"Now, in an age when humanity's powers are vastly multiplied, the problem is how to secure another human right: freedom from the fear of extermination. Strangely enough, there are reasons for hope. 'In a dark time, the eye begins to see,' as Theodore Roethke wrote. Collectively, fitfully, the world has begun to develop sensibilities that are genuinely global. Human rights, interdependence, sustainable development — these watchwords have become clichés because the principles and claims are inescapable. The American government may reject them, but there are international courts. There are international police powers, embryonic crippled, lethargic, but their principles are in play. I'm not complacent about how far we've come toward securing a human future, yet the growth of institutions such as the Hague human rights court tells me that we might be on our way, if not toward a federal world government, then at least toward a sort of Articles of Confederation in which we collectively agree that the enforcement of the collective good trumps the national boundaries that were the great political achievement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"There are reasons for hope but never guarantees. We, my generation, weren't the first to make mistakes. You won't be the last. Above all, there are reasons to act, and a strong probability that if the wise to not act wisely, the fools will prevail — and anyway since when does hope require reasons? If we're strong, wise and lucky enough, we won't solve all the problems, God knows, but we'll make the world safer to go on having them.

"I notice that as I get to the end of these preachments, I started writing we, not you. This is just as well. Someday you'll do the same, as you too run out of assurances, except that the world is stranger than you imagined when you were young, as it's come to look to me. Aren't you tired of all the glib generation talk anyway? Here's another strange and wondrous element of the human condition: We overlap. Generations aren't sealed off in separate capsules. So enough about special knowledge and unique missions -- ours, yours, anyone's. Enough about the vast achievements or failings of my generation and the unique challenges confronting yours. Each challenge is unique and each is identical — to do what's possible by finding out what's possible and, in the process, overcome what seemed possible.

"Some borrowed wisdom.

"From Samuel Beckett in the Worstward Ho: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

"From a civil right song: 'Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.' "