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Both are true. On the surface, the rich and near rich have more money to toss around, so the values of the age appear callously self-directed. Yet the plight of the poor is a constant subject of concern and speculation, arising regularly in the platforms of both political parties and in public debate. Below the glacial surface of inactivity, real hearts stir on this issue, but they move nothing. This secret of the age has a secret of its own: we embrace all groups but the poor.
What is it like to live in these times? Take a tour with me. The country feels enormous still, and various, in spite of airport roads that look identical everywhere and stores that unite the country in a fast-food mythology. The electric glass of Dallas could not be mistaken for Boston's pedagogical tweed or San Diego's white sail. In New York City this season, the sky dims by 4 in the afternoon, and the shop lights pop on like gold-and-white lanterns.
Anyone flying across the country is surprised by how much free, unpopulated land remains between the crowded clusters in the middle and on the two coasts. People in Great Falls, Mont., can look out their windows and see 60 miles to the start of the Rockies, blue-purple in the south. The mountains glow orange in New Mexico. In Vermont, your foot cracks snow like wafers around a part of the woods where a brook, not yet frozen, applauds itself in a rush. High over Iowa a hawk hangs still, watching a small boy kick a box in the road.
Do such things sound familiar to you, or has the world advanced so exponentially these hundred years that our common sights are fossils? Futurologists guess about your life, drawing pictures of robot doctors, television sets that one can talk back to, cars that park themselves. There must be more to you than that.
What did you do to handle the overpopulations we predicted? How did you protect the seashores? What did you do to keep the ozone layer intact, the energy supplies, the trees? Have you eliminated ignorance, brutality, greed? You haven't, I know; but one has to ask. Does your world revere the past -- not us, specifically, but the past in general? That might be a Christmas gift from us to you: the assurance that a knowledge of the past is far more valuable than a knowledge of the future, being that by which moral action is educated.
In some ways, then, we are giving you the future in this letter, which seems a right thing to do for one's children's children's children. Look back to us as we look to you; we are related by our imaginations. If we are able to touch, it is because we have imagined each other's existence, our dreams running back and forth along a cable from age to age. Hold this paper to the light. It is a mirror, a delusion, a fact in the brief continuous mystery we share. Do you see starlight? So do we. Smell the fire? We do too. Draw close. Let us tell each other a story.