Penalty: Delay of Game.
In his recent book, eaarth, Bill McKibben heaps up quotation upon quotation, impassioned plea after impassioned plea from politicians and scientists and activists and world leaders that "we" begin to do something to avert the threat of fundamental climate change "on behalf of our grandchildren." I, myself, have been moved by such imagery -- and have employed it in sermons and writings and conversations. "Think of our grandchildren." "What will our grandkids say?" Salvage, in other words, our future.
The idea intends to be motivational. Who, after all, would trash the well-being of their grandchildren? But ironically, what should connect so viscerally, so concretely personally with people like me -- what should conjure up the feel of tiny hands placed trustingly in my own; small, round faces with big and innocent eyes peering quizzically into my own -- instead dissolves into the inertia of abstraction. Somehow -- and this really is rather amazing -- the real intent of the appeals, which is the well-being of future, maybe even distant, generations, neutralizes any real and transformational connection to the powdery soft and fleshy well-being of any actual grandkids we may have. For one thing, as long as the subject is "we," I can leave it to someone else. Beyond that, any impact that remains has exactly as much power as realizations that "I really ought to lose some weight" or "I really need to get more exercise" or "I really ought to do a better job of keeping in touch" with that distant friend. What ought to carry the weight of compelling urgency transformed into an empty New Year's resolution. Something I ought to do, but won't likely do.
What McKibben realizes with regard to the topic of his passion -- climate change and global warming -- is that the change point is no longer in our binoculars as we scan the generational horizon ahead of us; it is in our rearview mirror. No longer is it about us vis a vis our grandchildren -- preventing what might otherwise come. The fact is that we are those grandchildren. The problem is a "threat" only in the same sense that there is a "threat" of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico or that there is the "threat" of more heat and humidity today.
My point, however, is not about the climate. What interests me -- haunts me, I suppose -- is our talent for procrastination when it comes to matters of fundamental importance. Maybe it's the college exam syndrome -- waiting to study until the night before, even though we know of its coming weeks in advance. When it comes to matters of substance, we are far less interested in future generations than we are our own, and the sad truth is that we are far more likely to clutter their path than to clear it if it means one more fun-loving night or decade out on the town with our friends. It isn't at all personal; in fact, that's the issue. As long as it is abstract -- out there, down the road, sometime in the future -- it doesn't strike us as real, no matter how passionately someone tries to associate it with my children's children. Someone telling me -- even if that someone is myself -- that I "ought" to do something inherently suggests that there is something else that I "could" do. And more times than not, it turns out that that something else is what I actually "will" do.
Altruistically, I know, I should be motivated to do good things for others -- even nameless, faceless others who may not even yet be twinkles in their parents' eyes. And, a sliver of the time, I do. But perhaps for the same reason that we tend to pay more attention to our checking account than our savings account, our own squeaky wheels tend to get the lion's share of our grease.
Perhaps that is where Gandhi's memorable counsel could, then, become useful: "Be the change you want to see in the world."
There is something powerfully -- maybe even motivationally -- "present tense" about that.
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