Ten! Nine!
Neil and Peter call out the numbers along with everyone else. They hold hands, feel like they are witnessing something monumental, something that could change things. It won’t, but that feeling, that spirit will live on in everyone here, everyone who sees. The spirit will change things.
Eight! Seven! Six!
Tariq sees that there are almost half a million people, around the world, who are watching this. Then he stops looking at the computer and looks straight at life.
Five! Four!
We’re going to do this, Harry thinks.
Three! Two!
I am alive, Craig thinks.
One.
We watch you, but we can’t intervene. We have already done our part. Just as you are doing your part, whether you know it or not, whether you mean to or not, whether you want to or not.
Choose your actions wisely.
There will come a time—perhaps even by the time you read this—that people will no longer be on Facebook. There will come a time when the stars of your favorite teen TV show will be sixty. There will come a time when you will have the same unalienable rights as your straightest friend. (Probably before any of the stars of your favorite teen TV show turn sixty.) There will come a time when the g*y prom won’t have to be separate. There will come a time when you will look at someone younger than you and feel that he or she will know more than you ever did. There will come a time when you will worry about being forgotten. There will come a time when the gospel will be rewritten.
If you play your cards right, the next generation will have so much more than you did.
Cooper will live to meet his future self.
You should all live to meet your future selves.
We saw our friends die. But we also see our friends live. So many of them live, and we often toast their long and full lives. They carry us on.
There is the sudden. There is the eventual.
And in between, there is the living.
We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.
That’s all we ask of you. Make more than dust.