Winter is Here and Break Time is Over
Like a lot of writers I write to make sense of my world. It doesn’t bother me if nobody reads it, although I hope that some will. It’s the process of writing that helps me to come to grips with the things I experience. I took a break for a while because I reached a point where the world had seemed to stop making any sort of sense that I could understand and writing about it didn’t help at all. The Trump phenomenon was so reminiscent of other more drastic periods of history when demagogues seduced whole populations and split off and isolated “enemies” they marked for destruction, “re-education” or worse. I found I couldn’t write anything that wasn’t filled with despair or anger. I still have the anger. I’ve reached an age where anger is a necessary companion. It enables one to summon the energy to climb on an exercise bike before sun up and drive the body in sweaty submission. I know that this is good for me because I actually feel better when it’s over…although that might just be because it’s over.
When I was much younger the world made way more sense to me. I was both confident and stupid, two great attributes for white males right up the end of middle age. That’s when you learn the depth of your stupidity and confidence flees. It’s also when one learns that making sense of the world requires a lot more work than one was led to believe. I also think that youth needs a smaller world to move through and one which is not so complicated that its solutions and answers are impossible…even wrong answers are better than no answers at that age…maybe especially at that age. It’s much less forgivable when you’re older…wrong answers and no answers need to lead to better answers and I can’t help thinking that one of the reasons that the world isn’t making much sense these days is because “better answers” are not appearing often enough. When I was much younger I remember hoping that if and when I got older the things that didn’t make sense would…somehow. Many of them didn’t. They just slipped off the charts of importance into oblivion and were replaced by much more difficult and terrible things that didn’t make sense.
When I look at the political and social situations around the world today I see a lot of people who are also struggling to make sense of it all and a great many have decided that the answers are only going to be available if they slow the complication and confusion down and roll the clock back to more simplistic times. Unfortunately. Social, political, economic and cultural change has moved at an incredible rate over the past few decades and the acceleration has been fuelled by technology…the internet…the apps…the connectivity. I heard the other day that “knowing about something is not the same as knowing something”. I thought I should have that tattooed somewhere on my body. The thing is that the speed of change has been almost more frightening than any actual changes taking place. In almost all of the developing countries immigration has been a necessary process which brought skills and diversity. Most countries had an organized systematic policy with target numbers and often, also bonus points for certain skill sets. However…with the advent of the European Union and with the proliferation of small scale wars (small is not small if it’s happening to you) immigration accelerated and over whelmed the immigration policies of some countries. A kind of saturation point was reached which had more to do with visibility of “immigrants” than actual numbers. If it appeared that there were more “alien” faces on the street…that must mean that some kind of balance had been breached. It was this sort of perceptual change…and the speed of it that became a rallying point for anti-immigration agitators and for the Brexit mind set…and of course for the “Build The Wall” warriors of America. Society is deciding that it cannot absorb immigrants…and they think that their governments have lost control of it. The fact is that these countries , our countries, still need the skills, diversity and vitality of immigration…but fear is shutting the doors.
The core of conservatism is the need to slow change to a point that is deemed to be manageable. Liberalism, on the other hand sees change as positive and while it also needs control…the control should not be so rigid. These two philosophical and cultural differences are in fact much more complex but the splintering of hard core positions over the past few years has led to a very rigid stand off between liberal and conservative camps that no longer allows for reasoning.
And that is a main cause of this old man not being able to make sense of his world. At first, like many others I was ready to blame it on Trump. As despicable as I may find his bombast and total lunacy it is not solely his fault that all of this is happening. He may be a consequence…one of many consequences of years of wrong headed policies and stupid beliefs. Never-the-less, I’m afraid history will see this as the Trump era…and he will be the symbol of some tragic decisions and events to follow.
Meanwhile I’m going to start writing again to try to make sense of it all and because it’s winter in the north…too cold to be outside.
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