Select Entry- Richard Koffarnus

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest.

The poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, encouraged us to "Fear not for the future, weep not for the past." Rather than dwell on the past, which is probably not as good as I remember it anyway, I prefer to look to the future without fear, and with a good deal of hope. I am optimistic about the future because I work with its citizens every day. As a college professor, I teach the young people who will make the future a reality, and I like what I see.

Pollsters tell us that today's young Americans are more conservative than their predecessors. Their attitudes about sex, drugs, and life are more mature than teens a few years ago. For example, in a recent UCLA survey, 39.6 percent of students agree that it's all right for two people to have sex, even if they barely know one another. That number is down from 51.9 percent in 1987.

Young people today also feel a responsibility to give back to their communities. At the small college where I teach, our 500 students performed about 15,000 hours of community service last semester alone. They served in nursing homes, hospitals, schools, churches, and other civic organizations. And they are having a positive impact on our town and the area around it.

Finnish diplomat Max Jakobson reminds us that our task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it. Today's youth are busy doing just that, and that makes me optimistic.