The Beings of the Three Times
"Let us begin as we often do in our workshops for activists — with an invocation of the beings of the three times. We invoke them because, at this historical brink, we need them.
"We call first on the beings of the past: Be with us now, all you who have gone before. You, our ancestors and teachers, who walked and loved and faithfully tended this Earth, be present to us now so that we may carry on the legacy you bequeathed us. Aloud and silently in our hearts we say your names and see your faces . . .
"We call also on the beings of the present: All you with whom we live and work on this endangered planet, all you with whom we share this brink of time, be with us now. Fellow humans and brothers and sisters of other species, help us open to our collective will and wisdom. Aloud and silently we say your names and picture your faces . . .
"Lastly we call on the beings of the future: All you who will come after us on this Earth, be with us now. All you who are waiting to be born in the ages to come, it is for your sakes too that we work to heal our world. We cannot picture your faces or say your names — you have none yet — but we feel the reality of your claim on life. It helps us to be faithful in the task that must be done, so that there will be for you, as there was for our ancestors: blue sky, fruitful land, clear waters.
The Reading of the Will
"In contrast to this prayer, our true regard for the beings of the future is closer to that portrayed by cartoonist Tom Toles. To a group sitting before him expectantly, a lawyer is reading a will. It says:
"Dear Kids,
We, the generation in power since World War II, seem to have used up pretty much everything ourselves. We kind of drained all the resources out of our manufacturing industries, so there's not much left there. The beautiful old buildings that were built to last for centuries, we tore down and replaced with characterless but inexpensive structures, and you can have them. Except everything we built has a life span about the same as ours, so, like the interstate highway system we built, they're all falling apart now and you'll have to deal with that. We used up as much of our natural resources as we could, without providing for renewable ones, so you're probably only good until about a week from Thursday. We did build a generous Social Security and pension system, but that was just for us. In fact, the only really durable thing we built was toxic dumps. You can have those. So think of your inheritance as a challenge. The challenge of starting from scratch. You can begin as soon as — oh, one last thing — as soon as you pay off the two trillion dollar debt we left you.
Signed, Your Parents
"What is staggering about this cartoon, to the point of being funny, is not any exaggeration, for there is none, but the sheer enormity of the reality it portrays and our blithe acceptance of it. Our national deficit of nearly 9 trillion dollars, for example, has more than quadrupled in the twenty-two years since Toles's cartoon. This state of affairs can be approached, of course, from a moralistic perspective, in terms of the selfishness of our generation. But I find it more helpful to understand it in terms of our experience of time; for it reveals a pathetically shrunken sense of time and a pathological denial of its continuity."
