The truth is I can barely breathe right now. If i have more than a little bit to eat day to day, if I socialize on a regular basis, I am out for days at a time. I had too much coffee today, and as a result I was too energetic to work, followed by a crash in which my body tells me just to lie down and do nothing.
If I stay pessimistic, I know my body is going to get worse. What kind of example does that set to people who say that in difficulty, they laid down to fate, they didn't challenge, they refused to evolve, and even if they didn't die, they died inside and surrendered to whatever came next.
It's important to be pessimistic, it's important to be cynical, that's realism, and our world is only improved when we're realistic about what's next and we keep moving toward the deeper goals we seek of getting people ready for whatever bad that could be next.
But underneath that fatalism, there is a greater, deeper optimistic wisdom that exists for us all.
Martin Luther King was wrong about very little, but the moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice, it bends towards meaning. It shows that there is meaning and dignity in a struggle that ultimately, cannot be won, only fought. And by following the path of the good inclinations, cardinal virtues, or dharma, or eudaimonia, we can find hope and dignity amid terrible struggles that will always come. Shakespeare articulated it at the end of Hamlet in what might be his greatest of all lines: “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.” All the justice in the world will not stop injustice coming for us all, but it's particularly in those moments of injustice that we have to look to a greater and deeper hope that there's meaning amid the suffering.
This is the meaning in the Bible and the Mahabharata and the Koran, of Shakespeare and Montaigne and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Bach, of Orson Welles and Yasijiro Ozu and Jean Renoir, of Mad Men and The Wire and The Sopranos, of Goya and Bosch and Breugel and Courbet; of Lincoln and Roosevelt, Gandhi and Nehru, and yes, the Founding Fathers; of Orwell and Isaiah Berlin, of Reinhold Niebuhr and Eric Hoffer, of JS Mill and JM Keynes, of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and Walt Whitman, of Mary Wollestonecraft and Martha Nussbaum; of Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa and yes, Gorbachev; of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, of Cesar Chavez and Harvey Milk and, of particularly pride to me and many I know, Sarah McBride; and of so many other moral arcs. ...and YES, of David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin.
In each of these leaders, in their own ways, they had to make terrible compromises with ultimate goals to reach their objectives. The fact that they did not lose their moral compasses amid those awful moments makes them greater leaders, not lesser, and differs from so many people in their positions. In democracies, perpetuating moral leadership depends on the terrible greatness within morally good leaders as much as ending totalitarian regimes depend on the goodness of small dissenters.
However much I freak out in the next election like in 2016, I'm determined not just to be a Cassandra again, warning that Rome is burning and that the impossible is possible. The impossible comes for every country on earth, every epoch, every dominant expectation of society. especially today when so many people tell us we can change the world if we just make a relatively sizable minority pissed off enough. As much as history is the history of "great" men oppressing small ones, history is the history of thinking things are different now, of thinking we can expect more from life and that the balance of life will stay afloat even if the boat is rocked.
No. No no no no no no no no NO!
That is not the point of life. That is not how life is lived, that is never what happens. The point of life is how we act in the face of whatever hardships come pointed at us. The point of life is to show each other exactly what will is, and exactly what vulnerability is: will and vulnerability put together. You and only you have your struggles unique to you, but we struggle together in the face of whatever difficulties come, especially those difficulties that are self-generated so that as we age, we can still light the way for the next generation amid the darkness we first created in our ignorance and irresponsibility. We are all both reprehensible and good in equal measure. And if we do our job properly, the next generation has their chance to be both and repeat our mistakes even as their version of the same mistakes is entirely their own.
THAT is the meaning of life, and that is how we know that life is operating the way it should. It's a tragicomedy for an audience that will laugh and cry in equal measure.
And if there is a God, this is how that deity provides meaning for us and all those ancestors and supernatural forces watching us like one of those Showtime dramas that are never cancelled.
If the drama has not been cancelled yet, it will not be cancelled next year, in ten years, in a hundred years. The show is too good. Too many cliffhangers lie in the balance, and too many characters have to come to realize the meaning of their lives before they're written off to be replaced by the next generation; things revolutionize entirely from century to century and the fascination in every age is how all things change yet remain just so.
Every generation gets the chance to show exactly what good and bad they're made of. There are those who strut their stuff with disproportionate influence, but we all make up that community and polity, that era and generation, those many regions of the world, that tell the greater story. No matter how much the great influence history, 99% of it still depends on the small whose names will never be in the books: how we were there for the people in our lives, and how we amid their darkness our light the way for them so they have the chance to add their light amid the darkness.
There is a future, and that's how we will be remembered here. If there is a next world, I doubt it would make much sense to punish us for what we did down here, but how we handled the inevitable injustices will give us marks for all time, and our story adds examples to the meaning of what lies beyond.
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