Looking Back from the Future

New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristoff is distinctive in how often he thinks outside the frame of current events and controversies. In a recent column he considered how future generations will look back at the behavior of our generation.

Just as we look back in horror at what strikes us as barbaric behavior of respectable citizens in the past, people in the future may look back at our behavior with disgust, particularly, Kristoff speculates, in our cruelty toward billions of animals, most horrifically in factory farms, in our failing to act decisively to arrest climate change, and in our indifference to malnourished children living in extreme poverty, most of them in what to us, but not to them, are remote corners of the world.