So, I just don't get it, Grandpa, she'll say.
What, like 98% of all the scientists were telling you this would happen, that it would be this bad, that you only had like--and she'll definitely say "like" because kids will still do that then--they said you only had like ten years to make the changes, and all everybody did was put in new light bulbs and spend an extra $4000 to buy a hybrid car?
I just don't get it, Grandpa. They said this was going to happen to us-your grandkids-and you all couldn't change things?
And, of course, I won't really know what to say. I'll start by reaching over and brushing the hair out of her eyes and weaving it back behind her ears. Man, she looks like her mother, I'll think.
It's really complicated honey. I'm only now understanding it myself. We weren't really thinking about it like you and your friends do. It's not that we didn't care about how it would impact you; we weren't really thinking about you at all. Oh that's sounds terrible, I'll say. I don't mean that the way it sounds. Again, honey, it's complicated. It wasn't personal; we just didn't think that far ahead. It was more like a blind spot. Our focus was mostly on our daily living, which felt hard and overly complicated as it was. We had our hands full just trying to think about and find the time to spend with your mama and your aunt and uncle. I'm not trying to defend it. I just don't want you to think we were callous or selfish. It's more like we were overwhelmed. And when you're overwhelmed it's hard to have perspective. I mean, a lot was going on. The whole issue of how our military might was destabilizing the world and also undermining our ability to take care of basic services like public schools, and health care was just beginning to dawn on us. And I can't say I regret focusing on that. Without the anti-war effort and the radical changes we accomplished there, things would be a whole lot worse than they are now.
But I don't get that, Grandpa, she'll say. You mean you could only handle one thing at a time? Didn't global warming also feel huge?
No honey, of course it felt huge, I'll say. And it's not that we could only handle one thing at a time. That's not what I mean. Again it's complicated. I guess what I'm saying is that we knew it was a huge and scary problem, we just couldn't feel it. What we felt was worn out. You're used to things as they are now. These "little things," as you call them, just didn't feel little to us. The idea of a smaller house, going without air conditioning, voluntarily paying $5 for gas or finding the $20,000 to install solar panels just seemed too much and too big to wrap our minds and to-do lists around. And nobody else was really doing it.
And more than that: we were hopeful. Ironically that's a part of it too. We weren't just worn out and overwhelmed with our personal lives, we actually believed the tide was changing, that bigger systems would begin to kick in and stimulate the changes for us.
She'll wrinkle her brow at this point showing confusion, so I'll try to explain.
Scientists, you see, weren't just telling us that we were on the verge of causing irreversible and dangerous climate change, they were also telling us we were on the verge of a technological break-through that would soon make alternative energy sources available and affordable. And politicians were getting on board too. The history books say that the country was surprised when the popularity of Al Gore's movie led to him jumping into the presidential race right at the end and winning the presidency. But not all of us were surprised. A few of us guessed it before it happened!
But what we didn't predict or see coming was the way his presidency and the growing bi-partisan support for alternative energy would lead to us normal folk turning the problem over to them. I know that sounds silly to you. I think the best way to put it is to say that our optimism and our hope, well, it sort of betrayed us. We had hope in technology. We had hope in politicians. And we had hope in our market system. It really felt like they'd save us without us having to do much. There was a saying back then: "Let go and let God." I guess we saw science, politics and the market as our gods-more powerful and knowing than us tiny normal folk. So we gladly turned the problem over to them and waited for them to change us.
But I thought you were the cynical generation?, she will say. I thought you felt politicians couldn't be trusted and the market only cared about making money for the elite few?
Oh, you are like your mother, I'll say. She was a stubborn young woman too, loved a good argument, loved catching people, and especially me, in the midst of rationalizing.
I'll smile.
She won't.
I'm not trying to argue, Grandpa, she'll say. I just don't like thinking badly of you.
Here's where the tone of the conversation will shift dramatically. She won't be angry. It will seem more like sadness. But she'll also be deadly serious. And it will feel scary to me, because it will feel-for the first time ever-like I could lose her, like she could turn and walk away from me at any moment.
You were brought up, Grandpa, she'll say softly, with hundreds of stories about Nazi Germany and how it happened, not because of the evil of Hitler but more so because of the silent majority of good folks that sat by and did nothing about a holocaust, because it didn't affect them directly. Didn't you worry my generation would see you in a similar light?
I mean, Grandpa, you look back on your grandparents with bafflement about how they could be so easily brainwashed by the sexism, racism and homophobia of their society. You saw them as lacking the moral strength to step outside the mainstream and extend empathy and fairness to others. Didn't you worry that we'd look back on you and see you as equally brainwashed and prejudiced toward us?
She won't say that with judgment. It will be more like she is asking for my help.
And all I'll be able to do is answer honestly: No, we didn't imagine that, honey. It never occurred to us.
Then there will be silence, which I will try to break by once again saying, honey, it's complicated. Please, you've got to remember we're human. If it doesn't affect you directly, then we humans just don't... and I'll stop there in mid-sentence because the rest of it will not feel like something worth coming out of my mouth.
So in the end she'll have to be the one to break the silence.
I just wish it'd been different, Grandpa. I hate what's happened.
Me too. I'll say. Me too.
And in that moment, I'll wish I had the chance to do it all over, to go back and do it all over.
So friends, there it is, my message this morning: we still have the chance to go back and do it all over. If we want, we won't have to wish we could do it all over. If we want, we can ensure that that conversation with our grandkids--or our nephews or god kids or the neighbor kids we love like a child--is different.
For the sake of all of us, here's how I want it to be.
Instead, of my granddaughter asking me to sit down, I ask her to sit down and I share a story of which I'm incomparably proud.
Back in 2007, I'll say, our church asked us to do this wild and wonderful thing: It named environmentalism as one of the 2007-2008 church themes and as part of that asked all of us to spend the year thinking about you every single day. You, I'll tell her. It asked us to not to just talk about the power of interconnection; it asked us to embody it. It asked us to make our lifestyle choices and environmental commitments not just in conversation with each other, but in preparation for the conversations we would have with you, our grand and great grand-kids.
And that changed everything.
I knew, I just knew you'd be the spunky young woman you are. I knew you'd not let me off the hook. And that made me unbelievably proud of you. And it made me want you to be proud of me too, not just like me, but be proud of me. And so suddenly, telling myself that I couldn't do without air conditioning in the summer seemed absurd, because I imagined you asking me to explain how cooling my summers was worth warming your world. Suddenly, allowing lavish neighborhood parties at my house to whine about how car pooling is too complicated to organize seemed obscene because I imagined having to sit beside you in the future as we watched on TV yet another effort to organize tent cities for the hundreds of thousands of African refugees displaced due to massive draughts--draughts caused, I imagined the reporter saying, by the first world pollution of 20 years ago. I imagined you turning to me and saying, "That's your pollution, right, Grandpa?"
And I'm not complaining, honey. It actually felt liberating to imagine you saying this. Like I suddenly had eyes that could see. Because my church asked me to, I began to imaginatively anticipate all of your rebuttals and challenges. I heard you say to me, "Let me get this straight, Grandpa, you mean a $20,000 kitchen re-do fit into your budget, but a $20,000 purchase of solar panels somehow was 'economically out of reach'?!"
People at church talked about that imagined comment of yours-we helped each talk about it, because it's not an easy challenge to deal with, especially since your grandma and I had just redone our kitchen. But it did lead to the formation of a study group for church members interested in installing solar panels, with three from the group installing them within one year's time!! We were all there the day the switches went on.
A lot of people, I'll tell her, thought our church was plain silly when they heard we put pictures of our kids up on our bathroom mirrors, and right next to those pictures we put one of the earth as it appears from the moon. We did this because we didn't have a picture of you, but we knew that you'd have your mama's eyes or hair or smile, and so we imagined that picture was you, looking at us every morning for a year. All of us at church did that. And this seemingly silly act led to some wonderfully crazy, creative and out-of-the-box thinking.
This man named Bert Schlabach--he was a leader of our building and grounds ministry at the time--he came up with the idea to teach all of us to read and understand our RG&E bills. (Because none of us could ever make heads or tails out of those darn things by ourselves!) And then he worked with Jan Gartner and the RE program to inspire this church-wide challenge by which we all switched to a local green energy producer and collectively cut that "energy use" line on our RG&E bills by 30% in a three year period. Our church school kids tracked and documented our progress then took the pile of our RG&E bills to the Mayor of Rochester, which inspired him to do the same for the RG&E bills of all the governmental offices in town.
Mary Jones and Syd Sutherland along with the other gutsy women of the membership committee came up with the "Shuffle for the Shuttle" idea-the dinner and dance party that raised enough money for the church to buy a six-person electric car to shuttle people back and forth from the parking lot across the street, instead of using the giant gas powered van we were using.
Within six months, the picture up on Marge Forth's bathroom mirror gave her the idea of developing a member and neighborhood vegetable garden in our church garden, which in the end spawned all these great initiatives involving buying local food that doesn't have to be trucked in from thousands of miles away.
And this was very cool, honey. You'll love this. Hybrids and electric cars, as you know, were just starting to catch on, but for many they were just $3,000-$5,000 out of reach. A handful of the choir members who had just set up a carpooling network to weekly choir practices, came up with this crazy idea of creating a church fund that gave church members $3,000-$5,000 grants each year to tip the scales just enough so they could buy a hybrid or an electric car instead of settling for a traditional gas powered one. Every time the church helped a member put a hybrid or electric car on the road, we added a small cut-out car to this chart on our church bulletin board. We all watched with great pride as that stack of cut-out cars grew-within a five year period this "doing it together" section of the bulletin board celebrated the fact that we as a church community added 30 earth friendly cars to the road. "Our cars" is what the church took to calling them, and the individual owners gladly thought of them that way too.
And you know, come to think of it, after we went through that year of imagining ourselves in conversation with our grandkids, we somehow never again heard the proposal for air conditioning our church sanctuary. Other proposals just seemed to hog our attention, like when your Grandmother Kaaren proposed we keep the church thermostats down in the winter and instead create a "sanctuary sweater closet" from which church members could borrow if they were cold on a snowy Sunday morning.
Come on, Grandpa, it all sounds too rosy, she will then say with a smile. The only thing that caused debate was Grandma's "sanctuary sweater closet" idea?! Come on! I mean you all were human, so you had to have some serious fights.
We had our disagreements, I'll say. But we were lucky, they never turned into fights.
You see, two of my favorite members radically disagreed with my and your Grandma's assessment of the scientific facts of global warming. They made it clear that they were not the only ones. But instead of fighting they came up with the idea of a small group called "Left, Right & Center"-it turned into four groups actually, made up of church members who represented the spectrum of opinions related to global warming. These groups met for the entire year, taking turns picking readings that represented their particular views. They debated a lot with each other, but they also forced each other to listen, which in the end made each feel heard. I think that's why we didn't fight; people felt heard.
In fact, it was my friend who disagreed with me the most who ended up saying at a public meeting, "If nine out of ten doctors say your child will not get better without immediate treatment, and yet I agree with the one who says that the child will get fine on his own; well then, I certainly hope I'm allowed to side with the single doctor without being shunned. "But," he added, "I completely support the rest of you who want to follow the nine doctors just to be safe."
Right there is where the silent pause will enter this conversation with my granddaughter. The joy of looking back on what we were able to accomplish together as a church community will hit me, almost overwhelm me.
Everything from the First Unitarian green coffee mugs that replaced our Styrofoam to the coal plant we helped stop from being built, all of it will come to mind. We did something, I'll say to myself. We really did.
I will think about what a privilege it was to have been part of a community that didn't just talk about a different world, but actually acted boldly to make that different world happen.
I'll be able to say to my granddaughter: You know, looking back-it wasn't all that complicated. We just had to remind each other what it meant to be human, that above all we humans have this amazing ability to step outside of ourselves and care about needs and generations and species greater than our own.
Having your picture on my mirror for a year and imagining this conversation with you helped me do that.
I'm so glad my church asked me to do it and did it with me.
I'm also glad I get to tell you about it, so glad I get to tell about it.
Amen.
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