The new week begins with an event we’ve been anticipating for a while. Since November, there has been an endless array of think pieces about what it all means, what it won’t mean, what to expect, you name it.
By this point, it’s all become tiresome anyway, because the entire range of thought varies from wishful thinking to doomsaying to educated guesses. Few want to admit that we don’t know what’s to come, but that’s not the kind of thing that gets readers or prompts buzz on social media. We crave certainty and hard answers, but one of the scariest things about life is that there are times when we just don’t know, period. And that lack of knowledge about what’s ahead has prompted some people in my circles to be worried, angry or otherwise highly concerned. At least one person I know has moved overseas, and I’ve heard rumblings from others that they have considered it. And if I had a dollar for every comparison I’ve read or heard between this moment and (insert gloomy historical precedent here), well, I’d be leaving motor yachts as tips.
Now, honesty compels me to admit that I’m not thrilled about how things turned out, any more than I was the first time around. But I’m looking at things with some perspective. As a historian, I know that movements ebb and flow, and at some point this wave we’re in now is going to crest and break, and things will swing the other direction. It always does. We just don’t know when it will happen. (I remember thinking in 1993 that we were finally seeing a new generation, one closer to my own, finally getting an opportunity and that the future was limitless. My generation was about to get its chance and we were going to change the world. Well, we know how that turned out.)
I’m also conditioned by the fact that I grew up in, and still live in, a state whose government is in miniature what the new/returning administration would like to enact nationwide. Ours is a state in which, any time a law or a ruling comes down that’s the least bit progressive, our state’s attorney general (who wants to become governor so much it’s written all over him) is among those immediately filing a lawsuit to stop it. Very little of this is new to me, and I know how to adapt to what may be to come.
Even beyond this, it’s that I’m long past weary of the burlesque that so much of life has become, and how the burlesque of popular culture has infected our governance. This has bothered me for a long time: that part of the process of choosing our leaders, the people who would have to answer that phone call at 3 a.m., involves how willing you are to dance on camera with a talk show host, or the quality of your campaign’s memes, or any of that business. But now it’s gone beyond even that: that you must out-patriotic the other guy, must out-respect-the-military the other guy, must out-religious the other guy, must deliver the coldest put-downs, and now you have to be willing to deploy four-letter words in public…it goes on and on. I’ll write more about this someday, when I can organize my thoughts about it, but it’s been exhausting seeing things that I have quietly revered all my life be hijacked in the name of financial or political profit, or otherwise fall victim to this societal burlesque. And once that burlesque pays off, the culture coarsens that much more, and good luck moving whatever it was back to what it was before.
More than that, though, it’s that I’m a pragmatist. Even if I don’t care for what’s about to happen, I have responsibilities here. In a week or so, I will have classes to teach and television programs to produce and students to look after. I have responsibilities to my family. And I also have responsibilities here. After all the years and all the money we’ve plowed into our little homestead out in the woods, we can’t afford to just up and walk away from all that. We wouldn’t want to, anyway. Too much of our lives are invested here. Moreover, I have as much of a stake in this state and this country as anybody else.
Maybe some folks would say I’m giving up. To me, it’s embracing reality. It’s the Stockdale Paradox in action. It’s accepting the realities, being clear-eyed about them, and finding the best way to move ahead. And it’s also knowing that even with the stuff going on at levels far beyond my own, there’s an awful lot of things that need my attention closer to home. I’m no good to my students and colleagues unless I do my job there, and that’s a ton of work in itself. I’m no good to my family unless I do my part for them. And I’m also no good as a citizen unless I participate as I can, vote when the elections come around, make my voice heard when it needs to be heard, help those in my community who need it. All the platitudes and good intentions in the world won’t matter if I don’t back those good intentions with the work of my own hands and heart. In sum, I have plenty with which to keep my hands full, and to be part of that fifth column of decency I mentioned some time ago.
And, even beyond that, it’s the long view. I know that no matter what happens in the public sphere, it’s not going to change how the birds land in our back yard and search for the seed we’ve scattered for them. It’s not going to keep my cat from demanding to sit in my lap any time I’m in my recliner. It’s not going to repeal gravity or change the laws of aerodynamics. It’s not going to change how gorgeous Rita Hayworth was in three-strip Technicolor.
Even more, I think about how the last four years seems to have passed in a blur, about how life seems simultaneously so long and so short, especially the older I get. It becomes a blur. Something I remember feels like only yesterday, but on cross-checking it I realize it was three years ago. The days pass into weeks, the weeks into months, and the next thing you know another year has passed. It’s sobering. And you realize, especially as you begin to lose those closest to you, that life is too short to spend it with a cloud over your head.
Moments like the one we’re in now, when the long view is so necessary, and when life will go on regardless of what happens at the macro level, make me think of what the eminent historian Will Durant wrote:
Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.
Life will go on. So will we.
