They do not scoff at my idealism. They're too polite for that. Still, they think me sadly naive though I'm almost three times their age and have been scrubbed of most of the innocence I once had.
In the high school literature class I teach, we've been reading "The Road." It is a novel about a man and a boy living in a post-apocalyptic world.
It is a dark story. Everything in this world is gray because everywhere – in the air, on the ground, in the water – there is ash. Nothing lives but humans, and like their surroundings, most of them are ruined.
I find "The Road" harder to believe than my students do. That man could blow it to such a degree does not blow them away. That he could be so foul does not strike them as far-fetched, and when I ask them why, they tell me man has a history – past and present – of poor behavior, and at his core he has but one concern: himself.
They have a point.
If not pummeling each other, those who occupy this planet often can be found peddling lies or practicing thievery. When much about us and around us changes from one era to the next, deceit and treachery endure.
My students are in their final year of high school, and though greater than they like to let on, the amount of hope they have in humankind isn't great – or at least as great as it should be – and who can blame them? Wherever they look – their economy, their environment, their government, their culture – they find trouble.
They might not know the particulars. They might not know that 44 million Americans – including 15 million children – live in poverty or that the temperature of the Earth has risen almost 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past 50 years and that each of the past three decades has been the hottest on record.
Nor might they know that commercial banks, insurance companies and health care firms together gave more than $1 billion to members of Congress and other federal candidates from 1990 to 2010 or that two of every five babies in America are born to single mothers or that almost 22 million Americans age 12 and older have smoked, snorted or swallowed an illegal drug within the past 30 days.
My students sense something is awry. If not the particulars, then maybe what has them thinking events are going badly is that they've grown up among so much bad blood: 9-11; two wars; mean-spirited politics; a crushing recession.
There has been no shortage of conflict in their short lives. To discover anxiety and disillusion, anger and indulgence, they need only to flip on the TV or hop on the web at any hour of the day or night. Yes, other generations have grown up during times of tumult. But youth today have as much chance of escaping discord as they do acne.
Desmond Tutu has witnessed more human depravity than most. Nonetheless, in his book "Made for Goodness," the man who helped to end South African apartheid writes of human beings: "We are fundamentally good. When you come to think of it, that's who we are at our core. Why else do we get so outraged by wrong?"
Evil, suggests Tutu, is the aberration. "The norm," according to the archbishop, "is goodness."
My students are skeptical of that. Such notions are not the world they know, and when I tell them none of the problems confronting man is insurmountable, and, in fact, none is that tough given our brilliance and our bravery, they accuse me of being unrealistic – like I'm some starry-eyed dreamer. If we can fix it, they reply, why don't we?
That is a good question. So I ask them one myself: Just because something once existed and just because it now exists, must that mean it always will?
When considering human nature, we tend to think we are who we've been, and we will be who we are. But if that line of reasoning is true, what possibility do we have of mending our ways, and for that matter, why should we even try?
If we're convinced humankind is bound to be selfish and bad because it always has been selfish and bad, the likelihood of it becoming selfless and better fades. When, instead of aspiring to change, we accept our flaws and our faults as inevitable, every dire prophecy we make about the human race becomes destined to be fulfilled. We end up exactly like we predicted we would, and ironically enough, when we do, we shrug our shoulders and say: "Told you so."
In "Made for Goodness," Tutu writes: "To be hateful and mean is operating against the deepest yearnings that God placed in our hearts. Goodness is not just our impulse. It is our essence."
In this world and in the one in "The Road," man has made a mess of things. On that my students and I agree.
We agree on something else, too.
Neither of us wants it to be that way.