What Shall We Bequeath

While never a fan of science fiction literature–although as a movie genre it is my favourite–the renowned writer of the Foundation series and I, Robot Isaac Asimov wrote a book in 1991 (along with Fredrik Pohl) called Our Angry Earth which first perhaps opened me up to environmental ideas so that I would be receptive to Wallace-Wells and Greta some 30-odd years later.

I guess I was always a big reader from the time my camp councillor lent me a copy of Jim Morrison and The Doors’ story in the book No One Here Gets Out Alive to the somewhat providential reading of Laurie Garrett’s 1995 book The Coming Plague.

A lot of this early reading evidently had something of an eschatological bent and I think played a role in my bluntly telling my ex that I didn’t want to bring children into this world: in retrospect seeing the struggles of someone like Greta had in her childhood, and I know through email exchanges with my ex that my daughter not only suffers from inherited diabetes but also, perhaps inherited, depression problems, and even horrifically for me was cutting for a period.

I got updated information from both my ex and the Internet and now know my daughter is in fact a brilliant student at top socially-minded schools in the New York City area, and even won an award for integrity, but I remain almost obsessively worried about the future, at the world my parent’s generation and my own will hand down to her and her own children.

This is a dynamic that animates my actions although I have made a concerted forceful effort to come to accept a positive mindset but when it comes to my daughter I do remain fearful.