I’m going to kick this post off with a quote from Ursula Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Hard times are coming.  Some would say hard times are here.  The media tends to promote the idea.  The future looks big and scary with a lot of doomsayers in our midst.  And kids get an earful of it. . . and an eyeful.  The media gives them great heaping gulps of the awfulness going on . . . and the awfulness we might be headed into.

It’s not a complete…