On coming back from two weeks out of town, I read through the back issues of the Recorder. I was brought up short by one letter that despaired of humanity and its future altogether — “Planet Earth better off without us.”
I am acutely aware of the messages that we adults put out. So I want to offer to my children, my grandchildren, and their peers an altogether alternative message. There has never been an era in history in which humans have not confronted great challenges. The Bubonic plague killed nearly one-third of the population of Eurasia, one out of every three people; volcanic events have radically altered Earth’s climate for years; Nature threatens droughts, murrains, floods, asteroids, earthquakes, reversals of Earth’s magnetic pole; we humans have excelled at bringing grief on ourselves through wars, enslavements, and tyrannies.
So we are all deeply indebted to our forebears, back many hundreds of generations, who rose to the occasions they confronted, who decided that they’d do what they could, who didn’t give in to despair, who trusted in one another that, while there was loss and grief along the way, the effort was worth it, that we, together, were worth the effort, worth struggling on despite the pain and loss that is inevitably part of life.
It’s easy to despair. In 1941, Nazi Germany held all of Europe, minus Britain, firmly under its control and, by the fall, had troops within a few miles of both Moscow and Leningrad — poised to control, from the Urals to the Atlantic, the single largest empire the world has ever known, with its vast array of natural resources.
Then, within a few days in December, my parents witnessed our country dragged into that war with the loss of more than 2,300 sailors, the destruction of 12 ships and 160 aircraft, and the damaging of as many of the same, in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One day later, the Japanese attacked the air bases on the Philippines, decimating the largest air force contingent we had in the Pacific theater, a disaster that allowed the Japanese to overrun the Philippines in three months and cement their control of the entire eastern seaboard of Asia, from Manchuria to Southeast Asia.
Nothing looked hopeful. Anywhere. We didn’t even have the guns or ammunition available to train the troops we needed to prepare to go to war. It would have been easy, even sensible, to say at that point, let’s just draw back and huddle here, buffered by Atlantic and Pacific, and let the rest of the world play out its insanity.
But, thankfully, that’s not what our parents did. Let that example stand in your memories. My mother lost one of her brothers and her sister lost her fiancé. Very few families were not touched by loss. But two totalitarian states were brought to an end, and in their ashes, those two countries have become beacons of freedom and prosperity in the world.
There is sometimes a terrible cost to progress but it is possible and has happened again and again and again in human history. We have the capacity to endure and to succeed in the struggles we face because we have one another as resources and, together, we present an awesome force of imagination and ingenuity.
Do not be misled by the impatient ideologues, those who tell you all needs to be torn down, that, somehow, starting over from scratch is the only way to achieve progress — both Russia after 1918 and China after 1949 show the true heritage of the ideologue.
On the other hand, don’t follow those who would have you believe that standing on a street corner with a sign is “doing something.” There will be work to do, hard work, challenging, even frustrating work. But we are here today only because our ancestors rose to the challenges they faced and built for us the world we have today.
Take heart and stand tall. You are not alone and you are rich with potential. More often than not, “The clouds you so much dread are great with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.”
Stephen Hussey lives in Greenfield.