The Mystery of the Future... and a Happy New Year.

As the year creeps towards its end, I sit watching snow blowing off the mountains and filling my backyard, where a large convocation of birds is enjoying the pine grove hung with feeders. And I find myself wondering why we always seem to imagine that a new year will bring better things, that our current woes will dissipate, our lives and the world we inhabit are bound to change for the better, that the New Year will somehow turn out to be, against all evidence of the year past, Happy. I've just visited one of the websites that I regard as essential , TomDispatch, to read Tom Engelhardt's annual year's end messsage, which is, as usual, written by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is a writer of enormous scope and compassion, someone who is almost always able to convince me that life is, after all, worth living, even in its darkest hours. Yes, in fact, a recent book of hers is entitled Hope in the Dark, and it's really what she's best at. This piece is a little more whimsical than usual, because she is here taking a very long view. It's written as though from the year 2026, a sort of review not just of one past year, but of the first twenty-five years of this century. Find it here, and read it soon: The Age of Mammals Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century. She offers this interesting factoid, that

In 1996, the Pentagon prepared imaginary scenarios describing five potential futures by 2025. Most of them were based on the belief that a better world was one dominated by American military power -- which is to say, by the threat of state violence

. But, in her hopeful way, goes on to say

That they came up with five possible futures demonstrated, at least, how wide-open the next two decades seemed, even to a Tyrannosaurus-Rex bureaucracy that thought it was soon to own the planet.

The report she sends us from the not-so-distant future is not one, I'm sure, that the Pentagon would approve of, but what it shows is that it is still possible for those of us in the very real present to make some much better choices. That future in fact still lies before us and the children we are now bringing into this world (Solnit's article is dedicated to a child in her family, Solomon Solnit, born this past October.). It is still possible that some of what appear in this article to be fantasies can in the next twenty years become reality. The end of this report from the future is replete with hope:

The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for. It issomething you invent daily through your actions. As Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in
Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: "One does not stand still
looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being." We
make it up as we go, and we make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more
elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can you do?

Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to
which we all belong.

The mystery of the future. Perhaps it will be happy, perhaps not.But clearly that's entirely up to all of us, what we invent through our actions in this coming year, for a start, and how we follow through on them in however many years remain to each of us. Let us look for a path together, a path that can lead to something resenbling the 2026 Rebecca Solnit imagines As she says, we have most of the tools for such a future available to us now - if we will only recognize them, pick them up, and use them.

Tags: engelhardt, future, hope, new year, solnit,

| +Save/Share | |