As my son graduates from college I have a thought for him and his generation.

This world you are inheriting from us is a fixer-upper. Like any broken down old home the fixes are of two types. The stuff that has gone bad And the stuff that was built bad

This one has so much to fix As you graduate from college I write to you from a town where more youth goes to jail than college That will be for them and you to fix together My generation of privileged college grad do-gooders made it clear that you cannot fix it for them. My generation of ineffective political opposition has left all kinds of employment for your generation. To make the place livable you will have to fix a lot of things. In your century you will need to know forestation, watershed, wetlands biomass and biodiversity no matter what your major or your job. To make the place livable you will have to grow a lot of trees and use a lot less energy to live your day to day lives. Climate change is just one a string of broken windows that will be fixed to make the house of ecology a place everyone wants to live. To make the place livable you will have to learn how to stop killing people. You will need to find out and then tell us all, what the meaning of the word imperialism means in modern times once it has been dusted off and fixed up a bit after so much abuse. If you find that imperialism is something that no longer exists you will need to find out how to fix your own mistakes. A livable world is probably one that has a place for the people living in it. That means you need to fix a way of work that gives so many so little opportunity to be a producer and not just a consumer. Fixing up an old home often requires that you remove the gyprock of the faade that covers its walls. This is the democracy you inherit. The faade is rotten and the basic idea was cheap and flawed. Some of it was never designed to provide a democracy for most of us anyway. When you fix that you will have to deal with a far older piece of unfinished business: the dictatorship of money and those who have it. As the Bard put it: There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls, Doing more murders in this loathsome world,

Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell. I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none. So please, take this world and call it yours. Fix what has degraded. Fix what never worked. Fix what was never done but should have been. I know you will do it because it will be yours to fix.