To My Beloved Grandson

Grandson:

I’m writing this to you now, even though you are so young you’re unable to read or comprehend it, because I feel we are at the edge of a great precipice morally and idealistically and practically. I publish this letter in its entirety in the present, the year 2026, when you are but a scant few months old. A copy will reside with your parents to hold in trust for you, that you may have a physical reminder of me and my thoughts and my love for you even after I’m gone. I recognize it as a quaint old custom, the passing along of an old fashioned letter written on paper, by hand, in a form of script that you may look at and never actually comprehend. To you, when you are finally presented this artifact, it may be as alien a form of communication as I found Sumerian cuneiform, or Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Incan knot language. I’m hoping your mother and father school you a bit in the art of what is known as cursive writing in the here and now, even if the educational system abandons the practice. I believe it is important to be able to write and especially to read cursive, and the most important founding documents of our nation were written in that script. I believe it is vitally necessary to be able to read those primary sources in their original form, rather than rely on an unknown human or machine mind’s translation.

You must know I write this to you as much for myself as I do for you. As I compose this, I’m currently 65 years, six months, and 15 days old, and the reality for me is all that time has been claimed by Death. It is irretrievable, all those moments that have made up my life to this point countless as grains of sand – and just as barren. They all exist as memory, flashes of data floating round the hard drive of my brain, some pushed to the surface more often than others, some embedded more deeply into the gray matter and less easily called to mind. This is the way of things right now, and I work through all that by recognizing that my present role is to transmute those memories, especially the hard ones, the shameful ones, the mistaken ones, into wisdom. Because I can use wisdom right here and now. And right here and now is the only place where life is for us, Grandson. I want you to remember that. The sooner you can get a handle on that, the better your life will be.

I have been on a path of reconciliation these last several years, and it seems to have prefaced, even mirrored somewhat, what is going on in our nation and our world right now. We are currently ruled by a Nero, and I’ll leave the research on the original Roman emperor for you to undertake on your own. When you do, you will see the similarities between Roman Nero and the current American version striking, to say the least. But one thing I have noticed is the bullying, the falsehoods, the insatiable lust for power and money exhibited by this man and his enablers – they are all elements of a deeply wounded, terrified child desperately looking for what we all crave as human beings: love and acceptance. He fills those voids with bluster and puffery and gaslighting, but the void within him has never been and will never be filled.

Because even this Nero, a man of almost limitless power, a man who as of this writing has gone so far as to incite a war in the Mideast as part of his long-term con – this Nero still doesn’t feel like he’s enough.

He doesn’t feel he’s enough

He does not feel he’s enough.

I repeated that so you can see how important it is, and to lead into this most important message to you from me:

You are enough.

You have always been enough.

You will always be enough.

Your parents will do their best to make sure you learn this, just like I will and your other grandparents will. We’ll tell you, we’ll show you, we’ll teach you this truth as best we can.

You are enough.

I tell you this because of that great precipice I mentioned earlier. We will all tell you this, and more importantly we’ll all teach you to live this belief, because your life, the quality of life you have, the happiness you are able to generate for yourself and your own friends and family, all of that depends on you not only learning this simple truth, but teaching it, too. You’ll teach it by how you treat your friends, how you treat the people you love, and especially how you treat the people in your life who are destined to teach you hard lessons, the little Nero wannabees whom you will inevitably encounter.

Because the more you spread this reality, the more joy you will have and the more joy you will bring to the world. And we’re gonna need all the joy we can get, Grandson. We’re gonna need all the joy we can get.

Things will get hard. Difficulty is part of new beginnings. I cannot even begin to imagine the kind of world you’ll inhabit, but I already see signs of a massive surveillance state springing up around you, one that tracks your movements, tracks your contacts, tracks the content you consume. Already we see books being banned, history being whitewashed and revised. Division is right now being sown between us as citizens so we are distracted enough to not notice the infrastructure of detention centers and data centers and extractive capitalism that is quietly ramping up. ‘Flooding the zone,’ they call it. Distraction as strategy. Distraction as policy.

I hope for the best for this country, but I know an impending darkness when I see one. You may need to live through some dark times. But you are enough. You are enough. You are enough, just the way you are.

I also know that we are on the edge of a new dawning. I don’t know what it will take to get there, to realize the promise, the ideals of this country, but I think it begins with recognizing the difference between right and wrong. And I know it begins with you and everyone around realizing that simple truth: you are enough.

You will need to be a revolutionary, Grandson. Revolutionaries organize, they write, they paint, they make poetry, they sing, they make graffiti art, they dance – they tell the truth. Most of all, they vote. Always vote, Grandson. Not just at the polls, but with your money, your time, your company. Vote with how you live your life.

Something big is coming. I don’t know how it will manifest, but I’m trusting it will provide the opportunity for us to come together as a country and as a world. I’m not going to see it through, but I’ll do my best in the time I have to teach you what I know, to love you like you deserve to be loved, and to remind you every time I see you:

You are enough.

Now go be a revolutionary.

All my love,

Your Grandfather