“Don’t Trust Anyone over 30!” contained a little wisdom, because the passing years fatten each of us with a career, a self-image, a mission, a mortgage, family, dogs or cats, friends, jobs or political positions, and/or other entanglements with society that demand priority, so that the question of what the village or nation should do doesn’t get answered so purely.
But I saw 60 in my rear-view mirror long ago, and 90’s a dim vision near the horizon. So that retreat from telling pure truths to power seems “mature,” and I’ve been wrong and right enough to recognize that not much is how we see it, and that even the Richard Nixons loved their dogs.
We old folks see the world around us less clearly than the young folks for whom it’s “The World,” the only one they’ve known since they reached consciousness, with all the details precious. To us, it’s a superfluous epilogue to the real world we discovered in our own youth.
During my youth, older folks misunderstood what was happening because they viewed it through the lens ground by their own time. We who questioned the Viet Nam War were traitors or cowards, because anyone who did that in 1941 was. My father, who’d left graduate school to fly bombers in the Pacific, saw it that way, initially. I also remember a German-born janitor at college, who viewed the sixties through the eyes of someone who’d fled Hitler’s Germany, and worried about repression. The Eisenhowers, Dulleses, McNamaras, and Kennedys who made that huge mistake called Viet Nam recalled from youth Chamberlain returning from Munich proclaiming “Peace for our Time,” as Hitler prepared to gobble up all Europe.
Even so, things are especially nutty.
Donald Trump Time is not entirely a spontaneous fire at the intersection of aggrieved population Street and a narcissistic con man Avenue, with the Leader proclaiming his anger every six seconds. We’d like to think so; but he is also the logical end of a road we’ve been traveling a very long time. Yeah, we started with love, of each other and of this wonderfully natural world, and of our freedom, from all the ills and repression and intolerance of where we’d come from. (Unforgivably, we didn’t notice original residents or the humanity of folks we enslaved.)
Along that road we dropped community, caring, and other excess baggage to seek more effectively wealth, position, security, and perhaps a flash of fame; we formed corporations that soon took us over; we created computers, which soon dominated our lives and kindly did our thinking for us, and even our socializing; we divided into political parties, thinking to govern ourselves better, and they grew into huge entities that hated each other, paralyzing government.
But this is extreme. Compare Tom Homan, caught dead-to-rights taking bribes, with the FBI prosecuting, ‘til Donald Trump nixed that and made him immigration czar, with Sherman Adams, a minor embarrassment to President Eisenhower. Back then, vaccines dramatically saved a lot of us. Now Trump’s health guy proclaims unscientific nonsense about vaccines or painkillers, and the rest of the world tells populations not to bother listening. (Ike had actually helped end a war, a pretty significant one, but he never bragged about it a fraction of what Mr. Trump has done.) The world confronts climate craziness – a mere “hoax.”
I think we’re reliving early 1930s Germany. Perhaps we’ll find a better solution.