I Don’t Know

I hope you will not turn away from this essay because it isn’t about writing or dogs or life in the country; the things I usually choose to write about here. Normally I keep to those sorts of subjects because they are what I feel most comfortable writing about, and understand the best. Today I want to focus on tomorrow.

I just don’t know what to make of the current social climate. We are beset by enemies at home and abroad, we are arming citizens as if we were all just graduating from boot camp, we are letting the people who make more in a week than most of us earn in a lifetime dictate fiscal policies and control who serves in congress and perhaps even the White House and you and I have almost nothing to say about it, given the loud voice with which money speaks. I’m scared.

I’m scared because at this time of my life I should be feeling the warmth of a life well lived and enjoyed, and turning my face more to the past than the future, but instead I am filled with concern for our younger generations. I’m worried that they will not have the future they expect; that we, the people who were to have given them a future, will have given them a world trying to destroy itself instead.

I understand that some of what I am feeling is just an old man’s squint at the bright light ahead, but in fact, I do believe that while we will always face war and the threat of war, we are approaching a future that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced not just as a nation, but as a global neighborhood. I don’t want that bright light to come at the end of a countdown.

Somehow we seem to have become so polarized that there is no more shading of images. Everything is cast in absolute terms. Do you follow the realities rather than the newsviews? Do you really base your understanding of the world on sound bites? And if you do, is that fair to those who come after?

If you read (and I assume that since you are following this blog, you do), and you listen to what others are saying, then you must be hearing the same things I’m hearing. Do you wonder, as I do, who is listening? It doesn’t seem to me that the people we want to hear from are saying what needs to be said, but instead are saying what they think will bring in the most coin. Dollars, pounds, yen, you name it: everywhere the political life of our world seems in the hands of those holding a fist full of currency.

Is there an answer? I don’t have one. I just know that in the long run, we are the people most affected by what the free-spending politician-owning class does. And political party doesn’t seem to matter.

And if that is true, then neither do we. Matter.