So much has changed since my youth. New York was totally different when I was a girl growing up here seven decades ago. America was so different. At my advanced age, I have the luxury of looking back on a fine life and long career in public education. Memories of the many thousands of children who have been taught in schools under my administration warm my heart. Now, as Principal of I.S. 406 however, I’m faced with the responsibility of preparing a new generation of children in ways never implemented before. I believe my purpose has never been more urgent. And now I have the means to make radical changes.

Since the end of WWII, we thought we’d made the world a safer place. We were only fooling ourselves. We were so flawed that we couldn’t handle the awesome responsibility. We were rotting from within, ripping ourselves apart because we didn’t have the ability to change or the faith that only with change could humanity find respite from its ceaseless and sadistic cycles of hatred and destruction that are inbred in our DNA as a species. Our instinctual flaws made us betray the potential the Maker had provided for us to find Eden again.

The world is too large and chaotic now. Too many choices, too many opinions. We stand on the brink of epidemics, climatic shifts and disasters, and impossibly unbending opinions, convictions and divisions, all of which threaten to rip asunder the basic fabric of life as we’ve come to know it. Demagogues whip up public sentiment and exploit deep-seated prejudices into explosive hatreds that let loose the most horrible instincts in the human animal. Some say the great experiment we called America is being exposed as a sham, nothing but what it probably always was, from the early 1600’s to now—a financial venture meant to enrich oligarchs and their money-hungry investors. Political parties polarize around vastly conflicting ideals that splinter the entire population into warring factions. Anarchy looms if we don’t root out and cure the cancer of human nature.

Now, for the first time, we have the tools to create a type of harmony and stability—a lasting and constructive and all-encompassing happiness—that never existed in the past. We have the technology to eradicate bias and prejudice of every sort. We can fashion a society which runs smoothly and where people are genuinely compassionate with each other, where we all think in the same, useful direction. We can finally set things right. It has to happen. It will happen. The alternative is awful to contemplate.