All this may be true: but most of it is beyond my reach, and would be beyond my reach even if I were not old and deaf. My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected it to look is not going to help matters. I'll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)
I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, "You can't make socialism without socialists." Likewise, you can't make democracy without (small 'd') democrats.
Such business as I still have in the world is the cultivation of democrats and the democratic virtues (which are, after all, just a subset of the virtues, period). The lamps may not be relit in our lifetime, or in our grandchildren's. I am sorry about that. It is painful to watch an old established democracy attempt suicide, and the slow motion slide into comic horrors, while we wait to see if the attempt succeeded, is not much to my taste. But you play the hand you're dealt.
1 comment:
These are difficult days, and I agree, it may be our grandchildrens' time before the damage we're seeing now is repaired. A sobering thought for me as the mother of a fifteen year old, but here we are.
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