A smart civilization doesn’t debate the vagaries of a crisis. Personal and subconscious impulses don’t overtake one’s awareness of higher or simply better thinking; thinking expands awareness, sound judgment and expression. So much depends on our thought and emotions most of the time. We certainly don’t think identical thoughts, but similar ones. We are singularities, all powerful individuals.
In today’s world we observe that humankind has changed little in its basic responses. Civilization’s outward window dressing is our creative responses to the present. Scientific advancement is propelled by the present yet strives to extend its reach, discover and create for our future well being as well as its own blind alleys. Researchers regard that still as progress. The atomic age was our bete noir.
But we know humankind is an unruly bunch in all its conflicted beauty and misgivings. Our problems are far more self-inflicted than natural. If God created all this wonderful mess, what was He/She thinking? Christ was concerned with human suffering. If the conflicts and mess in the real world never seem to resolve themselves, (yes, many things have) there’s still the possibility that we can learn, evolve, better ourselves, find common cause and the highest of all, compassion. None of this is easy. If it were, of course, we wouldn’t learn anything of real value. The kinds of revelation that true knowledge through experience elevates above simple points of view and opinion takes courage and inquisition.
It is our lives we are being asked to change, reinvent in this new “age of accelerations” as the historian Yuval Noah Harari points out. We recreate the world around us while the fundamental problems remain intact. The window dressing is illusion: “make life better”, create the unimaginable, take tourists to Mars. But we’re surrounded by the intractable such as “human nature” which we use as a cudgel when wit fails us.
While at the same time, climate change and mostly pyrrhic victories, world conflict distractions, the same old me against you mentality thwarts, shunts, obscures, and stifles the general population: those who lurk within the chaos, create reactionary forces touting weapons of cultural demolition. It’s almost what else can they do? Yes there are answers, but the reality is so unresponsive. Democrats are still sorting out what has really happened. Fundamental problems beg fundamental answers. There’s too much camouflage composed of cultural myths and insincere, opportunistic, herd mentality driven, brain dead followers rather than thinkers. These are history’s antagonists now elevating comprehensible governance to the realm of Shakespearean tragedy. Where did you think the bard got his ideas? Who needs a stage and price of admission? We are paying it as we go.
It’s a wonderful world we’ve established for ourselves, but it won’t be forever if we can’t stop looking over our shoulder at the vanity mirror and not out of clear windows. We are told we are basically good people with honorable intentions (we know which roads were paved with those.) The deeper we sink into division the more inevitable the outcome. Everyone is looking at Merrick Garland our honorable attorney general to emerge from his cocoon and bring the miscreants to justice. The House just keeps laying out the miscreants’ deeds and there seems to be no end to them. Everyone is scratching their heads uncomprehending why Watergate felons were decapitated in clear fashion, and the current gang can float endlessly on a sea of criminality. It’s like the dam has to break at some point and time is running out.
America has always sailed on its sea of idealistic beneficence but history is jumping ship if we’re not winning the race. The winds will not be following sails. The wind is fickle as every sailor knows. We’ve made it a perpetual race, and have lost some, not all, of our bearings. Outside of the house where the wind blows free, the evidence of our misjudgments is manifest.
My friend and I were looking out across our beautiful Deerfield River. My optimism is always tempered by his practicality.
“So what should we be doing, I asked him?
“Well, I’m meditating on it,” was his reply. “That’s the best I can do.”
I started to say, “Yes but then what?” but stopped myself. Thought and silence have power. It’s the world out there that’s killing itself. By myself I’ll never win that battle, but I can make sure no one is defeated on my watch.
Alan Harris is the retired chef of Noble Feast and lives with wife Jane in Shelburne Falls. He’s working on publishing first novel, “The Preposterous Tale of Dan and Lee.”