I’m in some turmoil about whether I’d be able to cope well emotionally with what our future may hold.
We have three crises stacked up on each other: 1) the coronavirus pandemic (with its public health and economic dimensions), 2) the (unexpectedly) serious threat to American democracy, and 3) the impact of climate change as it gathers momentum.
And it’s not clear on any of them that these crises will be resolved well. So I envision possible futures I fear I could not bear.
I’m trapped by several aspects of the way I’m put together.
The first of those is that I seem to yearn – more intensely than most people -- for the world to be as it should be: for people and the organization of the world to be constructive, not destructive; to be kind, not cruel; fair, not unjust; honest, not deceptive.
That combines with a second aspect: i.e. my habitual deep feeling of engagement with what is going on in the world, so that my own well-being rides on whether things are getting better or worse.
I seem to be incapable of shutting off that intense connection. And I’ve tried.
My first effort to disconnect with a too-painful world situation was in the late 60s, when the Vietnam War kept grinding on, year after year, in such a futile and ugly way. I decided I’d just stop following the news, focus on my own life, and tune out what that war was doing both to Vietnam and to our own country.
I couldn’t do it. Not even for a week. And that’s been my experience several times since, when things got just too ugly with no end in sight.
My well-being so tightly tied to the state of the world around me makes me frightened about how the rest of my life might feel. As painful as was the era of the Vietnam war, what might lie ahead could be considerably more painful, and uglier to behold.
According to the futures markets, there’s at least a 50-50 chance -- that later this year -- America might collectively choose a course that threatens America’s constitutional order and bolsters the force of thuggishness in the world. (A course that – given what we’ve already seen about a president’s policy on climate change -- even potentially darkens the ultimate prospects for human civilization as we know it.)
I’m not sure I can bear living in that kind of world for the rest of my life. (I’m in my 70s, but there are plausible scenarios in which the darkness in our world does not lift for half a century, if ever.) It’s an entirely possible world where brokenness has pretty much taken over:
where the spirit of greed and the lust for power will have full sway over our nation, so that our recovery from this pandemic will be engineered to serve the rich and mighty at the expense of the whole of the American people; where, as a result of the degraded nature of the power in charge of the world’s once “indispensable nation,” the planet as a whole will careen into chaos; where unchecked climate destabilization leads to famines: and where waves of immigration –driven by droughts and wars -- further stress the international system. where the breakdown of the international order leads to an intensification of conflict among nations.It would tear my heart out to see the world gone so wrong (and I don’t want to live the rest of my life with my heart being torn out).
I’ve always understood there will be ups and downs, but I always imagined there’d be a limit to how far down things might go.
I look for hope in the idea I might disconnect from the world (as I could not do during the Vietnam war) and focus all my attention on all that’s good in my own private sphere. But my bet is that shutting out the nation’s and the world’s slide into darkness would be beyond my capability.
So I pin my hopes on America restoring to power a force that’s constructive, and that advances basic American values. If, instead, our nation takes that downward course, deep suffering seems inevitable for me.
I’d like to believe that I’d find the strength to accept that suffering while also finding fulfillment in the good things in my own life (love, comfort, beauty). That I’d have the strength of spirit to be grateful to be alive, even while also having my heart torn out from seeing a tragic failure unfold in the surrounding human drama.
But I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes.
I am not generally a praying man, but there are times when the need is so intense – like prayers of soldiers in the foxhole – when I reach out to Something – that’s beyond my ken, that cares about the world -- to make everything all right (or at least within the range of the acceptable). This is one of those times.
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This piece will be appearing as a newspaper op/ed in my very red congressional district (VA-06).