Three possible futures imagined by R. Crumb

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 5, 2024

Broken and broken

Again on the sea 

The moon so easily mends. 

Ueda Chōshū

 _________________

We Are All Going into the Future Together

Johnny has framed this newsletter – Peace, Love, Happiness and Understanding – to give readers a sense of joy. He has asked me to write about being a futurist, an optimistic futurist, knowing that it is part of my practice to find good things in the world. Every day I try to find signals of hope from what is emerging – in the news, online, in conversation and from observation. 

Two things about the future: there are no facts (as if we needed proof given our recent political stories) and, the future belongs to all of us. We are going into it together, learning as we go. 

When I connect to people who think about the future we construct and play games as we set up scenarios that might come into being. Here is a recent one: millions of people will be migrating from too-hot-to-live-in places to places that aren’t as devastated yet. I’m in Oregon so people will be moving here for sure. How do I feel about that? What can/should I do? What problems and possibilities are there in this scenario?

My first thought is, “Wait. What? People coming here to my block? I don’t know them – they could be from anywhere.” I sit with this and then think how much I have and how much I’d like to share. I begin to think about how my neighborhood could embrace a new family. Could I put a small house in my yard? Could I find friends and neighbors who would pool money to buy a place they could gift this family until they could pay rent? Could I move in with one of my kids (or vice versa) and give a displaced family somewhere to get a new life started ? Could a group of friends build a house like Habitat for Humanity does? And then I start to get excited about exchanging ideas and culture with new people. As a teacher, artist and grandma I’d love to teach their kids art, or sit in their kitchen smelling their cooking, or share some of mine. My granddaughter could meet their daughter and who knows where that could go?

The futurists I hang out with are part of an online community started by Jane McGonigal. Years ago I read her book “Reality is Broken” because my boys were spending so much time on video games and playing Warhammer and I didn’t understand their fascination. Jane’s book opened my eyes to the foundation of games: to make a game you set a goal and then put obstacles in the way. Think golf: you could just walk over and put the ball in the cup. To make it a game you have all kinds of complicated rules involving special equipment, spaces, time, scoring. And though golf doesn’t interest me I began to realize that as an artist I set up rules to play by every day. Will I use watercolors or acrylics? Big brush or small – arm motion or wrist motion? Abstract or realistic? Political or decorative? And so on. What this has to do with futurists is the real game, the underlying game, is “What if?” What if I use only blues? (Picasso’s Blue Period.) What if I accentuate B&W contrasts and shadows? (Think film Noir.) What if I put lots of mirrors facing each other and walk between them? (Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms.)

Artists make up their own rules and play by them. Artists and futurists ask “What if?” to guide them to new places.

In our online group, urgentoptimists.org, we look ten years in the future and imagine:

“What if there was a huge climate event that knocked out food production across a wide band of the earth?”

“What kinds of new holidays and celebrations would you like to be part of?”

“What impact will AI have on medical care, education, business, art, politics?”

“How might we meet a new pandemic and what have we learned from Covid?”

“Tomorrow is the last day of trash pick-up for everyone, forever. What have you (and your town/city) done to get ready for this moment?”

Jane’s recent book is “Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Be Ready for Anything.” As a game developer she knows how to make learning interesting and inventive. For Urgent Optimists she designs a scenario, like the ones above, and we are prompted each day for a week to write and post journal entries from the future (usually ten years, so 2034); or create an artifact (design a poster for the new holiday “Ancestor Appreciation Day”); or contribute to a poll that asks how we’d feel being in 110 degree weather for a week. 

From all around the globe people answer Jane’s prompts as if they’re in 2034 and this is their reality. They share hopes, fears and cautions. They sleuth out signs that whatever-it-is is starting to happen now. Many places around the world have had 110 degree weather for a week and more, and that number is increasing. Where do we see signs of solutions? 

This is foresight as a verb. Once your mind has gone to that place, no matter what question it is answering, you have a different way of imagining the future. You’ve imagined the people you are connected to in that future: your family, friends, neighbors, city, country, globe. Everyone and everything plays together: mycelium and birds and streams and avalanches and a girl eating a corn dog at the county fair in Nebraska or a boy eating yak-on-a-stick in Mongolia all come together – the yin and the yang of the great wheel of fortune. The murderer who types on a computer and the one with a sawed off shotgun. The baby blessed and the baby abandoned. The open road and the closed cell. We are all going into the future together. But since there are no facts, you and I are just as expert at drawing a picture of it. We are all immigrants in the future, dancing as we go.

—Jill Littlewood

*

Like all the other hippies, back in the day, I spent a lot of reading and re-reading The Whole Earth Catalog. It was a kind of Bible to us. It was a way of finding out about things before there was an Internet. A futurist and inventor named Buckminster Fuller was prominently featured in its pages. He invented the geodesic dome, and many of us dutifully did our best to build them on our hippie communes. As a young man “Bucky” had spent a lot of time imagining the future, what problems might arise, and how to solve them. He hoped that by getting a 50-year head start on the problems, by the time they arrived we’d be ready for them. Maybe we could even prevent some bad things from happening. A book of some of his speeches was titled Utopia or Oblivion. Those were our choices, he said. Since oblivion is not very interesting, he decided to devote his intelligence, imagination and energy to utopia.

Fuller invented something he called “The World Game.” The object of the World Game is to “make the world work.” Anyone can play. Maybe everyone is already playing it, but some strategies aren’t working out too well.

If you imagine you have enemies, you might prepare to fight. You might actually fight. If you imagine you have no enemies, the world is not such a scary place. Instead of imagining a world of warring nations, we might imagine that there is one human family. We might take it a step further and imagine that we love everyone—including plants, animals, clouds and stones. How would that feel?

I asked my friend Howard what he thought the future would be like. “Like the present,” he said. 

When I asked Jill which of Robert Crumb’s visions of the future is most likely, she said, “All of them.”

At this moment on our big beautiful planet, everything imaginable is happening right now, and many things that we can’t imagine. The newspaper reminds us of the wars and other catastrophes. Meanwhile, birds and butterflies are migrating, children are playing, bees are spending their days pollinating flowers, mammals are falling in love, puffy white clouds are floating by. It has ever been so.

Not only do we not know what will happen next, we don’t know what is happening right now. Somehow, our eyes, brain and nervous system present the appearance of a three-dimensional colorful world to us. Somehow, my heart keeps beating. Somehow, I digest my food. I don’t know how any of these things work, but they do. The whole ecosphere, including us, is a complex example of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” In the future, I predict that everything will continue to inter-be.

Some of the ever-changing happenings are wonderful. Some are terrible. Personally, I want to be on the Fun Team. I’d rather be kind than mean. I’d rather be happy than sad. I’d rather be good than bad. I’d rather have friends than enemies. I’d rather be part of the healing than part of the wounding. I’d rather live in love.

In the future, as in the past and present, there will be injustice. And tragedy. There’s no way around it. We’re all gonna die! That’s the way this game is played. Life and death go together. While I’m alive, I want to live! I want to live a life rich in meaning—with lots of friendship and laughter. I often think of the words from a song by Laura Nyro:

And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone,

there’ll be one child born, and the world will carry on,

carry on.

—Johnny Stallings

*

It is Sunday,—-September 1st! Thank god! Finally! The sun, although hot, is slanting at its oblique, golden angle, and the heat is less intense. Goodbye to the hot, flattening blasts of July and August. The nights are cooler; the sun is rising later and later, and setting earlier. I love the darkness.

I am driving and listening to All Classical. They’re playing Autumn, of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; Autumn Divertimento by Constantini; September Song by Kurt Weill…well, someone else obviously is happy about this month, this season.

My chrysanthemums are blooming, russet red, sunshine gold; the tomatoes plump and ripe.

I am euphoric, incandescent with joy. Peace love happiness and understanding coalesce into one moment of palpable transcendence. Sometimes there are these moments. I feel enveloped by abundance and love and joy.

Could this moment be aided and abetted also by the fact that I am re-reading (for the third time) the sublime Becoming Duchess Goldblatt? No doubt about it. For those of you who have not read about the Duchess, I would just like to quote some of the (anonymous) author’s words. Words that are nothing less than the beauty that comprises peace, love, happiness and understanding. I won’t go into the ‘plot;’ it’s too complicated.  Here we go:

“My lifelong training as my father’s child has been instructive here. How do you love everybody? Surely you can’t love everybody. Surely some people don’t deserve it.

I used to ask my father about this all the time.

‘I’m not sure what you mean by ‘deserve,’ he’d say. “You love people because they’re people, because they’re human beings. Not necessarily because you enjoy their company, which is one kind of love, but because you recognize they’re inherently worthy. Every person is inherently worthy. I’d argue it’s your obligation, regardless of whether you think it’s your job to decide if they’ve earned it.’”

Lyle Lovett figures into the story (really!), and he offers thoughts about the Duchess: 

“Duchess is such a unifying force of nature. That’s your book, as I’m sure you’ve already considered: how we can all be connected, how we all are connected by the most basic and most powerful of all, love, and the acceptance that comes with it.”

The Duchess/anonymous author as a young girl being chastised by a nun:

“I didn’t make eye contact with her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I kept my eyes down, but I heard every word she said, and I knew she was dead wrong. I knew in my bones, had always known, that my brother would eventually commit suicide, and I knew he was a child of God just as much as anybody else, and I knew that when he died he would be welcomed into heaven. If she’d ever seen despair up close, she would know what I knew, that God understands the nature of a broken heart. The saddest people will always be allowed to go home first.”

So with these heartbreakingly beautiful words, I leave it to you to enjoy, cherish, love, and celebrate this book and this season.

—Jude Russell