Future No Future

Advice for those who have asked about children.

I understand the dangers of the following: suburbanization, conformity, heteronormalization. I understand the violence of compulsion to replication of the same.

But I wonder if in worrying about futures that look like infinite extensions of now we don't grant too much agency to the present. Can anyone really fashion a child who is a self in miniature? Can anyone predetermine the shape of the years that child will inhabit? Can anyone persuade a child not to say no?

"The children are our future." What could be more maudlin, trite, wrong? They're not our future (who is this our?) but a future that unfolds regardless. To send a being into that unknown holds more risk than reassurance. Sacrifice, too, but not complacency.

I often think of the choice Wendy and I made to raise our children as Jews. I research antisemitism's long history. I know that times of peace are broken, suddenly. I wonder, sometimes, in my darkest moments what the consequences of this choice not theirs will be for them, for those who come after them.

And yet.