I thought I would write about the possibility of third acts in American life, about how some people’s prosperity and good fortune allow for a meaningful time after they finish a career, but the inexorable press of events made that essay subject absurd. Kabul will soon fall to a theocratic tyranny. The bodies of the murdered from the Ethiopian Civil War are washing up on the banks of the Tekeze River in Sudan. Climate-change wildfires are devouring Greece, Siberia, the American West. An aggressive, suicidal irrationality has tightened its grip on anti-mask, anti-vax men and women. The Delta Variant is reaping the masses of the unvaccinated.
Now, often, perhaps all the time, it seems as if a private life is being rendered obsolete and the everyday joys and trials of ordinary people becoming trivial. Even if we live in a vessel of peace and material comfort, in Chester County PA for example, the world floods in each second on our devices. The flood says that no place is safe. Dread is the undercurrent of our lives. One senses we are living on the cusp of much worse to come. I’ll leave those visions to you.
The only answers I have to this mess are trivial in themselves, or so it feels — one gathers to thank 18 year-old co-workers heading off to college and to wish them well. Or one buys a nicer shirt and trousers for a Reunion, throws frisbees to dogs, shops for groceries, meets an old friend for breakfast, spends an hour with a sister, listens to the stories of an old man, a friend, on the road, watches the slant of light turn toward autumn, pays the bills, readies a door for painting, wishes for rain, makes a wish with a child at a fountain. ‘Normal life’ goes on except that the context for normalcy has changed in light of the pressure of disasters.
I can still define ‘normality’ within the tiny pocket of humanity where I live but not for much longer. What comes next? What are we to do? Protect our loved ones. Offer assistance and kindness to strangers. Fight to retain a moral center. But what are we to choose as an anchor, the secure mooring we all need to help us labor toward that moral center? In my uncertainty, I fall back on what I know and love. I spent more than half my life with children. What I know is that they should come first. That is the north star upon which I must direct my gaze and thus formulate a response to the madness of this epoch. What will keep them safe, let them grow-up, give them a chance? I love animals and open space and light, fields, the sea, mountains, this astonishing creation. So I also think in terms of this question: What will preserve that which is in-human?
Each of us will have to discover our way through the new world that is coming for us. What will you do?
