The Future is a Place

(Note: this article was written by my friend Roxanne Amico who is an artist and radio producer living in Buffalo. I was dazzled by this article and asked her if I could post it on my blog. She said yes, and I am happy. The above picture is also by Roxanne and is called "Circle Casting". Links to Roxanne's site are at the end of this post. Enjoy. Be inspired. Be hopeful)

The Future is a Place
By Roxanne Amico

We walked to the playground, from my mother's house, where I go for dinner most Friday nights, to play with my sister's 2 daughters (10 and 5 yrs old) and my mom's dog. The ten year old has mastered everything at the playground with an admirable cockiness, and still challenges herself to step outside her limits. The five year old worships her older sister and wants to do all the older one does. I've been marvelling this spring over how much stronger they are, how much more confident in all the things they do...

The five year old saw what her bigger sister did on the monkey bars--a move that made ME envious--and she wanted to do it. What she can't do alone, I help her with if I can. I couldn't help her this time. I had to say no. I hate that. So does she. She stomped away, her hair flying behind her like a kite with the words ":F-You" written on it... I know how she felt--I knew that if I were bigger or stronger, I could have helped her. I walked slowly behind her to her pouting spot and told her that it was only because I didn't want her getting hurt by doing something I couldn't help her do. "It's not fair! Why can't I do ANYthing?" I told her how much she does this year that she couldn't do last year, when she was four. I knew that would have some meaning, because she makes it clear on a regular basis how proud she is to have arrived at five years old. I called her older sister over to help remind her of the strides she's made in one year. She wanted to do that monkey bar thing though and pressed her case. I said, "You will." She said, "When?"

I said what I knew to be the most irrelevant answer I could give a five year old child, knowing both before, during, and after saying it that it was inane: "In the future."

It was inane because ultimately time means at once everything and nothing to a five year old. "Five years old" is just "more than four", and therefore "better", in many respects because she feels progressively more privileged "now" than "before". It means this thing that means so much more to everyone else --older and bigger--around her, and therefore becomes something she wants desperately to understand, as if it were the secret to the universe. Her mother and I laughed about this recently, because she's been asking, "What time is it?" a lot lately, (..."Why--You got a date?"...), just as she's been talking about death and age. The future is nothing, does not exist, and I know this, yet to say, "In the future" was all I could think to say, while all the while I thought about the problems with this answer, the things I did not say to her, about how I hate this answer I am about to give her... I hate it because I hate this culture that teaches children to become adults who sell their lives to the clock and wallet; because I loathe the fact that she is growing up in a culture that is obsessed with pretending death won't happen, and therefore lives insanely as if the future is the only thing, a culture then unwittingly enslaved to the future as death, disguised as eternal youth, which is actually eternal ignorance, and amounts to acute lack of responsibility for the lives of others in other cultures who die at the hands of this foolishness--others who cannot--don't have the luxury to-- forget about their impending death, too often imposed by this culture...

...I feel rage rise in my chest, right next to the grief that I've got a niece who is 5, one who is 10, one who is 13, and another who is 16, knowing as I do that the future is grim because:

* if the bee population collapses which it is, humanity has 4-5 yrs to survive;
* if the climate change reports are accurate … we have maybe 20 yrs before it's too late to do anything to stop the worst of the consequences of climate change ...
* because I know that another 570+ species go extinct every day, huge areas of the planets forests are felled and cleared every day, more topsoil is removed, deserts keep expanding, oceans keep dying, Greenland and all places ice are melting at a much faster rate;
* because we act like the economy is ok because it hasn't hit "us" yet, but we're just plain wrong and to say otherwise is like talking a language no one can translate. And there are good reasons it SHOULDN'T continue as it is, and in the middle of ALL of the above, people still think we will find a technological silver bullet fix for the energy crisis we are now immersed in ----
* AND-this culture keeps pretending that to look closely at these facts is to invite depression, rather than it being an act of reason to look at the facts and recognize WE -CANNOT-GO-ON-LIKE-THIS YET-WE-CONTINUE-TO-ACT-LIKE-WE-CAN....

And when a 5 yr old asks me one 'simple' question, I think of the rest of her life in these conditions, because I love her, and because I know how much she loves to be alive. (And because I know she won't go all ga-ga about how fast and high that dow jones is climbing--whoop-de-effing do--Aren't we all doing so wonderfully???? I know she won't say something even more inane like, "hey--but we can always try wind/solar-power, while all the while ignoring all these other factors, and forgetting that even these "low tech" solutions rely on PETROLEUM )

Now before I get any emails telling me everything is ok, or checking in on my state of mental health, I'll just say right now I am not "Depressed". This time is one of the happiest, most satisfying and exciting times of my life. What I despise is this culture, not people, not reality, not everything. I can't stand that to merely look at and raise the topic of the danger we are in brings people to blind fear, rather than awakened agency, but I keep looking for a way...

And I think that until we truly see and feel and grasp the deeply disturbing reality, we cannot truly do anything effective about it.

I passionately believe it's entirely possible to love life, love the people I know and many I don't know, love the planet and all living things, past, present, and future. And at the same time to have deep contempt for that which threatens all I love--that which is within my agency to oppose, that which is, as my niece calls it, "Not fair." When I say I hate this culture, I mean the petri dish we're all in, festering away in the disease that's killing the planet, (and there's simply no positive way to put that one anymore), and I don't mean culture in the classic (and elitist) sense of the term. This, of course, is what makes me the artist I am: Because I love, and because I hate, and because the future is not enough, so that what my life is about is shaping a sustainable culture, and because I know in my heart that the only answer really is the present, [even if, at the same time, I know the future I am working for is far too much in the future than I can describe to a five year old] as does the five year old know so dearly about the present...

...As this avalanche of thought crashed through my mind, fully expecting a rumble from my niece in response to my simplistic "in the future" claim, she didn't skip a beat: She sort of growled, and sneered, and with her fingers extended in her own gesticulated passion, sort of like a cat's untrimmed toe-nails, she said loudly,

"the future is just this boring place where they let you do everything and you can't have any fun!!!"

This took my breath away. Knowing I wouldn't remember this exact thing later, I grabbed my pen and paper I always keep in my pocket I don't always have and said, "Hannah--Wait!! Before you say another thing--THAT is one of the coolest things anyone has ever said to me--Can I write it down?"

She said, "Now this is fun. I like this writing things down when I say them--let's do more of that..."



(to hear Roxanne's radio show, go here
To see more of Roxanne's work, go to her online studio here
Her myspace site is http://www.myspace.com/radioroxanne)