"Grandchildren are the crown of the aged..."

Your blogger as a brand new grandchild, in Oslo,
with his Oma and Opa, Emma and Paul Schmitz.

We can’t create a future fit for our grandchildren with systems built for our grandparents.
—António Guterres

Perhaps nothing is more predictable than politicians' sanctimoniously referring to the interests of "our grandchildren."
—Neil H. Buchanan

Grandchildren are the crown of the aged...
—from Proverbs 17:6.

It's not unusual for people to talk about grandchildren—now (with pictures) or in the future. I've been in such conversations. But I was brought up short the other day when a friend said, "I don't want grandchildren."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Just think. What kind of a world would they be born into?"

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've rarely considered these two things at the same time: what my actual family, friends, and neighbors, and their flesh and blood descendants, will experience, and the macro-scale trends forecast by our economists and ecologists—a future my contemporaries and I might or might not experience firsthand, but what we might reasonably anticipate for our children's children.

Politicians naturally might want us to believe that, with our support, they will help shape that future into a better direction. But I have some questions for them/us:

• Will your recommendations benefit some children ("our" children) more than others? If so, what will happen when those other children catch on to your game? And will our children welcome this bias and be infected by your cynicism, or will they be repelled in favor of a more universal blessing?
• How will you know when disastrous ecological changes approach a tipping point beyond which we cannot risk going? What risks of miscalculation are you willing to take? When are you going to go public with your own private realization that we have been postponing a true reckoning too long?
• When will the dismantling of our (U.S.) constitutional structures and norms reach a similar tipping point? How will you know? How are you responding?
• In any realm—political, ecological, economic, or the places where all three merge—can you envision joining a coalition of hope and change of a sufficient scale that it would compensate you for abandoning your personal dreams of political success—a success that honesty might well threaten?
• Will you identify, join, or help build such a coalition? Will I?

If by some microscopic chance, our generation's grandchildren see this, my question to them is: well, how did we do?

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Related, sort of: Sowing in tears, part one, part two. The long defeat.

Political tipping point toolbox: The Federalist #51, "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments."

Environmental Research Letters: Observations and cautions on using the term "tipping point."

Climate change outlook (science and politics) for 2025 and more generally. It seems that the planet itself is not in danger, but how far can we push its capacity to host complex life forms?

Hannah Bowman: ways for your church to take solidarity beyond sympathy.

Food for vision, from George Lakey: nonviolence vs dictators.

Indivisible: example of a current coalition. (Suggestions of others, and your criteria for supporting them, are welcome!)

Friends Committee on National Legislation, lobbying on behalf of Quakers in the USA since 1943.

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Revisiting George Lakey's writings, while assembling the list above, reminded me of the power of telling stories in advocating social justice. I still have vivid memories of Studs Terkel interviewing storyteller John Henry Faulk. (November 1, 1969.) I couldn't believe my ears! In fact, Faulk's argument from absurdity probably helped open me to genuine Christianity, as did the Christmas 1969 issue of Reader's Digest a month later. (I told that story here.)

Our old friend and colleague John Muhanji is giving a First Monday talk, April 7, at Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania. Contextualizing Quakerism to African Cultural, Social, and Spiritual Realities.

What is Lent, really? (Asking for a Friend!)

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Eve Monsees, "Number Nine Train."