Hope
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Day 28 of Blogvember. A full list of prompts for the month is available.
I hope my children have a good future. Challenges confront them large and small.
Some of my immediate hopes include:
- they don’t fall in with the wrong crowd.
- they develop deep friendships - the type where you can trust the other with your deepest secrets and fears.
- they don’t fall down a drug vortex.
- they find fun in their childhood.
- they muddle through their difficult teen years.
Any prior generation to mine could probably stop there. Yet now I feel like our kids are faced with an existential crisis, the likes of which we have never battled before. I fear that the world they grow up in will be damaged and impacted by anthropogenic global warming, that will bring down all sorts of issues. In this sense, I hope:
- their generation can actually recognise and respond to this ‘wicked problem’, as economist Ross Garnaut described climate change.
- they don’t experience a dramatically less hospitable world in which to live.
- they don’t experience wars and upheaval resulting from large-scale migration from inhospitable locations and a fight for diminishing resources.
- they can still eat fish caught from the sea, hoping that they haven’t been fished to extinction.
It’s a worrying world. Some of my hopes for my children I can influence through effective parenting. Others are completely outside of my direct control. All I have is hope.