Holding On To The Future
Holding On To The Future: An Anthology of Visions, Dreams, and Questions was written by the students of Helen Bernstein High School in Spring 2023
Introduction
AGAINST BLADE RUNNER
(LOS ANGELES 2023)
1982:
Blade Runner stuns moving-going audiences with its opening shot - called the “Hades” shot - of a futuristic Los Angeles in the year 2019. It shows an endlessly sprawling landscape oversaturated with industrialization, punctuated by oil refinery burn offs.
1992:
Political economist Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama declares “the end of history,” claiming that the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union has signaled the end of humanity’s ideological evolution.
2014:
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher popularizes the concept of “the slow cancellation of the future,” a condition in which life continues on, but progress has somehow stopped. He diagnoses our time as one in which no truly new or significant cultural or political movements are possible. There is no longer a future to hope for.
***
These ideas were very much on my mind when I came up with the theme of “the future” for this, our fourth Paramount Writers
Workshop. In all honesty, I was curious to know what young people had to say to being told time and again by past generations that they had no future to look forward to. As the project - and this book - took shape, I began to realize that this was not just theoretical for these student authors. As a couple of them point out in their stories, they are facing down a future of ecological disaster. They have family members in war-torn Ukraine. And they saw their school in the news cycle when multiple students on their campus suffered Fentynal-related overdoses just a week before our first session.
Those aren’t uplifting things to read about, and maybe not what you expected when you picked up this book. But to ignore those realities is to deny the circumstances in which these student authors were asked to imagine their futures. Knowing them, you might assume that the pages that follow contain visions of dystopia to rival that of Blade Runner.
In fact, I showed that “Hades” shot to the student authors, and I asked them to respond. One response: “It’s boring.”
There is one more great thinker’s words that inspired this project. Black science-fiction writer and Los Angeles native Octavia Butler, who once said/wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns.”
The idea that “the end is nigh” isn’t anything new. And, as that one student author so eloquently pointed out, it’s boring. It’s so easy to imagine the end of the world. Much easier than imagining something else. Yet, that’s what these students did. They took on the challenge of imagining futures - their futures - as something else, as something more. Amidst, in spite of, against dominating narratives of finality.
They shared their visions. Forged by familial and cultural legacies, in communion with their environment, and in pursuit of their passions.
They shared their dreams. Of travels of self-discovery, adventure, or liberation. Of making it out, and getting made.
They shared their questions. Taking on the form of mysteries, putting themselves in the role of the detective, the seeker, and finder, of answers.
So maybe it’s time we stop listening to the prophets of doom. Rather, we should be listening to these student authors. They are the future, after all.
—Mike Dunbar, April 21, 2023