Dream. Plan. Act.
Since my mother first brought me to the public library in the late 70s, I have chosen to read about the future. As a boy, I steeped myself in the works Carl Sagan and the high-minded ideas of science fiction. I found comfort in looking at the world from greater distances of space and time. The title of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot alone was enough to excite me.
As a teenager, I could better grasp world events – for my generation, the Challenger explosion and the collapse of the Soviet Union – if I could place them in both their historical context and the trajectories of the future. Dreaming was how I found meaning.
The further I could look into the past and, even better, the future, the more grounded I was. As I devoured speculative fiction, science fiction, and new age books with titles like History of the Future, I became deeply – and often technically – familiar with far-out topics like world government and interstellar arks.
By the time I left the glow of the banker’s lamp in my basement bedroom and entered the adult world, I was as comfortable with these topics as the challenges facing humanity in the present day. It stung to be called, sourly or playfully, an idealist or a dreamer. While my reckoning of time may have had an eccentric charm and certainly had a place in dorm rooms clouded with pot smoke, it was not serious in daylight.
How can that be? Must our political discourse really be so limited to what’s in today’s papers? Or confined to what is practically achievable in the near future?
If you bring up the ideal of, for example, world peace and how to achieve it, you won’t get very far. Urgency wins over dreaming with some detractors. “How can you waste time on a pipe dream when [insert contemporary tragedy here] is happening on our watch?” Others can’t believe it’s possible because there’s no evidence it’s within reach. “You can’t have world peace without global disarmament and an end to everything that divides us. Good luck with that!” Lastly, it’s not uncommon to put human nature in the way of achieving our ideals. “Conflict and aggression is in human nature. World peace is impossible.
That’s how ideals get pushed out of political discourse. Perhaps they are unachievable. We don’t know. But we definitely won’t make our utopia if we don’t talk about it, or even casually assess how they it be achieved. This blog seeks to help correct that.
In stating that our future is now, this blog advances the idea that we must have our heads in the clouds and our boots on the ground. We must keep dreaming. We must plan to achieve those dreams – even in unfathomable timeframes. And we must act on those plans even knowing that our great grandchildren will be continuing that work.
This blog is, therefore, guided by a belief that humanity is worth saving and, in order to do so, we must look further into the future for ideas and bring them into the now. In every minute of every life is the beginning of infinite possible futures. Now is always the time to dream about, plan for, and act on the futures we want.