When I look into the future, I see a peaceful home, beautiful surroundings, and a loving family. I see my children knowing the land, climbing trees, passing their childhoods in peace. This has always been my vision. I dream of my future, I imagine future homes, I see myself many years along.
I can tell you now that this dream won’t come true, The way things stand, my children and I will live in a tall, gray apartment building wreathed in smog. The next generation won’t know a sunny childhood liberally sprinkled with grassy parks and carefree play. Our sunny afternoons will be their gray days. Our snow will be their sleet. Our realities will be their fondest dreams.
Can you imagine never having seen a cloudless blue sky, or never having breathed in a warm breeze sweeping towards you? The next generation might have to, because they will never experience these things. That is, as things stand.
Look around you. Look at the people beside you. Do you know them? Do you trust them? You are seeing the people you will work with, the future leaders of our world. I hear that’s what they called our parents, and their parents. True, I suppose. But now they need us. Our choices will be the the ones that shape the world of our descendants.
One day, when the history of this age is taught, what will the teachers say?
“Those corporation-obsessed airheads! They ruined our world! When they had the chance to save it, they turned their backs.”
Is that what will be said? Is that what should be said?
No, I believe that the teachers of the future will speak of us in admiration, speaking of how we rose to the challenge that faced us, and how we surmounted it. I have a dream... that the children to the future will look back and thank us, remember us, and dream of our glorious age! For now is the time to take our present into our own hands. Now is the time to raise our voices in one, uplifting, unified cry.
“We will not be satisfied with this state of affairs. We will not be satisfied with living in a broken world, and that is not what we shall leave to our children, and their children. Now is the time to change our gloomy future. Though the clouds won’t lift at once, even a single shaft of sunlight is better than nothing at all.
I have a dream, this dream, and I hope with ever fiber of my soul that, together, we will make this dream come true.