The Grasshopper on Writing, Sunday Edition
Optimism vs. Pessimism
Observing the Collapse: Will Something Good Arise?
An optimistic America vs. a pessimistic America
I write about politics, current events, and climate. As you might imagine, it would be very easy to descend into gloom when you put all these things together on a daily basis. And gloom sells. There are writers here and elsewhere who traffic in it, very successfully.
I can’t be one of them.
It’s too easy. Things right now are fluid, we’re not in stasis. In my generation of older white people there is a mythology about times like the 1950s, when everything was simple. I was too young to be there but I can tell you it wasn’t. There was, for the first time, the potential for nuclear war and the realization that humans were capable of destroying all life on the planet.
That is not simple.
But this is not a reminiscence piece and I am not nostalgic. I’ve never been one to look back because…that already happened, it’s done.
I suppose, in some way, it makes me an optimist. The reality is that we cannot do anything about the past. This month I have been riveted by the January Sixth hearings and the story they tell of how close we came to the destruction of our nation by an unbearably shallow man.
And that is not even close to the worst thing out there. Another shallow man is systematically destroying another nation and, in the process, destroying his own. For what? we might ask. Some fantasy?
Then we have the weather, which is literally affecting everyone on the planet and we are not dealing with it at all. One side talks but cannot achieve anything because one party, the Republicans, have collectively decided this issue is one that only works against them.
They have traded their children and grandchildren’s future for power today.
Pretty dire, right?
I might be wrong but I do not think we will let this thing collapse. The hearings are a cause for optimism as they methodically destroy a myth half the country seems to be embracing. Putin may be reaching his limits in Ukraine. Sustainable energy technology is becoming more viable, economically, than burning stuff.
While experiencing this total chaos, we may actually be on the cusp of something new and better.
It is a rule of history, if there is such a thing, is that out of drastic change comes progress. At a painful cost to be sure.
My perspective comes out of a Buddhist idea, that desire causes suffering. We are a society consumed by desire. In politics it is desire for power and wealth. People build homes in places they know are dangerous because they fulfill an unrealistic fantasy. That beachfront place, that California spot in the woods, that eternally blissful home in Phoenix, all wildly unrealistic fantasies.
Fire and heat and rising waters will wash those dreams away and, maybe, a generation will learn what reality is.
And that’s the cusp of this. My generation is no longer living in reality, at least here in the US. Our desire has blinded us to common sense and it has spread. People living in borderline poverty have convinced themselves they need $50,000 trucks and bigger TVs. Wealthy people now routinely spend millions of homes they will almost never occupy.
We’re in a plague of desire.
This is not anything new. It will self-destruct because it is never sustainable. Like those dystopian stories on screens that we find so compelling, we will rebuild. We won’t learn, but we will rebuild.
That’s the nature of the beast we are.
So…it’s time to start fixing things. The optimist in me thinks that will happen because we like fixing things.
It offers purpose in a world where many of us wonder what ours is.
I saw the Dalai Lama speak once. He was asked to simply define Buddhism. His answer took my breath away:
“If you can’t help someone, don’t make things worse.”
Something a lot of us might keep in mind these days.