What do we wish?

What do we wish for the children, thirty years from now? I live in a boom-town. More people are moving to Portland than to any other city in America, for the second year in a row. There is no dereliction left to photograph. Every unused scrap of land in the city is a building-site. Real estate is impossibly expensive, traffic is a hideous tangle, and forget finding a parking place. And yet people are drawn here, as I was, for the city’s supposedly “progressive” ethos, and we are bristling with dreamers, planners, and sustainability activists. There’s a chance it will be a healthier place when Bella is 35 than it is now, despite political stagnation, fears of earthquakes and climate change, and entrenched racism. As a “brown” child who speaks Spanish as fluently as English and comes from multiple ethnicities, Bella will inherit whatever it is becoming, if she decides to stay here.

I think of the question because I’m living the experience of Alexander Murray’s Egypt’s Thousand Days of Revolution: A Parade of Presidents (Banana Books Europe, 2015). It’s a compelling diary in vivid photographs and words kept by a Scotsman who makes his way to Egypt as a young thing in 1981 just when Anwar Sadat is assassinated; who returns in 2011 in time for Arab Spring; and who hangs around Egypt between 2011 and 2015, talking with cab-drivers, vendors, children, and waiters about what’s going on around them. 

Murray befriends a wily eight-year-old named Su’ud and writes, 

“So, what would I wish for Su’ud at forty? That’s in thirty-two years’ time, which mirrors the period since I first came here. I’d wish him an end to everyday experiences like tear-gas attacks and unlawful detention with beatings or deadly batterings. A house with a door and glass in the windows. Work that uses every qualification he acquires with enough money not to need to moonlight or go to Saudi Arabia, where he may be radicalised. A police force that helps and protects him in time of need. The confidence and opportunity to cast his vote for someone who represents his interests without fear of intimidation. The survival of that sparkle in his eyes....” (119).


What do we wish for all the children, because they are all our children, the Su’uds and the Bellas, the Fionas and the Fernandos, the Mankos and the Michaels? What kind of world do we want for them? What are we doing to bring that world we want for them?