Those of us described as the ‘60’s generation grew up, for the most part, as idealists. At least, that’s when we were growing up. We were peace and love and what could be more idealistic than that.
But things have changed. We’ve lived. Life comes at you in ways that can make idealism a very difficult outlook to maintain. It is my experience that when I get into a conversations where I express an idealistic vision of what the world could be like, I am routinely greeted by something like, “Oh, that could never happen.” But actually, almost everything we are now experiencing, everything we now take for granted, was at one time something “that could never happen.”
My father-in-law is 100 years old (and one month – in baby calculating age, then, he’s 1,201 months old). Yes, that’s right, the man has been around for a century. And he’s a wonderful man. A world full of people like my father-in-law would be a world that even an idealist might not be able to envision. However, I mention my father-in-law because when he entered the world, if the world we live in today had been described to those around him, they had would have said, “that could never happen.”
So what was happening in 1922, the year that my father-in-law was born?
For one thing, the Lincoln Memorial opened. Imagine Washington without the Lincoln Memorial. That would be a different world. And the opening of the Lincoln Memorial illustrates my point in a much more important way. During the dedication ceremony of this symbol of America’s most dramatic attempt to heal racial divisions, the black guests had to sit apart from the white ones. Thank goodness, that is no longer the world we live in. While we are far from homogenized, but at least we have overcome those seating arrangements.
Also, in 1922, the first woman served in the U.S. Senate. To say she served, though, is a stretch. Her service lasted 24 hours until a successor was elected.
A guy named, Ralph Samuelson was the first person ever to water ski.
The Readers Digest was first published.
Alexander Graham Bell was still alive.
President Harding had the first radio installed in the White House.
Three generations from today will still be the 21st century. Said another way, and to show how soon we will reach what is to us now an unfathomable world, anyone born now who reaches my father-in-law’s age will be alive, of course, in 2123. Is there anyone who expects that world to be anything like this one? Can anything that today we are unable to even contemplate be said to “never happen” in 2123?
We can’t know whether the future will be much worse than the present or much better than the present. What is certain is that the future will be much different from the present. Why shouldn’t everyone look at life with an attitude that makes it easier for the future to be better? Doesn’t that require a view that there is very little in the future that can be said will “never happen?”
I choose to think that the future can be better. This is only possible if we accept the idea that we should not extrapolate today’s world into tomorrow. This is only possible if those who say that idealistic visions can “never happen” can change their minds. Those who say that idealistic futures are impossible, make them impossible. We all have the power to create a future that we want. Some not as much as others, but everyone to some extent. It is impossible to know what that future will be, but what is possible to know is that without our efforts to create a world as we want it, there is infinitely less chance that it will happen.
We were right 