To My Grandchildren

 Hey kids, I'm sorry. I knew the planet was broken way back when I was young, and I didn't stop it from going straight into ecological bankruptcy. I suppose I could blame prior generations, but that wouldn't really be fair. Mine was the generation that looked up and saw a hole in the ozone layer. Before that, we were all concerned with doing our best for Mother Earth. 

We failed. There are plenty of us scurrying around currently looking for ways to slow down our slippery slide into uninhabitable. Water to drink. Air to breathe. Land on which we can all stand. Not so much to ask for, really. We just weren't that good at keeping things nice for those of you who came after all our lousy decisions. 

I don't know if you will remember when there was such a thing as money, but that was what was driving a lot of our choices back when there was still a planet to save. The really sad thing about all the money that people thought they were making was that many of us truly believed that we could use that abstract notion to make thing better. There was this plan where people could buy "carbon offsets," which was a way to put cash back into assuaging their consciences for the way they were tearing through natural resources. For a price you could buy peace of mind. This was especially true for those who had money to burn. Like everything else. 

We congratulated ourselves for buying electric cars, and putting solar panels on top of our houses. There were companies who would proudly announce that they were "carbon neutral" even though they knew that they weren't going to be able to get some of that carbon back from the places we were putting it. Maybe we were distracted by superheroes. There were a lot of them around in those days, mostly on movie and TV screens. We imagined them saving us all from horrible fates much worse than being cooked alive slowly on the ground where we lived. It turns out the bad guys didn't come from another galaxy. They were right here all along. Killing ourselves in little ways, day after day. 

I could tell you that we tried to make things better by worrying more and more about how bad things had gotten, but all that worry and impassioned letters written didn't keep the climate from changing. We let people talk about how "the climate has always been changing." Many of them had jobs in our government. We let this happen. We encouraged them by voting for them. I could say that it's not my fault because I didn't vote for them, but that doesn't change the fact that at the moment when we might have pulled back from the brink, we didn't just stop. We knew that five million people were dying each year because of climate change, but we couldn't bring ourselves to stop changing the climate. 

It was a little like how we used to let people keep guns in their homes. Lots of guns. We used them to kill one another. But that's a story for another day.