Think of this as Volume 11, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I’ve written since 1997. Enjoy.
There is a feeling felt by earthquake and hurricane survivors, in common with those who have made it through war or a terrifying disease.
Joy amid the ruins. (Love Among the Ruins is a painting by Edward Burns-Jones.)
We are thankful for having made it through. We have life and (hopefully) people who care about us, still. Everything narrows to that fine point. We dare not look around at the devastation all around us. We concentrate on what we have, and we pray that the storm really has passed, that the rebuilding can now begin.
Yeah, it’s the election. But also the post-election. (UPDATE: Don’t assume every terrorist attack is all about you.)
For a generation Americans have been playing a zero-sum game with power, even while evidence of its futility piles up around us. We have felt hopeless, cynical. We have believed that tossing out one bunch of bums merely means another bunch of bums, that all we can do is trade hates, that life is nothing but conflict, the idea of political peace an illusion.
It takes great events to jolt Americans out of their complacency, forcing us into a search for unity and renewed purpose. Each disaster in our history has provided such an opportunity. At the end of each conflict we have promised, never again. And then again happens, again.
We have spent the last decade building a bridge to the 19th century. It has been fueled by our own hatreds, one for the other, our own hubris, our own fear. This only accelerated with the end of the Cold War, the latest "last time" in our history, and I have argued it happened precisely as a result of that event.
Most Americans came here, or has ancestors who came here, due to unacceptable conditions somewhere else. Whether it was over the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago, on ships hundreds of years ago, or by plane just decades ago, you saw in America a new chance to make a new start, and to do it different this time. (And if you are descended from West African slaves, you may have been given that chance by relatives still living. Thank them.)
But the better angels of our nature are easy to vanquish. They are easily distracted — maybe our better angels have ADD. Comfort can distract them. Theories can distract them. Religion can distract them. Desire can distract them. Every generation has had its excuse for taking its eye off what mattered, and focusing instead on threats, on the other.
Even the Greatest Generation succumbed. It was our parents who saw the value of uniting against Depression and War, who built our prosperity and who then let themselves be distracted, by harsh words and oppresion overseas, into thinking that "killing is the only thing they understand." Never mind that resolution and defense are not the same thing as war, and containment was not meant as an excuse to send young men off to die.
In the great conflict that was the Cold War, fighting was just one
tactic. Usually it was the wrong one. That war was eventually won on
the strength of our economy, of our economic, political and social
liberties, which drew the other side’s best and brightest here and let
us build a future Marx could not even conceive of. That’s why the wall
fell. Reagan’s words and spending merely accelerated the inevitable,
perhaps by a year, perhaps by a decade. But the die had long been cast,
and if we really believed the words we would have acted on them.
So for 16 years we’ve had it out. Cheney and those who believed as
he did created a new enemy, potentially just as dangerous, on the ruins
of Afghanistan. Liberals sought to redress every wrong of the past. The
big political question gradually changed from "What did you do in the
War," to "What about the war against the war?" Fighting in the latter
was the disqualifier.
Everything the Clintonites built up, the Bushies tore down. It was
enough for a cause to be supported by liberals to win the undying
enmity of so-called conservatives. All the lessons of the 20th century
needed to be forgotten, all the gains of the Progressives and the
Populists were tainted. Even economic equity, which Adam Smith had
supported in his "The Wealth of Nations," gained the smell of
socialism, as the winning side sought to destroy the losing one and use
21st century weapons to re-create 18th century conditions.
It was madness, all of it. On both sides. My generation fought a
battle our parents set up for us, one based on false choices and phony
equivalence. Meanwhile the storm came up all around us. Iraq. Katrina.
The economic meltdown. The destruction of all we’d said we stood in the
previous century, wiped away.
Enough. My generation has crashed the ambulance. It is time for a new
generation, rebelling against the lessons we thought we were teaching,
to take command. It is time to chart a new course, based on first principles,
into a world we know is complicated, into struggles we know will be
difficult, into the new world of the future which my generation dreamt
of but could never reach for, so bound were we by the Civil Wars of our
youth.
Walk away, Baby Boom. It is not your world any more. You didn’t
start the fire but you did nothing to put it out. Help when you’re
asked to, but otherwise please be quiet.
And it’s that quiet I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving.
