I love this closing dedication in Ann Laura Stoler's edited collection Haunted by Empire:

This book is dedicated to my children, Tessa and Bruno, who enter adulthood at a moment when U.S. empire continues to bear down deftly and crudely, in so many places, with enduring force. Let us hope that their generation recognizes the rhetorical and material forms in which U.S. empire sustains itself, that they don't confuse imperial stretch for compassion, that their understandings of empire's intimacies confront its tortures, and that their working vocabularies can identity those gradations of intervention and sovereignty that call themselves by so many nonimperial names.