What Will You Tell the Children?

One day, a child may ask:

“Were you aware of SHS? Did you know what it was trying to build? Did you know what its leaders stood for?”

And you may have to answer:

“Yes. We knew.”

Then the child may ask:

“Then why did you reject it? Why did you deny humanity the chance to build a better future? Why didn’t you find out whether it could help us?”

What could you say?

Could you tell them you were too busy? That it seemed unfamiliar? That you didn’t know whether to trust it? That you thought someone else would look into it? That you assumed the people responsible for the future would build something better?

But what if you didn’t build anything that answered what SHS was trying to build? What if you never took the time to understand whether it could benefit humanity on a scale that would matter to your own children?

Then the child might ask the question that is hardest to answer:

“If you knew our future was at stake, why didn’t you even try to understand?”

The future may ask this question in an hour, in ten hours, or in ten years. The child asking may not even be born yet. But the choice will still belong to the adults who had the chance to look, to listen, to question, and to consider what was being offered.

No one can promise that every idea will succeed. But there is a difference between examining an idea and refusing to examine it; between finding real reasons it cannot work and deciding that it is easier not to know.

So if you rejected SHS, what will you tell the children?

Will you be able to say, “I looked at what it stood for. I asked what it could mean for humanity and for you. I tried to understand it, and then I made my decision”?

Or will you have to say, “I knew it was there, but I never made the time to find out what it might have meant for your future”?

The children deserve an honest answer. And humanity deserves adults who remember that the future they inherit is the future we chose to build—or chose not to.

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I want you to write this for whoever might need it, whether in the present or the future. Whether the future is in one hour or in ten hours or in ten years. How would you explain to a child, being one of those who were made aware of SHS, the leaders and everything that he stood for, and them still denying humanity that. How would an individual explain, or can possibly explain why they rejected this, when it was the only thing that was investing in a better future, and the parent themselves wasn’t building something that matched that, nor took the time or care to figure out whether it was something that could actually benefit the future of humanity as a large, as that future is the future of their children.