OK, so I’m not much March 27, 2003
Posted by admin in : Uncategorized , trackbackOK, so I’m not much of a blogger.
So anyway, some war huh?
This is all really very strange, very complicated. I think even if it seems simple, the war is wrong, every day we’re still at war the wronger it is. Even if you know exactly, unquivocally where you stand, it’s still complicated. Even just opposing the war is complicated because there are so many reasons to oppose it, so many ways to protest it, so many challenges to your intelligence to fend off. Living with it is crazy, adapting to it, coming to accept it.
Here’s the thing that I’m dealing with about it:
I have always had a fundamental optimism — a sense that history has steadily moved in this linear progression from worse to better, in all sorts of little and big ways. It fits neatly with my own life, in which I started out as a baby lacking in competence but bursting with potential, slowly trading the potential in for greater competence, and always feeling I’m getting the better of the bargain. My life and history seemed to follow this pattern, so it allowed me to fit nasty business into a paradigm that I could accept. Things may suck, but on balance they are getting better.
That may still be true, but for the first time I really don’t feel that it is true. Maybe I’m arriving late at wisdom the rest of you came to earlier in life. Right now I think things are decidedly worse than they have been, and as far as I can tell, they are steadily getting worse. The middle ages were a horrible period of incredible suffering and violence, but probably today more people are starving than ever before. That’s the kind of thing I mean. Material things — not just political trends I don’t agree with — but actually more overall suffering, that’s getting worse. More injustice, more violence.
And our country, supposedly this “beacon” of hope, as we used to like to say, that’s over with. It will always be part of the lore, but it used to be true, and it’s not any more. I watched it go from true to not true. I was there. It was not pretty. We thought we represented the most highly evolved culture and form of government and society, but that was mainy true as a lot of potential. We definitely had that potential. That promise was real, valid, resting on a rock solid foundation of immanent manifestation. But it has been destroyed. It’s easy now to point to more tolerant, more sophisticated, less violent, freer, nations and peoples, than our own. And since these things are always in flux, the potential for realizing those promises may be greater in many other locales than here.
So here we are, looking back, looking ahead, and lacking any real authority, or and rational reason to expect things to get better, hoping they will.
I think they will, and they can, but I don’t necessarily expect that. And if it happens, it will be because of some new, ingenius novel development, not the flowering of the promise of democracy and freedom and American enterprise, but some whole new thing, as good as that, but not yet seen. Something universal, international, sheer genius that will emerge as a complete unforseen surprise, and absolutely NOT the result fo a bunch of people running around governing, or war-making, or propaganda fabricating, or even protesting.
That’s hopeful. It’s happened before, so I know it can happen again.
Sadly, I wouldn’t begin to know where to look, or how to will it into being. I may miss it altogether. The stuff I see, that I can point to or do somethign about, it all is so limited and inadequate. The president? A celebrity? A really good movie? A bottle of beer? A snappy web page? A neato blog? I don’t think any of these kinds of things offers enough possibility for novelty to really do it.
I think it will be more like an awakening, after a period of fatigure, people will grow tired of war and hatred and violence. Like criminals who experience relief when they are finally caught, I think maybe the idiots responsible for our current world conditions will be grateful when they no longer have influence on world events. I like to think so anyway. When enough people just shake of the horrible funk of the end of the 20th century and the dismal start of the 21st, maybe they will be ready for something new and that’s how it will happen.
That’s almost like believing in fairy tales, I realize. Maybe that will happen, but on what basis should we expect it to?
Well doesn’t that sort of happen? Isn’t that the experience of generations? Wanting to forget the Depression, or the war, or Jim Crow South, or Vietnam, or whatever crap our parents just barely survived and did not wish for us. Young people never appreciate what their parents suffered, but that’s how parents like it. No one wants their children to suffer. So somehow, magically, joy will return, but it may take a while, and it may not return equally for us all, or any time soon.
So good for them, those lucky people in the future to whom joy returns.
But it’s me I’m worried about.
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