Imbolc Bloodroot Moon
A friend last night said we don’t spend enough time thinking about the future. I believe he also meant imagining it, then trying to press ourselves toward it. He may be right, I don’t know.
I know in my youth, say from 13 or so until the waning years of my forties, I had clear images of the future and put my back into seeing them come to be. When junior boys couldn’t go to the senior prom, for example, I decided we needed to have junior prom. And we did. Seniors had always bought their rings from Jostens. I thought we needed bids. We chose Herff-Jones.
In college it was eliminating in loco parentis, the war in vietnam, racism. We manged the first, raised hell about the second and, well, the last one. Not so much. Later feminism, affordable housing, normalization for the developmentally disabled, neighborhood based economic development, a jobs response to unemployment. We made good progress on all of these. Examples. There were others, many others.
However. Today we fight in Afghanistan, just finished up in Iraq. The class inequality in the US and its attendant ills: homelessness, joblessness, foodlessness are as high as ever. Those neighborhoods in which the affordable housing got built and the businesses started as owner co-operatives worker managed. Mostly out of business. I imagine the senior class at Alexandria High is back to Jostens by now. And no more junior proms.
Thankfully women are no longer locked in their dorms after ten on college campuses. I’m not saying there hasn’t been progress. Actually, I believe there has been. And in difficult areas like racism, feminism, gay rights. All to the good. Not far enough, no, not by any means, but some progress, yes.
Yet the deep painful trench that separates the 99% from the 1% has gotten only wider. Our new gilded age had some of its gold-plating knocked off, revealing a lot of brass, some tin and lots of lead, but the plating is mostly back now.
My point is this. Imagining the future is one thing. Not a bad thing to do I suppose, though it might be, but working for change is quite another. It’s messy, painful and often fails. Imagining can be a diversion from working now, for what’s possible, in incremental ways. And in that sense we may imagine the future far too much.
