FUTURE’S HEIRS
FROM MOUTHS OF BABES, DOUBT — AND COURAGE
The idea was to walk into a few fifth-grade classrooms on a sunlit October morning and ask the kids what Houston would be like when they’re grownups. If you want to know the future, I thought, ask the future.
I expected predictions of whimsical inventions, and I figured I’d be entertained.
And the kids at Harvard Elementary, a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math magnet in the Heights, delivered.
Nikko De los Reyes imagined not only flying cars but flying stoplights. Emma Garfield expected that Houstonians will have invented more suitable clothing for our sticky hot climate — maybe hollow jackets stuffed with ice packs. Bronson Guerrero dreamed of a parentcontrolled pod that would let his busy mom and dad send him on errands to the grocery store. (Yes, please.)
And Lucas Rodriguez — a forthright kid in a UT shirt and dark, rectangle glasses — wanted Houston to have plenty of amusement parks, so families wouldn’t have to go all the way to Galveston for a good time. He also hoped that the city would solve its identity issues.
“If you could have some kind of thing that people would think of when they think of Houston, that would be cool.”
Classmate Kathleen Alex acknowledged the medical center, and felt it was commendable that doctors help kids with cancer, but that’s also a downer.
“Basically my main goal is to make sure there’s some kind of monument besides a bunch of hospitals.”
Tyler Darden, who said his mother drives him to the bus in the morning, said he wanted bigger roads in the future so that people didn’t have to sit in traffic. The traffic makes people fall asleep in their cars, he said, “and plus, my mom’s always getting mad.”
Camille Olson, who dreams of living in the hubbub of New York City, found the notion of big change naïve.
“People in the ’60s, they thought there was going to be time machines and flying cars. They thought it was going to be like in the ’80s. But in the ’80s, there was barely even good TV,” she said. “So I think it’s gonna stay the same.”
This is the kind of stuff fifthgraders should say. But mixed in with the fun were heavier concerns.
Take Ashby Church. When I asked about the future, his response was to yearn for the past.
“Whenever my dad was a kid, he tells me about how he could do whatever he wanted, running around and playing outside without having to worry about anybody hurting him,” said the boy with tousled hair and big, blue eyes. “And now, your parents won’t let you go across the street. They won’t even let you get the mail. It’s different. And I want it to be like my dad tells me it was.”
I asked him what had changed.
“People got more secure,” he said. “Because of all the threats.”
Chloe Gonzales, who said she likes to watch TV news with her mom, predicted the future would bring laws that don’t let people carry guns outside their clothes or onto college campuses: “I think we shouldn’t have to worry, when we go outside, about someone hurting us if they’re carrying around guns.”
Noah Villegas, a soft-spoken boy in a Harvard choir polo, said, “Houston needs to have less police brutality and less racism.”
He wanted the future, in general, to have “not so much hate.”
“Instead of fighting — we’re all one race, we’re all humans. We need to work, instead of against each other, we need to work together.”
I asked him if he thought the people of the future, many of them sitting at tables around him in Mrs. Figueroa’s class, could accomplish this. He wasn’t sure.
“In the future, I think there will be more hate,” Audrey Tynan said matter-of-factly in the next classroom, explaining that the millions on the losing end of next month’s presidential election will only get angrier “if they don’t get what they want.”
Then there was Wyatt Buquid.
“What do I think Houston is going to be like in 20 to 30 years?” said the brown-haired boy with faint freckles and a firm grip on his water bottle. “Well, here’s the thing: it’s all about, basically, chance. If you watch the presidential debates, we are talking about America’s 20-trillion-dollar debt. We’re talking the terrorist group ISIS and that al-Qaida is still going strong. …”
He went on, in a sermon that eventually touched on population growth “spinning out of control” and the Industrial Revolution.
“Everything has an up, and everything has a down,” he said. “The Industrial Revolution made pretty much a faster way to get around and took horses off the streets. But what did we do? We created massive pollution, which started global warming, and we’re burning through fossil fuels like crazy.”
His conclusion, though, was surprisingly sunny: “People can change the world, but they just need the courage to do it.”
There were plenty more worries weighing on the bright, diverse group of students patiently sharing their thoughts: homelessness, oil prices, and most especially, pollution. And, for a generation raised on and by electronic devices, they seemed pretty fatalistic about technology’s toll on society: people will stop hiking and playing in parks and doing anything physical outside. They won’t notice the world falling apart around them, because they’ll be staring at a screen.
Sometimes, the predictions mimicked literature or film.
“When I think of the future, I think of the Lorax,” said Yana Zabarov, in her pigtails and dimples. “All the trees will start disappearing, and animals will start dying.”
“You think that’s going to happen here in Houston?” I asked. “Yeah,” she said. “Then we will die if all the trees die, because we’ll have no oxygen,” Jacob Cloer chimed in.
“We wouldn’t be around to tell,” said Savannah Golden grimly.
“That’s why Pablo wanted to plant trees!” another classmate intervened, offering a political solution to our slump into dystopian hopelessness.
Pablo Ramirez, sitting a table away, was running for student government on a platform that includes tree-planting. The candidate himself was generally more optimistic than his peers, explaining that solar power, electric cars and coalitions of concerned citizens will cure much of what ails Houston.
By show of hands, it appeared most kids didn’t plan on living in Houston when they grew up, either because of the weather or because they found it boring or because they wanted to live in their parents’ hometown or country.
When I asked the last class, with a roster of 27 students, how many thought Houston’s future would be better in 20 years than it is today, I counted five hands.
“Everybody look at those people,” I said, torn between comedy and consolation. “Those are your optimists. You’re having a bad day? You go up to those people, and they’ll make you feel better.”
By nature, children are supposed to be optimists. But I left that elementary feeling a bit like I’d just visited a nursing home.
I didn’t know if I should be proud of those students for being so aware of the problems facing our world or devastated that so few believed they had the power to change things.
We, and generations before us, made these wars, bought these guns, dirtied this air, jammed these freeways, and accumulated this debt.
Now we want our children to clean up the mess. That pressure is bound to lead to anxiety and resignation.
I don’t think the answer is turning off the TV news, or skipping the chapter on greenhouse gases. But we shouldn’t forget to emphasize the progress, and the people who did in fact make things better for the next generation. Those kids need to hear about what Terry Hershey did for nature, how the Rev. Bill Lawson and Barbara Jordan fought for civil rights, how James A. Baker and George H.W. Bush embraced civility and “a thousand points of light” and what medical pioneers like Jim Allison over at M.D. Anderson are doing today.
All parents want for their children a world, a life, better than what we had. We can’t let that notion become as fanciful as a flying car. In the “city that could,” we have to remind children that they still can.