Popular in the pundit’s playbook are accounts of the interdependence of all or most current crises. The rise of totalitarianism, climate change, pandemics, war and income inequality are seen as each contributing to the other in a tsunami of suffering and chaos.
Reading such, we are tempted to seek comfort in the simple uninvolved life. Pile on too heavy a load, and no one will want to pull the cart, or even believe the cart can be pulled. A status quo will be prolonged as long as people feel that change is just too hard a job, or involves too high a cost, or might “blowup” a system that seems to be holding together, if fragile, for the time being.
“Danger, Will Robinson!” (As fans of Lost in Space cried in the 1960s.) When we focus on the negative feedback loops and interactions of perils and human tragedies, we do not see any of the positive, corrective, feedback loops that also exist.
Many of us have not turned our backs on current crises. My generation has created innumerable attempts to push back, fight back, against the encroachment of what the self-appointed “wise” call “End Times.”
Science and technology birth almost daily a thousand new ideas to ease the poverty of nations and the enslavement of many. The daring of new music and art and ideas flourish. We listen to and we learn from our trials and our failures. Reagon said a lot of things that were political schlock. But it is always morning in America, and there’s no requirement that you take a cold shower. Say that this is just another viewpoint of the twisted optimism of a young America, or of an America old and doddering. While it obviously can’t be proven, it can be felt. And that, perhaps, makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We are even now shaping the future. Perhaps the men and women who work for justice and peace seem too few. Perhaps their voices do not carry far enough in the tumult of the present. Many dismiss their dreams as unwise and hopes unfounded.
Our present efforts are not wasted. A new generation is rising from the ashes of our partial failures and the seeds of our planting.
I have always liked Vachel Lindsay’s lines about the implacable forces of progress. Governor of Illinois) John Peter Altgeld, the leader of the urban half of the Populist movement, pardoner of the Hay Market rioters, was reviled in his time by many. They saw at best his efforts for reform as quixotic. A man out of step with his time. A visionary. He died largely forgotten.
Vachel Lindsay wrote of Altgeld:
Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
“We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.
….
The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,
…
That should have remembered forever . . . remember no more.
Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,
The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,
A hundred white eagles have risen the sons of your sons,
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.