On Children
by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.*
I have loved this poem for a long time. Even before I had ever read it, I was striving to raise my son according to these thoughts. Because he has his own thoughts. And looking back at my life on a recent birthday, I realized that the one human on Planet Earth who has probably taught me the most, hands down, has been my son. And I have never been anything but a willing student, because his soul dwells in the house of tomorrow.
I’m bringing this up, not because I want to talk to you about your children, if you have them. No, I want to talk to you about your political candidates. I want to urge you to vote for the youngest viable candidates you possibly can – and by viable I mean sane, literate, and fundamentally kind. We have to move forward, and the people who are gonna get us there are, yes, our children.
Gibran perfectly describes the situation – our children are the arrows, and we are the bows. We release them into the world from our place of stability, and they go create the future. We can help, and we can strive to emulate their progressive spirit, but in order for them to thrive we have to let them use their minds and their bodies and their hearts to create what they will. And hell yeah, we have to let them make mistakes, because how stupid would we be if we never made mistakes?
We did our job, now it’s time to get the hell out of their way and let them make the world they want to live in.
Confession time: I was born in the last month of the last year of the Boomer generation. That information really shocked me, because for the most part, I do not identify with that generation at all. My son told me I could be an honorary Gen-X, which is much more appropriate. But, as a “Boomer,” I have decided I’m not voting for any more Boomers, unless there is no other option. Like no other sane person is running.
Here’s the thing; it takes years, sometimes decades, for legislation to start impacting people, especially pollution controls. It can take decades for ecosystems to recover to a point where it can even be determined if a program worked. Environmental devastation, like pipeline oil spills, wastelands left by fracking, strip-mining and destructive forms of logging, can take centuries to recover from. Folks my age and older just aren’t gonna be around for that, so some of us are . . . lacking in the passion needed to actually do something other than fuck-all about it.
Some people are flat-out terrified of Greta Thunberg and are doing everything they can to demonize her. Lucky for the rest of us, she doesn’t not give a shit about their fear and smear campaigns. She believes that when people start demonizing you, you must be doing something right. She’s absolutely correct about that; well, at least according to my dear old dad, who used to tell me the same thing. Greta doesn’t give a shit about the feelings of entitled assholes who don’t want to have to go to all the bother of changing anything in their lifestyle for any reason. And that’s really it, people fear change, and when fear starts running the show, change is put in a headlock and slowly strangled.
But folks like Ilhan Omar and AOC don’t fear change, and they don’t give a shit about the status quo. We don’t need to keep things the way they are, because the way things are is not working for us anymore. We have reached the point where there are real climate change catastrophes going on all around us. We’re having bizarre weather all around the globe. Record heat, record cold, floods, droughts, hurricanes, monsoons, tornadoes, you name it, it’s getting worse. People are starting to die of climate change. How many homeless people freezing solid on the streets in a single night does it take to make you go, hmmmm?
The current crop of Boomer candidates (okay, with a couple powerful exceptions) does not have the necessary gumption to fix this shit.
You know what, thank the GODS that every pissed off 17 year-old right now is going to be eligible to vote in 2020. We should be in every high school in the country registering every 17 and 18 year old person to vote. Recently, a 20 year-old woman won a run-off election for a seat on the city council of Iowa’s seventh largest city. This is the first time a student at Iowa State University has won any representation on their city council. It’s exhilarating, and gives so much hope. And more good news – Iowa candidates with strong ties to big business are not doing well in recent elections – can I get a wahoo?
Onward, upward, and forward, into the House of Tomorrow.
*Here’s a lovely musical version of this poem sung by members of my dear Family Folk Machine. Music by Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock.