Summer Healing Moon
It would be easy to assume that the world is worse off now than it has ever been. Bernie Sanders calls the various smaller wars going on around the world, “World War III in segments.” There was an article in today’s NYT called for a new period of black radicalism. Not difficult to see why. The gap between the 1% and the 99% has widened, it has become not a gap but a canyon, a Grand Canyon. We can see each other across the canyon’s width but the distance is so great that the people on the other rim appear faintly, if at all.
The ocean’s acidify, the average temperature goes up, the ice caps melt and Shell Oil heads to the Arctic to drill oil wells. When the price of gas goes down a bit, Americans shift away from fuel economy to bigger and faster. Some scientists contend we are in the midst of a sixth great extinction, this one anthropogenic.
And yes, the macro view, the perspective from above, has all these things and so many more to see: poverty, epidemics, drought and water crises, forest desertification.
Yet. Men and women, men and men, women and women fall in love, get married. Babies are born, joy coming into the world with them. Children learn about the Wizard of Oz or Tin Tin or Ganesh or the Monkey King. They play in alleys, parks, war zones, schools and forests. Dreams and hopes trail in their wake like the contrails from a jet.
Here’s what I believe. We are a destructive, adaptive, mean, resilient, loving, biased species. When we push ourselves too far in war, in climate change, in racism and sexism, in concentrations of wealth and power, we take corrective actions. Clumsy and too hopeful probably, ill thought out and filled with flaws, yet with enough right to get us past the current mess.
Life is not a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Life is a tale told by fallible creatures, full of love and misguided dreams, signifying everything.
