Fighting the Blues

Another day of tumultuous news. It makes it hard to stay positive. I work on it by thinking back to my parents’ generation. Can you imagine living through The Great Depression, the “dust bowl" catastrophe, and the collapse of social order in one lifetime? Just imagine the relief upon emerging alive. Then imagine seeing a faint glimmer of hope just as the radio announces the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

Oh, it may have been a “great generation.” I won’t argue that point. I think all generations have some greatness in them, along with their share of shortcomings. I know that many think the so-called “Baby Boomers” had theirs. I point out to you, though, that many of them went, when their country asked, to an immoral war during a time that had its share of tumultuousness. More than 50,000 of them never returned alive. All provided their service under criminally poor leadership, a service for which their country has never forgiven them.

We all press on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” Today the dreadful past has created a gaping hell hole that draws us toward the bigotry, hatred, and racial injustice from which we had thought we were escaping. We had hoped against hope that past racism lay dormant, but like a 1950s subterranean movie monster, we awoke it by electing a man of color as president.

Now, bigotry is creeping over us like a blob landed on Earth from an unfriendly planet. In its worst form, we find that it is a political tool—a highly effective political tool. “I hate the same people that you do,” has replaced "We're all in this together," and “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Will we survive? It seems up for grabs as some at the highest echelons of power seem, for some indeterminable reason, to be using all the power at their disposal to prevent it.

For hope, I look back, as I say, to the generation before mine. Their country survived, although not as intact for some of its citizens as for others. And when I think of how hard the struggle for survival was for my parents, I can only marvel at how much more difficult it would have been for them had they not been white.

Would today have been different had more Americans voted out of hope rather than out of media-induced dislike? I don't know. As Ernest Hemingway said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"