By LARRY DALOZ
The Bayview Cash Store is still reverberating from the show the teens put on last week. We’re referring to the Climate Arts Project, mounted by a team of fired-up high school drama club members who created a showcase featuring poetry, songs, spoken-word, and skits — all student-written, all zeroing in on the reality of climate change and urging action. They brought the house down and the audience to its feet several times over. Afterwards the adults milled about shaking their heads, tearfully thanking the teens, hugging each other. “These kids,” they said over and over, rolling their eyes in wonder. “These kids.”
“These kids” indeed. “They are the future,” we are tempted to say. “They restore our hope.” “The future is in good hands.” All this is true. Surely this would not have happened without the stunning talent and gutsy leadership of young seniors like Kari Hustad and Chloe Hood, backed by a host of juniors and sophomores. But it is no favor to the young people to leave them alone with the unfinished work that our generation has left; it is a mistake to dust our hands and walk away. For the event also happened because a handful of older folks didn’t walk away. Julie Glover, Ann Linnea, Deana Duncan and others stepped up and worked with them tirelessly for months to make it happen.
There’s a lesson here: yes, the future belongs to the next generation, but it also belongs to all of us as long as we are on the planet, and one of the most valuable things we can do is to actively encourage, support, and mentor the emergence of this remarkable new generation. No one does it alone. We all matter. We all have a stake in the future.
And there is another lesson here, a lesson about grounded hope. It is tempting and all too easy to see the world headed to hell in a handbasket. And in some ways, it surely is. The old order has been crumbling for the past 50 years, and we are still mired in the uncertain murk of transformation. But something new is also being born. We saw it the other night in Bayview. One piece in particular, a piece by three remarkable young women and previewed in the WOW weekend last March, spoke to the seeds of that transformation. Called “Echo Chamber,” it calls on us all to “break the bell jar”— to listen to those different from ourselves, and to enter into a genuine dialogue directed not backwards toward the way things used to be, but forward with courage toward a world emergent, still ours to form. “We aren’t listening to the people calling for help; we aren’t listening to the scientific evidence; we aren’t listening to the people who don’t believe,” they sang. “We want a conversation, not an argument.”
They’ve got it right. It’s time for all of us to rise to our feet — all the generations together — to greet and together shape this remarkable new moment in history.
Larry Daloz is a former Associate Director of the Whidbey Institute where he is now a Senior Fellow.
