Sometimes it seems the world is falling apart.
The last two weeks have brought an abundance of bad news. ISIS continues to bring violence and terror to the poor souls of the Middle East. Control of our borders is broken. The first reported cases of the Ebola virus have appeared in the United States. The American government appears incapable of solving even basic problems.
The last two weeks have brought an abundance of bad news. ISIS continues to bring violence and terror to the poor souls of the Middle East. Control of our borders is broken. The first reported cases of the Ebola virus have appeared in the United States. The American government appears incapable of solving even basic problems.
Each day brings headlines of some new disaster: terrorists crossing our Southern border, joblessness, sexual and financial scandals among our leaders, the possibility of war with half a dozen other nations. We’re still losing the wars we are fighting: the wars in the Middle East, the war on poverty, the war on drugs. The middle class continues to disintegrate. We Americans owe trillions of dollars in debt, and even worse, live in chains, bound by a million government regulations that daily stifle creativity and cost all of us untold hours of time and enormous sums of money.
In short, if we buy into all the bad news, we are going to hell in a handbag. And the zipper on that handbag is closed and locked.
But let me offer a flicker of hope. No, let me offer a bonfire of hope, a blaze made up of tiny flames.
Every week from August to May, I teach Latin, history, writing, and literature to over a hundred home-educated students. They arrive in the classroom, where I instruct them on these subjects, and then they return home to work on those lessons. Week after week, we meet together in the classroom. Some of them engage in the class, some spend a good part of the time daydreaming, and a few of them every semester suddenly eat their academic Wheaties, come to life, and become hard-working students.
Every time I step before one of these classes—and I mean this—I experience an explosion of emotions that sends me on a sort of “high.” I am old and they are young, and I look at these young people and see them twenty and thirty years down the road in ways they can never imagine. In my visions, I see them as human beings who will bring gifts to a world sorely in need of those gifts. They haven’t yet experienced the failings I have, the wrong turns I have made and continue to make, and they are lovely in their innocence and their trust. Every week I meet five score or more young people who will soon go out into the world, and I have complete confidence, because of their abilities and their parents’ love, that they will nudge that world into a better place, that they will leave their mark, that whatever they do, they will be a force for good in hard times.
Some of you reading this piece may think me a sentimentalist, a deluded old codger who idealizes the young. “Get real,” you’ll say. “They’re just a bunch of kids who will make the same mistakes everyone else has before them.”
You might make such a retort, but you’d be wrong. Nearly all the young people I have known in twenty years of teaching walk with their faces to the sun. They are all very different one from the other. Some love school and academic work, some despise it. Some dress conservatively, while others sport pink hair. Some like soccer and basketball while others love Broadway musicals and dancing. Some are social—the breaks between classes find them wildly exuberant—while others are shy.
Despite these differences, these students fill me with hope. Each of them contains a seed of goodness, no matter what their political or religious beliefs, and each will carry that seed for planting into the future.
These young men and women give me tremendous confidence in the future. I am blessed by their diligence, their intelligence, their goodness.
And so are you, dear reader. So are you.
In short, if we buy into all the bad news, we are going to hell in a handbag. And the zipper on that handbag is closed and locked.
But let me offer a flicker of hope. No, let me offer a bonfire of hope, a blaze made up of tiny flames.
Every week from August to May, I teach Latin, history, writing, and literature to over a hundred home-educated students. They arrive in the classroom, where I instruct them on these subjects, and then they return home to work on those lessons. Week after week, we meet together in the classroom. Some of them engage in the class, some spend a good part of the time daydreaming, and a few of them every semester suddenly eat their academic Wheaties, come to life, and become hard-working students.
Every time I step before one of these classes—and I mean this—I experience an explosion of emotions that sends me on a sort of “high.” I am old and they are young, and I look at these young people and see them twenty and thirty years down the road in ways they can never imagine. In my visions, I see them as human beings who will bring gifts to a world sorely in need of those gifts. They haven’t yet experienced the failings I have, the wrong turns I have made and continue to make, and they are lovely in their innocence and their trust. Every week I meet five score or more young people who will soon go out into the world, and I have complete confidence, because of their abilities and their parents’ love, that they will nudge that world into a better place, that they will leave their mark, that whatever they do, they will be a force for good in hard times.
Some of you reading this piece may think me a sentimentalist, a deluded old codger who idealizes the young. “Get real,” you’ll say. “They’re just a bunch of kids who will make the same mistakes everyone else has before them.”
You might make such a retort, but you’d be wrong. Nearly all the young people I have known in twenty years of teaching walk with their faces to the sun. They are all very different one from the other. Some love school and academic work, some despise it. Some dress conservatively, while others sport pink hair. Some like soccer and basketball while others love Broadway musicals and dancing. Some are social—the breaks between classes find them wildly exuberant—while others are shy.
Despite these differences, these students fill me with hope. Each of them contains a seed of goodness, no matter what their political or religious beliefs, and each will carry that seed for planting into the future.
These young men and women give me tremendous confidence in the future. I am blessed by their diligence, their intelligence, their goodness.
And so are you, dear reader. So are you.