This morning at breakfast, Ian turns to me to ask, "What's your favorite future? My favorite future is metal."
Let me translate. Ian asked, "what do you think the future will look like? I think that there will be lots of robots and big shiny buildings, sort of like the Jetsons."
I asked Ian if that's what he meant and he nodded.
I turned to Jonah and asked him what he thought the future would be like. He said that he thought he would have lots of money and live in a big house and play video games all day.
I asked if I could live in his house and he said no. Where's the gratitude, kid?
Ian asked me again what my favorite future was. I said I wanted to be very happy and have my babies near me.
I also hope that they are able to fully articulate their ideas, live independently, and live in a world that supports them and lets them reach their potential. I also hope to have lots of dinner parties with friends, have a bigger backyard to grow lots of tomatoes, and to surround myself with people who won't care that I will grow more eccentric as I age. Steve just wants the big house and video games, too.
Question of the Day: What's your favorite future?
Apt. 11d 
My kid says her “favorite future” is one where she’s a world-famous author, and lives in a house across from the British Museum. I think she has some specific houses picked out. She said we can’t stay in her house, but that she’ll buy us a pied-a-terre nearby to stay in when we visit London.
I’m pretty cool with that future.
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But, I really, really want a jet pack, too. I still don’t get why we don’t have them yet.
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Though I do get why we’re just now, potentially, getting voice recognition software, so it’s a failure of my lack of knowledge about engineering, as opposed to speech prception.
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I want life to get a little more downmarket and communitarian. So we’re all living a little lower on the hog but more communally. I want communal (town-level?) work projects and communal dining rooms, not for every meal but as a feature of neighborhood life. Everything scruffier and lower-tech and more fix-it. Flattening of differences between rich and poor, more mixing of different kinds of people, more tedious everyday participation of individuals to make things run.
I have no idea what political or economic conditions would have to take place to produce this future but I thought I’d throw it out there since we’re talking fantasy life. (It isn’t a very glamorous one, is it? But it’s comforting to me.)
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I want life to get a little more downmarket and communitarian
Then BJ will rocket over you throwing empty coffee cups down.
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I don’t want a jet pack and I would run from a communal dining room, but I’d like more more “fix-it.” I don’t actually like fixing things, but I do like the more solidly built stuff you get when it is fixable.
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A few weeks ago, I was having a picnic with the Raggirls, talking about “olden times.” Medium Raggirl asked: “To the people in olden times, would we be futuristic?” “Yes.” “And in the future, people will think of us as living in olden times?” “Probably, yes.”
Medium Raggirl then looks around at all of the big building around the public park we are sitting in. “Nope. I just don’t think it can get much more futuristic than this!”
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I want life to get a little more downmarket and communitarian.
Marya couldn’t have expressed my ideal better. I want Melissa and I to live in a neighborhood with parks where the kids and grandkids can play, and an open-air market you can walk to where you can pick up the veggies you don’t grow in your garden and some pork chops for Sunday dinner on Saturdays, and grocery store where you can run and grab some milk during the week, and the church and the pharmacist and the public library on the corners just down the block, and sidewalks and bike trails so the kids and grandkids can get around to their friends’ houses and climb each others’ tree-houses. Oh, and a basement full of over-stuffed book shelves, with a sliding ladder. Got to have the sliding ladder.
Basically, I want to go back to the future, to a world of fewer choices and fewer complexities and more community. To a world that never existed, in other words. Hey, my future.
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A communitarian utopia would be hell for introverts like me, and curmudgeons like my husband. Feel free to live your utopia, but don’t imagine that imposing it on others would make for a better world.
I think the best of all possible worlds is the one in which government and community work together to ensure more choices, and more ability to choose, for each human being.
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Oh dear… I don’t think I like this question right now. I’ve been thinking about my favorite future for years and years and the road to get there seems to stretch for miles and miles. Maybe I’ll answer with a whole post. this is a great question and warrants more than a mere comment. Sigh.
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No, I’d ride my jet pack to one of Marya’s community dinners (well in theory). In practice, I’d probably find I wasn’t willing to face all the people unless someone forced me to.
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I think I live more or less in Marya’s future. We live in a college rental house, side-by-side with other college families, we eat 5 dinners a week in the excellent college cafeterias (currently $12 for all of us, and just $4 on family night, although it’s going to be $16 once D turns 6). This is what communism would look like if it actually worked on a large scale and without a subsidy from all these well-heeled undergraduates (thank you, undergraduates!).
My husband is definitely the one pushing us in the direction of “scruffier and lower-tech and more fix-it.” The downside of that is such things as the dozen or so bamboo poles that he scavenged and is keeping in the garage. The upside is that he was able to build a telescope for a colleague and a swiveling binocular stand for public star nights (the latter was created from a cherrywood crib that somebody was giving away on Craigslist). It is an excellent thing for a husband to have inexpensive hobbies, I think.
I think all of that communitarian stuff is actually in reach, particularly if you live in a homogeneous enough area. However, it doesn’t happen by itself. You have to schedule stuff, organize stuff, drop off flyers, show up for school stuff, talk to strangers, write emails, cook for potlucks, etc. This is actual work. It isn’t this beautiful thing that is ready-made and waiting for you to jump into.
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“This is actual work. It isn’t this beautiful thing that is ready-made and waiting for you to jump into. ”
Well, and it never was, right? here were always organizers who were organizing the community (Ooh, I said community organizer) (like in the Anne of Green Gables books) and they received both praise and opprobrium for it.
I’m singularly unsuited to initiating a community building effort, but I am willing to contribute, and what helps me contribute is organizational backing of some sort (the school, or Girl Scouts, or some other organization that gives me guidelines and an excuse).
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“Well, and it never was, right?”
Yes, but there are a lot more commercial substitutes available these days. 70 years ago, corn husking was a major spectator sport.
http://www.heritagedocumentaries.org/WhenFarmersWereHeroes.html
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Amy and BJ and Kai, I think you’re pretty much encapsulating the whole communitarian appeal and debate in your comments:
1) Absent some sort of fundamentally divisive plurality (whether it be race or religion or culture, and in practice and with time many of even those can be overcome), the ability to enjoy the simple fruits of community is available to most people already.
2) But it won’t just happen; it has to be worked for.
3) Most people today, in a world wherein wealth and technology have provided us with commercial options and possibilities and entertainments inconceivable to our grandparents, aren’t going to be motivated to do that work…
4)…unless there is some sort of organizational or structural support readily available to them, showing them possible ways to go about the work and giving them the chance to discover how contributing to such work can be personally rewarding.
5) Providing that organizational or structural support will sometimes, perhaps most of the time, involve costs and regulations. Providing people the opportunity to form bike clubs will require someone to pay taxes to build the bike lanes, and some drivers having to submit to additional rules to keep those bike spaces safe. Ideally, communities and governments could work together so that providing organizational support for some wouldn’t impinge too much, if at all, on the choices of those who didn’t want to be part of the collective project…but the historical record of America’s single largest “communitarian” experiment so far–free public school for all children–suggests otherwise. And so, the struggle between those who want to build utopian futures and those who want all us builders to buzz off continues…
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70 years ago, corn husking was a major spectator sport.
My dad never participated in it as a sporting event, but he still complains about all of the husking corn.
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Jet pack, hell, where’s my teleportation booth? Because sometimes getting there is definitely not half the fun.
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“but the historical record of America’s single largest ‘communitarian’ experiment so far–free public school for all children–suggests otherwise.”
Though the vast majority of the foundering has not been because of an abstract desire to have builders buzz off, but because of white Americans’ very specific collective unwillingness to countenance sharing their good public schools with black American children. I mean you can talk about the history of public schools without talking about race, but it’d be like talking airplanes without mentioning wings: not likely to get you very far.
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Doug,
I think you’ll hear a lot of skepticism from parents here that the “good” schools are all that great. There’s a lot of mediocrity hidden by strong demographics. My sister just moved into a suburban Washington school populated by the children of Microsofties. While the school feels great and there’s a very high-achieving vibe, the math program is a disaster–fractions this week, geometry next week. They send home math homework that the children are totally unprepared for by their classwork. My sister has been doing a lot of clean-up work to make sure that 1) her son keeps up with the meanderings of the Everyday Math textbook 2) he gets a solid foundation in math. Sure the school has high test scores (and I’m that’s what they’ll tell her when she complains), but really, do we seriously think that Microsoft parents were going to let their kids fail? Drop a low-income, low-SES kid of whatever race into that school and he’d sink like a stone.
My nephew has also studied in a German village school and a rural Washington school. In the rural Washington school, my sister was around when a teacher told a 2nd grade child with a thick book, “You’re not really reading that!” A teacher (possibly the same one) also just suspended math for a while, because somehow, the class was supposed to be between textbooks (in the middle of the year?).
That leads me to another point. In much of the country, there are no “good” schools to “share”. The mix of students and parents is most of what makes the average school good or bad (although I admit that the rural teacher in my sister’s story probably wouldn’t have lasted very long in the suburban school). As I say (probably too often), it’s a stone soup situation. School families are (by and large) getting out what they put in. Should we have larger aspirations for the role of school? Can it enlighten the ignorant and lift up the impoverished? Sure–but not necessarily those “good” schools with the pretty playing fields.
On a lighter note, I love this old Iowahawk post on the subprime version of “wherever you go, there you are.”
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2007/12/please-dont-des.html
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Truthfully said, Doug. Note that above I said that that, with time, “many” of those divisions that make community feeling and obligation and support possible can be overcome. Thus far, the U.S. has gotten better at seeing the poor and black as part of the same group as the middle-class and white, but between the comforting promises of the meritocracy and the occasional spasm of old school racism (often itself a sense of resentment induced by that same meritocracy), we haven’t quite gone far enough yet.
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On reading my comment again, I see that I did paint the rural school as a “bad” school. Backtracking a bit, I think that the bad rural teacher reflects the culture and educational level of the surrounding community. The teacher can’t lift the children above that level, because that’s where she is.
From talking to my sister, there is a certain amount of moat-building going on in the affluent suburban community where they’ve just moved. She definitely got the feeling that the very diverse dwellers in Microsoftia wanted to repel boarders (i.e., lots of quizzing on the (very, very white) family’s bona fides for living in the school enrollment area). The residents have got a good thing going, and they want to protect it.
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Here’s a bonus culture-clash story from Microsoftia. My sister is volunteering in the posh public 5th grade class. A little girl asks, “How old are you?” My sister eventually truthfully names an age in the low 30s. The little girl (not believing her a minute) says (in a very friendly way), “You can tell me the truth. My mom is 41.”
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Ha! I love Amy P’s last story. So funny! My boys are always broadcasting my age to other kids (some of which turn to their parents and ask their ages, much for their embarrassment). Then I have to explain to the other adults that I don’t really mind my kid discussing my age (39, BTW).
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Really, do people still care about how old they are? Or maybe the right question is, are people our age starting to care about it? I can’t think why I’d care if someone knows how old I am.
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How ironic is it that Cracked magazine is making points I ardently believe in? But #s 1, 2, and 7, about having to deal with irritation from other people and their needs, are right on and that’s part of what I am nervous about. We need community because sometimes we, or our kids, will be the annoying people no one has time for if there isn’t a community. Nuclear family isn’t reliable enough to support that.
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