive to outdo others—to surpass the luxuries of past generations. Perhaps it was all of these that blurred our collective vision of the future. Had we been able to look beyond our giant, ballooned notions of self, property, and progress, perhaps we would have been able to foresee something or someone out there in the distance.
Although you cannot possibly imagine it, we were, generally, an agreeable people: we knew how to celebrate, how to have a parade, how to draw a crowd, how to break
By now, you certainly know us better than we knew ourselves. You have shaken your heads in amazement. You have, no doubt, wondered at our disregard for you. You know how opulently we lived, how we gorged ourselves daily, how we lived beyond the means of ourselves and of following generations. You know that our desires extended in every direction in time and space, that our capacity to take was monstrous, and our restraint absent. Because we lived in our time, but irreparably harmed the world for those beyond it, I offer this unsatisfactory apology.
I imagine that you are breathing the exhaust fumes of our disregard. If large metropolitan areas are still inhabitable, your citizens must certainly …show more content…
But as it shrinks into the past, its internal tensions and dissonant voices fade, and the telescopic lens of history sees it as a unity. And certainly, this fate will befall our time. The material conditions created by our time will frame us all as guilty, as complicit in the deterioration of a socially and environmentally uninhabitable world. And this is no defense of our dissonant voices—those who tried to warn us. They too enjoyed our opulence.
As a collective mass of consumers, we all created the conditions that you presently endure— whatever they may be.
Although it is probably impossible, I hope you do not look back and characterize us as purely self-serving and wicked, but as trapped in our own enterprise. We were a young culture with no parents. In fact, we stumbled over ourselves to appear perpetually immature and restless. We packaged restlessness and sold it in the form of hair dyes, fake breasts, and sexual stimulants. Like a mass of delirious adolescents, we made ourselves increasingly giddy, posing for ourselves and for one another, posing in every aspect of our lives: our homes, travel, clothes, food, water, and vacations. It was a mammoth parade of teenage delirium that began in …show more content…
We grew outward and consumed everything because we told ourselves that we could, because our parents said we could, and because their parents said we should. Relentless growth was part of our mythology. It was hard-wired into our daily lives and our nightly dreams.
Perhaps it was our conflated notion of private property that eclipsed our potential concern for those outside our fences or beyond our calendar years. Perhaps it was our bloated pride at overcoming nature; we were utterly smitten by the idea that nature could rarely infringe on our desires to move whimsically about the world. Perhaps it was some instinctual drive to outdo others—to surpass the luxuries of past generations. Perhaps it was all of these that blurred our collective vision of the future. Had we been able to look beyond our giant, ballooned notions of self, property, and progress, perhaps we would have been able to foresee something or someone out there in the distance.
Although you cannot possibly imagine it, we were, generally, an agreeable people: we knew how to celebrate, how to have a parade, how to draw a crowd, how to break