Letter to a person alive in 2054

This time I am not entirely writing for the people who read my blog today, although I do care for them a great deal and they may well benefit from reading this letter. Today, because of what has happened, because of the turn our country has taken, I feel the need to write for some poor soul who may stumble across my words in thirty years.

Dear person alive in the year 2054:

This post is a time capsule, a letter for you across time. If you are there, if you are reading this someday in the distant future, I am unbelievably honored to have been found, even if you are only one solitary wanderer in the archives. And I am so very sorry for what we have no doubt left to you.

I can’t predict exactly what will happen over the next thirty years, of course. But it is a very safe bet at this point to say that little coordinated action to mitigate climate change will occur between 2024 and 2028 at the very least, given the takeover of the US government explicitly by fossil fuel interests.

We have already seen record heat year after year for the past decade. In thirty years, it will no doubt be much more severe. I can’t guess what all the fallout will be. Likely you experience wildfire and drought beyond anything we can imagine, even though our fires and droughts seem unbearable and out-of-control in 2024. The United States was hit by two devastating hurricanes in the past month, much more intense than in previous years due to the heating of the oceans. And those who stole away our future made up stories about the chaotic and self-contradictory Democratic Party somehow controlling the weather, so that they can pretend fossil-fuel-caused climate change isn’t the immense threat we face.

By your time, of course, the human-caused climate disaster is undeniable but too advanced to do much about. This election has stolen the last real chance for actions that might have mitigated the terrifying calamities of your time. That’s partly why I am writing to say how sorry I am and how sorry I know so many others are, crying for you, children growing up today, children yet to be born, all who live in our future.

We fought for you. We went door-to-door helping people vote. We wrote and we demonstrated and we gave our time and our resources to try to protect your lives, because you are our future. And we know it wasn’t enough. Knowing what you know, I’m sure it is hard to understand why we didn’t all go out in the middle of the street and lie down to block traffic to stop the damage before it was too late. The truth is that some of us did just that. I did a few years back with Extinction Rebellion. People went to jail for it. People gave up their careers. But not enough people. Not enough.

Dragonfly on a string of barbed wire - creative commons image by andy blackledge

We were not strong enough. Every day for the past two months I received 5 or 6 propaganda texts on my phone from the Trump campaign. They all came from separate numbers, so when I blocked and reported each one as spam, they still came. My phone company blocks many important texts, but never those propaganda texts. The drumbeat of advertising was inescapable in any built-up area or near any screen. The vast sums of money that poured in to claim our country for corporations and billionaires were overpowering.

Over the past century, many people have struggled for social change, for women to be able to vote, for schools and restaurants and buses to be open to people of all colors, for the freedom to choose a religion other than that of the majority, for the rights of children with disabilities to be educated, for women to be able to have jobs and access their own money and assets, for people to marry whomever they chose, for medical care for gender-misalignment or sudden miscarriages or anything else, for so many things that you may never have heard people had because we don’t know if you will still have any of these rights and freedoms that we fought for or the possibility of learning about our history.

Throughout all of that social change we learned many skills—how to organize, how to stand in solidarity with one another, how to work within the system and talk to elected representatives, how to advocate for ourselves and others through the various agencies and institutions of our society, how to speak and write and think freely. But I am sorry to say, we did not learn how to deal with massive waves of corporate and billionaire power stacked against us. Today there is such a vast tsunami of money for disinformation and spam and mystification, that all of the tools we used before have been befuddled and turned against us.

Many of the poor and vulnerable of this country have believed these waves of well-funded lies and glamoured hate speech. You are certainly not to blame for being angry about that, angry at those who believed the lies and maybe especially at those of us who knew better, who were not taken in and yet failed to do anything to stop it. I don’t say you are wrong. Your anger and your anguish is clear to me.

And yet, it is worth knowing why and how such a thing happened, not because it is an excuse, but because by remembering what happened some 80 to 90 years ago in Germany, we have been warned against this kind of thing and we did fend it off for a good many years as a result. I hope you may learn from us, from this age when money has obstructed the progress of social justice organizing which served us well for a century. I hope that you will be wiser for knowing what is happening in our time. Gods, I hope your history books have not been cleansed of all the unpleasant history that you need in order to chart a better path forward.

I find myself rambling, lost in this moment of grief. What can I tell you who are alive several decades in the future that will help or comfort? I can say that we loved you, that we tried to protect and defend you. But I know we have failed and that your time will be hard beyond our imagining, even if we manage to turn all of this around in another four or ten or twenty years. The oppressive heat and storms of climate change are here to stay. And all of the things that you should have had, the wonderful dreams of a peaceful, prosperous and equitable future that we wanted for you will at the very least be on hold for a long time while we fight for the most basic level of human and civil rights, for the very foundations of democracy.

But I know that it would matter to me to know that those who came before thought of my generation with love and care. So, know this. We fought and we will continue to fight for you. Our voices are likely to be quieter now. Much of our struggle may not be easily seen because it may be very hard to publish or speak out publicly in the next several years. Our schools may well be locked against true information and free expression. Non-profit organizations may be muzzled for any disagreement with state and corporate power. Those who dare to demonstrate in the streets are likely to face swift brutality. But we will fight for you, whether out loud or quietly and without fanfare. I will and I know many others who will.

I cannot explain why so many have turned away from you, our children, even from their own children. They’ve turned away from neighbors and friends and family members too. And so many of them have turned to hate and selfishness and the momentary gratification of being told that they can cuss, bully and lie with impunity. But I do know that it has happened before. We thought we were better than that, that our nation—even our entire species—had progressed beyond a time when such a thing could happen again.

But thirty years ago when I was a young American exchange student in Germany, an old man sat me down at a kitchen table, looked into my face and spoke these words to me: “We were told we were the greatest and the best of humanity. We could not imagine anything like that could happen in our country. And it did. I know right now your country is doing well. You are told you are the best country and the greatest democracy. I hope you will remember that it can happen to you. Beware.”

He had been drafted into Hitler’s army as a young man, and yet when I met him he was one of the kindest people I knew. While many others disparaged me for my poor eyesight and put down my friends who were migrant workers from poorer East Bloc countries, this man sat down to tea with us and told us his story without trying to avoid his own accountability for having been part of a murderous war machine, willingly or not.

And so, I pass his words on to you, since we are now learning hard how true they are. “ I hope you will remember that it can happen to you.” People of the future, you have a right to be angry at us, who had a chance to turn the threat of climate change and did not. You may not have much cause to respect your elders or your ancestors. But I hope you will read this or something like it. I hope you will learn from our history. “Beware!”

Beware certainty and complacency. Beware apathy and the hope that someone else will deal with the big problems. Beware those who blame the vulnerable and the weak for things stolen by the privileged and the powerful. Beware war as a solution. Beware the impulse to protect only your own and to leave others out in the storm. This is what we have learned from our times.

Sincerely,

A person aware and conscious in 2024