The mind tends to wander a bit on a long, solo road trip. There’s only so much singing along to your own music anyone can take, (especially if you have to listen to voice like mine.) Eventually you check out local radio — in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and on — and counter-balance that with a few select podcasts.*
That said, the take away from a recent spin listening to AM radio out West, reading local papers and catching up on sage punditry is that things have never been worse. This can’t go on much longer. A day of reckoning is coming. Survival is not assured.
It’s enough to make a guy pull over, abandon the vehicle (along with all hope) and like a diseased bull elk, wander off toward the high mountains and accept the end of days.
But is this accurate description of January 2022? Is this the worst “things” have ever been? Furthermore, how do you begin to judge such a thing?
After 70 comparatively comfortable and happy years on this planet I find it very difficult to buy into the thinking that humankind has never experienced a worse confluence of perils. Still, it’s a question worth posing every so often, if only to regulate your temperature.
If you’re an age-peer of mine you remember the Sixties. A cold war with the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. Assassinations of enormously popular (liberal) leaders. An immensely foolish, ill-conceived hot war. Near constant racial violence. The white, male power structure mashing the fire alarm over drugged-out, over-sexed hippies “rioting” in the streets and angry, fed-up women calling the old boys out for the sclerotic anachronisms they were.
It was a wild time. But not unlike the proverbial frog in the cookpot, the average teenager, tucked away on a Midwest prairie, thought of it all as nothing other than normal. Bad. But normal. More craziness like what has always gone on.
The fever of that era broke, mostly. The war ended. Bull Connor-style racial violence subsided. Doped-up kids got jobs. Women were heartened by the gains they made, albeit still a long way from cracking the glass ceiling. In a way time itself was an analgesic.
So it’s tempting to regard our moment today as essentially similar to then, or to any other spasm of rage and horror. Whether WWII, the repeated waves of Mongol hordes, the religious-based genocides of the Dark Ages or, hell, the stone-club and spear attacks of one Cro-Magnon tribe on another. Mayhem has always been with us.
But … but … there are several powerful differences between 2022 and any other era of stress and chaos.
At no other time has the entire human race faced a common looming lethality like climate change. Plagues have come and gone. But climate change will, by any and every estimation, inflict enormous physical, financial and emotional damage … and remain, likely escalating its chaos year after year.
I’m among those who think most of the insanity of this era is due to our inability to comprehend and adjust to the effects of social media, a revolution in human community-building, delusion-spreading and anger-inflammation unprecedented in the 200,000 or so years we’ve “cooperated” with one another. Never before has so much superstition and ill-will been able to spread so quickly and with such virality across the entire planet.
Compounding that menace is of course a segment of the leadership class exploiting superstition and ill-will for personal gain. That sort of thing too though is as old as the aforementioned cave men. But the number of exploitables, is now thousands of times greater than the Stone Age, and looking at population growth, easily double what it was when I was a teenager.
Of coyurse, age itself has to be acknowledged. With its remorsely increasing frailities aging enhances our sense of peril. We aren’t as strong or as psychologically flexible as we were in youth. We then become more isolated and fearful as a consequence of feeling susceptible to street crime and mutating viruses. Simultaneously, having a measure the young don’t have for how things once were, we are less able/willing to see a clean path forward. Hopelessness adds to our sense of doom.
The young may not have such feelings in the same depth. But I’m sobered by how many 20, 30 and 40 year-olds acknowledge climate change (and the leadership class’s inability to be serious about it) as a very dark cloud on their personal horizons.
I came to no definitive conclusion on the question of whether this is as bad as it has ever been. Clearly, raging ignorance withstanding, there are millions of people of intelligence and conscience determined to forestall and counter the impacts of climate change. So that glimmer of hope exists.
A lot of this sort of thing was rolling around my alleged mind as I took a side trip in western Kansas to see a geological anomaly known as Monument Rocks. It’s barely five acres of bizarre chalk towers, standing up to 70 feet tall amid the wide prairie of grazing cattle. The rocks are an 80 million year-old remnant of an island in the once vast inland sea that split incipient North America way back then. Every inch of the towers representing 700 years of accumulating sea creatures and sediment.
The point?
You can look at these strange pillars and arches and see only an accumulation of death. Or … you can see tens of millions of years orf life that has given way to grassland sustaining a new generation.
Which is to say that, while not supremely comforting, we can accept with certainty that life will go on long past this chaotic moment. You and I may not experience the same comparatively comfortable and happy style of living 20th and 21st century America provided us. But in some form life will survive.
https://podcast.thebulwark.com/january-6-was-built-on-years-of-lies-and-propaganda
https://getpodcast.com/podcast/ezraklein/e-o-wilsons-plan-to-save-the-world_7fd63512c2
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/michael-pollans-trip-report/id1528594034?i=1000531452648
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/68-reality-and-the-imagination/id733163012?i=1000382815809
Thank you, Brian! Lots of important insights here to be thought more about.
Thanks for the podcast list–I’ll be using it, as I am getting ready for a road trip myself!
My opinion: YES, this is the worst time ever, and not just because of White Fear and the Legacy of Slavery, but more importantly, because Truth itself has lost its currency. “Speaking Truth to Power” used to be an effective weapon, but since The Karl Rove Bush Years and their successful defeat of “The Reality-Based Community,” Truth itself became less important than power and winning and “belief.” It wasn’t just the republican elite that became inured to the stain of hypocrisy: it was the entire party. They LOOKED UP TO Rove and the lying elites as being “smarter.” This War on Truth has been coming a long time, and I agree Brian, Social Media and Fox News brought it into the water we drink.
It feels like the worst, perhaps, in our lifetimes….but certainly nothing compared to a world war, or the bubonic plague, or even the Spanish influenza. Nothing at all like the Mongol invasions, and not (yet?) as bad as the Dust Bowl. Certainly not like 1929-1937.
Perspective is something we gain as we grow older, but we need to understand the limits of our lifespans…