Beginning a new semester once again I encounter bright, thoughtless faces staring at me as if I were a curious, irrelevant antiquity from a museum they don't wish to visit. The earth is fresh to them and they are unbruised, for a little while yet, by the unforgiving realities that life must provide. I shuffle papers and make solemn pronouncements about the beauty of learning. They yawn and ****** the ubiquitous cell-phones I have so cruelly ordered turned off. I no longer envy them their youth or their future. They remind me of pigeons ready to be plucked.
I am tempted to tell them the necessary brutal truths: half their marriages will end in anger and divorce, others will drag on in despair; there is no such thing as true love forever and ever; the jobs they dream of will mostly be empty and boring and obsolete in short order; the corporations and the usurers have already captured the world; that the earth is poisoned and dying a slow, certain death; how there are no more secrets and the government may now legally read their texts and emails, listen to their conversations and learn down to the last moan even how and with whom they make love; that there will be more than just rumors of war and they will have to pay for them in blood, loss and treasure; that God is otherwise occupied murdering children in the middle-east; that we have utterly failed them.
But I don't, of course. They wouldn't hear me if I tried. ******, weeping holocaust that it has always been, the world must be rediscovered by every shiny, new generation. Mentally wishing them luck, I do my job, stick to the syllabus, say a prayer for their possibilities, turn it all over to them, smile, and continue to pretend. - mce