Dear future child of mine,

If I have my way, you will be a little girl called Inara.  Well, your name changes, but right now it's Inara.  Either way, it's me.  Your Dad.  Inara, I'm sorry.  I am very sorry.  I did something terrible.  I made a terrible mistake that I should not have done.

I let you come into this world.

Inara, I want you to remember that you are loved greatly by me.  Nothing on this Earth will change that.  Even though your Mommy will hate for me to say it, I love you more than her.  I always told her I would, and I was right.  But I let you come into this world.  A world full of hatred.  A world full of pain.  A world full of anger.  A world full of war and famine and death and destriction.  I love you, and by gifting you with life, you were gifted with a lifetime of sorrow.  And my generation caused it.  I am sorry.

It wasn't just my generation either.  My parent's generation did the same, but we had the chance to change things for you.  And we didn't.  Not only did we not change it, but we made it worse too.  We made more wars.  We made more people homeless.  We turned away thousands of people who were in need simply because they came from the "wrong" country.  We isolated ourselves from the reality that we are one community, and instead of looking at what we had in common, we looked at what made us different.  Our gender, our skin colour, the type of person we loved, our jobs, our age, the country we were born in, the type of house we lived in, the type of shoes we wore, the supermarket we shopped at.  We divided ourselves and our commuities and our people.  And then we divided your generation.

In giving you life, we didn't give you a broken world.  We gave you a world that is on the brink of destruction.  And when it comes to you being old enough to fix things, you won't know how to.  You will ask me questions, questions to make sense of the world, to make sense of the inequalities, to put the injustices into some kind of order.  And I won't have the answers you want.  In the end, all I will be able to say is "That's just how things are."  And I will expect for you to change the world.  I will expect for you to fix the world.  And you won't be able to, because I won't have taught you how.

And because you won't be able to achieve my expectations, you will grow to resent me, then you'll grow to resent the world.  Then, in a moment that will break my heart, you will become a part of the world.  You will be a part of the system.  You won't change things, you'll continue things as they are.  When your member of parliament does not follow through with their promises, you won't challenge them, even though I will teach you to do so.  I will teach you to stand up for what you believe in and to stand up against the lies, but when it comes to it, you will feel ignored because you will be one of the few people standing up for what you believe in.  And things won't change and you will grow disheartened, and then you'll give up and accept that "that's just how things are."  You won't challenge people's beliefs that you find morally wrong.  You won't challenge people's mindsets that you know are based on falsehoods and misinformation.  You will hear what people want you to hear, not what you are bieng told.

You won't stand up to bigotry and xenophobia because you will be afraid of the violence that follows them.  And your voice will be the only voice you can hear in the crowd of blind, disgusting hatred.  You will be silent about generalisations because those that generalise are louder than you.  That silence is something we created.  That is why I have failed you, Inara.  I failed you because we are silent about the hatred.  We let others tell us what to believe and what to think, instead of granting ourselves the freedom to think on our own.  And when we are told not to think or that we are wrong or that we don't matter, we don't say "Why?  Why the don't I matter?  You matter, so why don't I?"  And when we see injustice, we don't challenge it.  We brush it under the carpet and let someone else deal with the problem.  "We're only one person, what can we do about it?"  We let the silence stand in our way of making real change.

We didn't write to our parliament and demand that they make changes for the betterment of the entire country.  We didn't fight against lobbyists, looking to fill their own pockets.  We didn't stand together, arm in arm, with our neighbours.  Instead, we stood up for our own wants and told everyone else they were wrong. They were wrong to love someone because it didn't fit with our belief.  They had to like a certain pop group.  They had to read a certain story.  They had to follow a certain series.  They had to like a certain member or pairing.  They could not like their own things.  And we didn't just limit to popular culture.  We did it to religion. We did it to race.  We did it to nationalities.

We destroyed the world because we turned our backs on love.  We redefined love to fit within our own belief systems and our own biases and our own judgements.  We rewrote the rules on love to fit our own needs.  We redrew the guidelines on love because we didn't like it when things didn't go our way.  And in doing so, we turned love into hate.

I am sorry, Inara.  I should be changing things.  But instead, here I am, writing a letter to an as yet uncreated image of my child, and apologising for something that I and the world should be doing in an attempt to passively aggressively ask where we went wrong.  In an attempt to get people to come up with the epiphany on their own.  The truth is, Inara, we let apathy rule our lives.  We didn't challenge injustice.  We cultivated it.  We built on it.  We let our own needs become our sole priorities and we imposed them on other people.  In doing what we thought was right, we actually did the wrong thing.  We looked in the wrong direction.  We looked at the thing we were told to look at and ignored the thing we were supposed to see.

We did as we were told.  And this is what we created.

This is the world you were brought into.  A world full of hatred, bigotry, greed, injustice, inequality, pain, agony, turmoil and torture.  A world with no love, no compassion, no empathy, no togetherness.  We kept humans alive by breaking apart our humanity.

This is the world you will inherit, Inara.  When you look back into your own child's eyes, remember what I am telling you now.  Because you will pass the baton to your child.  And one generation down the line, the world will start to turn the other way and it will become right.

My generation lost its chance and now we're putting it onto your tiny shoulders.  I have faith in you, Inara.  I wish I could say the same for the rest of the world.