Inheritance
Better Than You Found It
Two unwitting mantras I remember from parents and mentors when they were the age I now am.
“Always try to leave the world better than you found it.”
“I’m glad I won’t have to live long enough to deal with what your generation is facing.”
The two seem profoundly contradictory. Or at least an admission of having failed at their counsel about leaving the world better.
If you’re blessed with long life, as I have been, you begin to consider your legacy. Have you provided a dependable foundation for your heirs to build on? Or have you left a mess for them to clean up? Likely some of each.
I sometimes find myself thinking our country, and the world, are facing the most challenging issues in memory. Then I remember the endless war debacle our Vietnam misadventure gave birth to. The assassination of President Kennedy, who had ignited the dreams of this then 23 year old. Five years later the assassination of Dr. King, quickly followed by Bobby Kennedy being gunned down as he looked to pick up the mantle of his brother and Dr. King.
Our unsettling discovery with the 2016 and 2020 elections that fully a third of our fellow citizens were so angry that they were (are?) willing to burn the house down, was deeply sobering. In both elections I saw the fundamental division among us as being between those who still had a stake in our system and those who had given up on it. Those wiser than I had seen this coming, but even they hadn’t figured the number of those who felt there was no future for them in the system could swing an election.
Then there’s the environment, climate. Is our species, so recently arrived, soon to extinct ourselves? And who could have imagined the return to the savagery of war we’re seeing in Ukraine?
You can see how easily and quickly an old person can despair. Worst of times?
Maybe best of times. All those issues have been with us from our beginning. But never have we been engaged in so fierce and open debate about what to do about them. Seems we’re edging toward a consensus that a tiny cohort controlling well over half the wealth while other scramble for subsistence, is not only wrong, but requires systemic remedy.
I’ve loved being here. And hope for a bit more. I now see beauty everywhere, in people, in nature, in our fellow species who so generously share the planet. While we work to address all the things that vex us – perhaps none more urgent than embracing Brian Stevenson’s wisdom, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice – we can remind ourselves of the miracle of finding ourselves here, against odds to great to fathom.
What a great place to work out our dreams.
Saving ourselves from ourselves is worth whatever effort is required.
