I spent the lion’s share of my working life as a teacher, a profession that rides on faith in a) the young, b) our species, and c) the future. Some teachers lose that faith, and a handful maybe never had it, but anyone who hopes to be good at teaching over the long haul had better hold tight to faith in that trinity of reasons for teaching. There’s no shortage of things that can make a person doubt their faith in the young, and even more reason to question the belief in the value or perfectibility of our species. And, in these dark days, it’s as hard as it’s ever been to deposit much hope in the viability of our future.

Those hopes can be especially hard to sustain when you view our tribe on social media. If, as I have done, you spent any time reading the written correspondence of people, famous and obscure, who are now long dead, you can develop a nagging suspicion that the human race ain’t on an uptick toward transcendence these days. If the future judges us by whatever is up there in that “cloud” we all hear about, we’re not going to come off looking too great. Aside from the fact that some of us lived in a time that produced presidents like Nixon, Reagan, Dubya, and Donald Trump, there’s also going to be a record of our utterly inane concerns as the heat of the world was building to boiling.

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