As I was scrolling in bed the other night I couldn’t help but think how history has judged Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of England in the late 1930s. He famously declared “Peace for our Time” after meeting in Munich in 1938, acceding to Germany’s annexation of the Sudentland. He (and others) figured that appeasement was the correct policy to avoid bloodshed and further conflict.
World War 2 began a year later.
I certainly don’t want to be another example of Godwin’s Law, and it’s not a perfect analogy by any means. But I’m not sure who my ire is more aimed at – the people who voted (wittingly or unwittingly) this madness in, or the people who sat by and didn’t think it important enough to vote?
It’s overwhelming. The news is relentless, and it feels like it’s meant to keep us off balance. (I saw a news article that unironically call it a “Blitzkrieg”.) I know many good people who are trying to make meaning of what’s going on by rationalizing. (Understandable but maddening). “There was excess fat in the government” is something I’ve heard all too often. Or finding things to praise in all the madness, those populist nuggets that seem designed to placate. Cutting the defense budget, mandating insurance coverage of IVF, trade protectionism or even cutting the penny – there are nominally some things that might in other contexts be praiseworthy.
But doing so ignores the context of savagery, cruelty and capriciousness by which this is all going down. It’s not just throwing the baby out with the bath water, it’s throwing the bath, the toilet, the bathroom, and the entire second floor with it. It’s not thought out or planned, it’s punitive. It’s meant to intimidate AND antagonize, and to hobble and cripple society in ways that are not easily recoverable. Which is, I fear, the point.
This past month I’ve been contemplating how to process it all. I can rant all I want on Bluesky, which feels helpful but only in the moment. It has felt dark.
Despite our insistence that life is somehow predictable or controllable, it will unexpectedly remind us that it certainly is not. The veneer we have of how things “should be” are constructs we have created that help stave of the necessity of having to contemplate life’s questions in its most primal form. We cannot drink from the firehose or contemplate the entirety of it, it’s just too much. Not only the unpredictable and unfathomable single events – death, illness, catastrophe- but the tides of history and happenstance that crash into our personal shores. So we have these ideas of what civilized people do – go to school! Get a job! Have a family! – with the underlying assumptions that there is a foundation and structure to support all of that. And it works only because we collectively believe it works.
Just like the conceit that 4 bucks I spend for a latte is worth 4 bucks only because we collectively agree a buck is worth a buck. We have economists and books and studies of thought and Nobel Prizes and professors that teach a new generation monetary and fiscal policy … all for a bit of creative fiction. An important one to be sure – one that drives daily life – but it’s all a construct that exists only because we collectively believe it does.
I’m not belittling all of this, at all. This is the world we live in, even it takes a certain amount of self gaslighting to get up and make it work every day. But it’s these times where events seem to be rattling the underlying structure that we’re tested. It’s an opportunity to rethink and reevaluate what is important, what is necessary, what is fundamental.
Consequently, I’m cultivating a sense of gratitude for this darkness. Because it’s only in that darkness you can make out where the light is really coming from.
And it’s there:
- A dear friend sent a photo of her college aged daughter. She was smiling with a blue sky behind her helmeted face, a group shot of her friends in Arizona. They were off-road unicycling. The image just makes me smile every time I see it.
- Having family in town for a few days, and spending a weekend together with amazing food and loving company
- Feeling the joy of creation by working with an artist, encourage to see what will come
- Booking extravagant tickets for a month long trip to Africa in the fall
- Inexplicably singing Sisquo’s “Thong Song” with my girls coming back from a day ski trip, celebrating their very individual successes
- Going to a local “Moth” Story slam in DC, and listening to 10 personal stories told with varying degrees of proficiency, but all vulnerable and revealing.
- Being in a like-minded group of men, being present, vulnerable and authentically sharing our deeper fears
- Engaging my creativity in writing, writing my first story in years.
It’s there, but only if you look for it.
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