"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; for there is nothing new under the sun." [Ecclesiastes 1:9]
If it wasn't the Bible, it was Shakespeare; if it wasn't Shakespeare, then it was my 7th grade teacher Sister Mary Ursala. From among the three, I learned just about everything I know. Which is not to say everything in the world, but just about everything I've needed to navigate the world.
College professors, social net-workers, and think tanks will challenge such hubris. More precisely, though, it's really humility. It's that sigh which comes with the dawning realization that while everything in our lives changes, lives themselves remain virtually the same. It's that dawning deduction which reports back how human nature and the human condition have endured intact despite history's most tectonic shifts. It's that dawning humility hard to grasp at first as we keep witnessing so many bold new headlines being made by our prime ministers, presidents. popes, scientists and of course newest Oscar winners.
Dawns rarely erupt upon us. Most often they creep in upon us. And so it's easy at first to believe everything that shines so smartly on the horizon is brand spanking new. "New" has always been one of the most efficacious adjectives in our language. From Washington to Hollywood, Wall Street to Main Street, Silicon Valley to Radio Shack, "new" has a rhapsodic ring to it. Still -- what Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare, and especially Sister Mary Ursala seem to advise is this. The victory will not go to the most excited witness to what's new in the world. Rather, to the witness whose excitement can be steadied by understanding what's also enduring in the world.
To put all that another way, it's how a lot of pitching coaches try to steady their new recruits in spring training. One who I knew would always pace in front of his eager rookies as he held up a ball. "Baseball is a game of basics. So lets start there! This, gentlemen, is a baseball...."
Oprah Winfrey, queen of the teary talk-show hosts, almost killed my inner child. Maybe not intentionally -- actually she's forever cherishing this spark of youth still flickering within us -- but she did it relentlessly. Lets be honest, Oprah, you can sometimes kill the thing you love by loving it too much!
That's what almost happened to me. So much slobbering love and affection and talk talk talk. I never doubted you and your guests for a minute. My inner child -- that wondrous small spirit of youthful innocence -- had survived very nicely throughout my eight decades. Until you started turning it into what it's not. It's not just all about being giddy and goofy and wanting to shoot the moon. What's more it's not only about being rebellious and racy and looking to wear more purple.
My inner child survived this long simply because there's something about him I like. Even admire. I'm guessing the same way many of your audiences feel too. Instead of a flash of late-in-life ostentation, our inner child is more like the warmth of the-way-it-was. The way it was when we were still young enough to believe in fairies and goblins, Santa and saints. Young enough to understand Charles Schultz's comics gallery of little folks. Young enough to feel the world is good, our life is safe, and everyone loves us like Mom and Dad.
Oh, I understand! How ephemeral and gossamer are these illusions. Traveling the adult world all these years, we learn full well that Linus's little blue blanket is no longer enough to get through a day, let alone a life. We also learn full well it's a hard Darwinian struggle for survival out there. But we're still here, so apparently we knew how to survive the struggle.
Still....
That inner child Oprah and other do-gooders give so much attention is not merely a wispy memory. Or emotional escape. Or excuse to act out some long repressed fantasies. That inner child most of us have come to know is, well, it's just us...! It's just who we were, who we are, who we will likely be till the day we die. In case anyone has forgotten, it's many of the very same hurts and loves, trials and triumphs, fears and epiphanies we harbored as seeking children just outside the front door of that place we once called home.
Our world has changed much since then. Our mind and bodies and experiences too. And yet candor demands -- no, invites -- us to reflectively admit that our essence has remained mostly intact. Because, after all, there really was and still is only one of us in this world.
Lets admit it. We take ourselves ever so seriously. Especially in this modern age when we can record every precious moment of our precious selves on our precious tapes. We possess a capacity ancient emperors would have killed for -- a permanent history of ourselves for all time.
And yet...
When later historians -- even later family members -- come across these collections, most will have scant importance. Little chance someone some day will come across our bar matzoh or anniversary footage with the same excitement of discovering a lost Mozart manuscript.
Talking about ol' Wolfgang, what would truly be exciting is Thomas Edison's last dream. He was working on a way of re-capturing the sounds of the past. Working from the principle of conservation-of-energy, he believed the energy of our voices is never lost. Somewhere in the cosmos the electrical impulses of past utterances might be found and re-created.
Think of it...! Mozart in rehearsal for his Jupiter Symphony. Alexander the Great at the conquest of the Persian capitol of Persepolis. Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. Caesar at the moment of his bloody death in the Senate. Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death!" Lincoln addressing the crowds on that rainy field at Gettysburg. Warren Harding playing poker and drinking whiskey with his cronies in the West Wing during Prohibition.
Then there's General Patton slapping that hospitalized GI in Sicily. Hitler's last rants from inside his Bunker. Martin Luther King the morning he stepped out on the fateful balcony. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Oval Office selling the Iraq invasion.
Not to mention what Clark Gable said to Scarlett during some of the Gone With the Wind rehearsals. Or those tense moments backstage just before Sinatra or Elvis or the Beatles stepped out before the crowds.
While we're dreaming Edison's dream, how about the first halting conversation between mom and dad the day they met. Or the feelings expressed between them the night you were conceived. Or then there's --
But wait. Even Edison would admit that some sounds and voices from beyond the barrier of time were meant to fade away right along with time. Perhaps just experiencing one day at a time is quite enough....
The older we are, the more we remember; the younger we are, the more we imagine. How then can the young and the old together imagine our impending future? Say, waking up in the year 2050...?
Chances are it'll be a world without newspapers, post offices, land-line phones, books, checks, or privacy. But imagining what we won't have is easy. The footprints to those futures can already be seen in the sand. More to the point, what will be new about us? about how our bodies & brains will operate? about what will still make us us?
Using an imaginary trajectory from 2050 births to deaths, one guess may be as good as another:
* No Orwellian baby hatcheries in 2050, but surely babies-by-genetic-order. Planned parenthood between you and your obstetrician will now take on bold new meanings!
* Schools and instructors as we know them may be passe, considering we can now purchase digital chips to be be inserted into the brain for mastery of any of a hundred distinct disciplines!
* Hospitals and doctors may now service our bodies electronically, from wherever they are to wherever we are!
* Interpersonal communications may by now surpass the speed and spread of today's world-wide-web, via brain chips which will bring us everything our networks, Internets and tweets do now!
* Love and arts? Well, matters of the soul may be a little more challenging for souless technologies, but surely there will be attempts. Perhaps 3-dimentional screens in our homes by which we can program live performances of the fine arts; also appearances by those whose psychological resumes seem most compatible with our own psychological resumes!
But first, a reality check...! Quite likely most of the above is quite likely all wrong. The history of futurists (from the Delphic Oracle to Nostradamus to the 19th C Millerites) has proved embarrassingly inaccurate. One 2050 prediction, though, is likely to prevail. The human condition...! Whether it was spawned just outside the closed gates of Eden or just out of the Darwinian dusts generated by the Big Bang, it has remained stubbornly unchanged throughout our recorded history. The very same human traumas and triumphs featured on tomorrow's media will, most likely, be very much the same as on yesterday's papyrus scrolls.
And so the eternal battle of the eternal titans will probably carry right into 2050. The irresistible force of new technology meeting the unmovable object of old humanity. Any bets...?
Polls and surveys have become part of the American fabric of life. We now have them for most everything. What we eat, what we wear, how we vote, how we pray, when we watch television, when we have sex. There's comfort in statistics. Sliced and diced into neat rows of numbers, they have the unmistakable allure of the queen of the sciences: mathematics.
Computers of course are essentially mathematical. It's the dazzling beauty of their billions of sequencing 0's and 1's which bring them to life. Endow them with their power. Permit them to store enormous bodies of data with which to process enormous numbers of questions. In just the last month, here are some of the results. Inviting the discerning to see if there is a pattern:
EDUCATION
59% of American high school students say they cheated on a test during the past year. 21% say they stole from a parent or relative. 80% say they lied about something significant to their parents. Still, 92% report they're satisfied with their personal ethics and character [ Josephson Institute of Ethics ]
RELIGION
70% of Americans say religion is losing its influence on national life. Still, 61% say they are a member of a church or synagogue [ Gallup ]POLITICSPresident Obama's latest job approval rating has reached 50%. Still, it remained in the mid-40s throughout much of 2010 [ Gallup ]MEDIAOpinions on the reliability of Fox News is now 46% agree and 42% disagree. Still the most trusted news source on television is PBS [ Public Policy Polling ]
As expected, none of the survey centers called me. Or offered to connect their dots to postulate a national pattern. It's entirely likely the only real pattern is there is no pattern. And while that cannot be said about our computers, it may be one of the few blessings we can still say about us.
Among other items around the house, two of the most commonly tucked away: old letters and old keys. The operative word here is "tucked." You see, we always intended to use them again. Then never did.
If you like metaphors, a couple come to mind. The letters are sightings to pasts we once knew and lived; the keys are for the doorways to some futures we still wish to enter. Then again, perhaps there's nothing metaphoric about them. Simply old letters and keys.
If you come across the letters, it's always interesting to discover from whom and for why. By golly -- I had forgotten I saved that class reunion invitation, that scribbly note from our child, and especially that astounding poem she wrote for our 25th wedding anniversary. Something like perfume, you kept them around to remind yourself those sweet memories really did happen. Why in heaven's name did you ever misplace them?
As for those rusting keys -- frankly I can't for the life of me figure out what they are to. Something like old biases, you kept them around just in case you'd need them again. Was this one to the garage? OK, but then which of the four garages we've owned? And this one, it looks like it could be to a mailbox. But where? And why? I don't even remember owning a keyed mailbox.
So there it is.....! Two more little mysteries to the network of mysteries that make up our life. Like resolute pack-rats, we're forever saving, storing, treasuring up the moments of our lives. Which is perfectly fine, for we thereby recognize our lives were worth remembering. However, why then do we so often forget?
Perhaps it's because we are genetically programmed to keep moving on. Growing. Advancing. Old letters and keys...? Well, like most old things, we keep them around out of habit. Sometime out of hope. The habitual hope that someday we'll find the time for them once more.
Funny, we never know when "once more" could be right now.
There are recurring adages that pepper our lives. Little truths like: "The apple never falls far from the tree," "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," "the best things in life are free." I grew up with these. But here's one new to my scene: "Right now, someone's getting rich from this."
When you think about it, that's probably been true from the time tribal shamans sold prayer beads and pharonic high priests kept the key to their boss' pyramids. Over time, the idea of making money became institutionalized. At first it was called inherited wealth. Later, mercantilism. More recently, capitalism.
So long as capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford felt a social obligation to their workers, there was peace in the valley. But over time, corporate "good citizenship" lost some of its charm Today, corporate profits skyrocket even while the rest of the economy remains stalled in a deep recession.
Enter the adage: "Right now, someone's getting rich from this."
Whether it was their spiking oil prices or growing food prices, corporations were known to have shared-the- wealth through the jobs they provided, and the salaries & benefits they pumped back into the economy. Today, however, Americans face a hard new reality. Our corporation don't need us anymore...!
Increasingly, their products, revenues and workers come from abroad (the preferred name is Global Economy). Harold Meyerson writes in The American Prospect: "With every passing year, America's leading corporations grow more and more decoupled from the American economy. Their interests grow increasingly more detached from those of our workers, our consumers, and our economic future. Unlike any other recession, including the Great Depression, today's leading employers can return to profitability without hiring large numbers of American workers."
Everyone -- from the posturing political parties to the chattering political pundits -- have decided that the weapon of choice in today's crippling recession is to slash government spending. If done judiciously and justly, that will help. But until corporate America rejoins America, much of the help will continue to benefit only those who least need it.
