englehart on hope and the apocalypse:
It masks a far darker world that your generation is about to inherit on a planet two-thirds of whose inhabitants, as a group of retired admirals and generals interested in climate change recently noted, live near a coastline (that might in coming decades flood). Put another way, according to the NGO Christian Aid, one out of every seven people on the planet -- perhaps a billion in all -- might, over the next half century (essentially your post-college work lifetimes) be forced from their homes and into the kinds of desperate migrations that would make the present American debate over illegal immigration seem like a global joke.
(...) Here's one from mine that's useful for this speech, whatever its historical accuracy. Around 1000 AD, there was a millenarian movement of peasants who, believing they saw the end days coming, built their own coffins, and, at the predicted moment, climbed into them to await their foreordained fate. To tell you the truth, I don't know what happened next. Assumedly, sooner or later they climbed out again. But here's the point I want to make: As long as you're looking at our world through your usual lenses, I suspect you're already in our version of those coffins, even if they pass for normal daily life. Only in the dark can you begin to imagine the possible Pompeii-scapes to come, the potential for the extreme unraveling of normalcy. And only after you imagine that, can you do what those peasants undoubtedly did when they realized that the last days had not come -- not yet anyway: climb out.
(...) I look out over this audience, remembering that, when I was 21, there seemed so much that needed to be done. How could it be that, over 40 years later, there seems to be so much more -- starting with somehow ending not (as in my college days) one, but two mad frontier wars, two scenes of slaughter and carnage, Iraq and Afghanistan, in a world where frontiers no longer exist? These are wars guaranteed to kill tens of thousands more and, in the long run, to endanger us all -- and there's only you to end them. There's only you, really, to change everything. It's a terrible burden that my generation of parents should never, never have loaded on your shoulders, but understand this clearly: It's not a coffin, not by a long shot.
(...) It's time to look up and read the inscription -- by now, you can surely do so with your eyes closed -- and then reformulate it. How about, for example: Abandon paralysis all ye who exit here.