People from the Future
I believe we
modern elders (a term coined by Chip Conley of the
Modern Elder Academy) have
two great gifts to offer the world and the generations that follow us:
pace and perspective. These gifts, if accepted, would go a long way toward resolving the political conflict that rages through our world like a bad virus, often separating so-called “progressives” (who tend to be or think young) from “conservatives” (who tend to be or think old).
While I am the latter, I share the utopian vision of my most progressive friends, one of a clean, green world safe for people of all colors, genders, and beliefs, a world where we can live how we want to. I share a vision where everyone has enough resources to live a good life, free from worry, and where our mental, spiritual and physical health, and the health of our beautiful planet, are as cared for as we would care for a child or beloved pet. I envision a world where we do not spend one penny, not one goddamned cent, on war or the machinery of war. We will pound our swords into plowshares and never look back.
If I could jump into a time machine and go forward one thousand years, I would hope to find this utopia, and my guess is most people, regardless of their age or political leanings, would hope to find the same. We don’t dispute where we want to go — our progressive friends have a good vision for that. The dispute is, rather, how and how fast we get there, and that is where our conservative friends hold sway. The lack of mutual respect for these two perspectives, one strategic and one tactical, is where the rub is. A truly good leader will find a way to bring us together.
And that brings me to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal.
For those who don’t know her, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, at the time of this writing, a 28-year-old, newly elected congresswoman from New York who is beloved by the left and despised by the right. She is outspoken, unapologetically brash, intelligent, captivating, and good-looking. Of her many bold new ideas, her Green New Deal (“The Deal”) is perhaps the boldest.
It is outside the purview of this book to go into the Deal’s details, but in summary, it describes a radical agenda for aggressively addressing global climate change, an issue which AOC, as Ocasio-Cortez is known, believes needs addressing with a far greater sense of urgency than it has been given.
One proposal in the Deal is to overhaul the US transportation system so that commercial air travel becomes unnecessary. This proposal, often maligned by AOC’s opponents to imply she wants to eliminate air travel altogether, opens her up to criticism, hence the snide quip, “And how will we get to Hawaii, AOC? Take a train?”
Now, I’ve heard my conservative friends scoff at the “train to Hawaii” idea and so forth, but I think they are missing AOC’s point. She is like a person from the future. She’s like someone who took a time machine back from 3020 to show us what we can be if we work together. Her train to Hawaii is, of course, absurd in our time, but she’s not thinking tactically — she’s thinking strategically — in a time framework measured in eons. She’s thinking like other people from the future, such as entrepreneur Elon Musk, Star Trek originator Gene Roddenberry, inventor Nikola Tesla, and musician David Byrne.
I view AOC’s proposals on travel as a metaphor, a placeholder, for a bigger, bolder vision. She’s a practitioner of “possibility thinking,” and it’s a good thing. We see Musk thinking this way all the time, and his accomplishments are nothing short of breathtaking. “Build a rocket with private funds that can land on a floating dock? I can do that,” he said.
And he did.
“
Dig a tunnel under the city of Chicago for a self-levitating electric train? Let’s give it a try.” And Musk’s
The Boring Company was born and the dirt is flying.
“Lay train tracks for Hawaii?”
Don’t underestimate the power of people from the future.
Ocasio-Cortez is challenging us to think beyond the limitations of our present capabilities, and rather to imagine the best ways to travel. What does “best” mean? It means ways that don’t pollute, that don’t disrupt the community, that are pleasurable, and affordable, and that put living beings and the care of our planet above profits, processes, and the needs of machines. That’s what the future looks like…if we want it to.
Look, I am an unapologetic capitalist. I believe in free market solutions. But I also believe left-leaning progressives, even the most radical ones who anger me, are trying to show me something that I need to see, and I don’t want to close my eyes to their message. I believe Capitalism and Democracy are the twin pillars upon which we humans should build our future, but they are not perfect. They need tweaking and adjustment just like all systems do, so that they adapt to our changing world.
And change is good. I welcome change.
There are people among us now, people from the future (often poets, artists and mystics), showing us how to make these changes, and we conservatives should pay attention to their message. Likewise, visionaries zealots, many of whom are young, should pay attention to an elder’s sense of pace, and how quickly we think this messy collection of human flotsam with its stone tools can move forward into a bright future. We modern elders have earned that perspective, and it has value.
The Buddha once said, “I am not the moon. I am just a finger pointing to the moon.” There is deep wisdom in that. We ought not to get distracted by the finger, what color it is, if its nails are painted, if it holds a reefer, or if its skin is mottled with age spots. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, and the shared vision of where we want to be in 1,000 years. That’s perspective. Then let us set an achievable pace for getting there.
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