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The Hopes of our Ancestors "Each of us has some kind
of tenacious family ancestry to call on in our work. No matter the
glass and steel look of our office, somewhere in each of our backgrounds
lies a layered, gritty complexity, an inheritance of people who came
through. Life is too difficult to survive without tenacity and perseverance,
and we all hold an unbroken thread of survivorship by the very fact
that we are here, the latest in a very long line of survivors. Some
of our ancestors were dogged, silent, and inarticulate in their holding
on, some courageously outspoken, but imagine their disappointment in
each of us, looking from the perspective of the particular heavens
they inhabit, when we do not take another step for them. When we do
not make a frontier of our own lives. If they were quiet in their own
lives, they must want us to speak out; if they were loud and vociferous,
they must want us to be more tempered and wiser with the fire, but
none of them, surely, can stomach our willingness to hide ourselves
in a bland compliance to powers or careers to which we have made ourselves
slaves." |
