Sunday has come again. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the case because I can hear the congregation across the courtyard singing. But has anything changed?
Each day this week I read the headlines. They screamed destruction and death, distrust and dysfunction. Oh, the horrible things that are now the resting state of our world. A week ago, following a similar seven-day assault on my spirit’s reserve of hope and compassion, I started to write a piece stating our world rested on a precipice. Ultimately the piece concluded with a statement that I didn’t know if our sphere would go over the cliff head first or step back from the edge. I even looked up the term precipice to make sure I was using it correctly. Here it is.
Precipice - prec·i·pice /ˈpresəpəs/ (noun), A very steep rock face or cliff, especially a tall one; "we swerved toward the edge of the precipice". I searched for a definition of the phrase standing on a precipice. If you say that someone is on the edge of a precipice, you mean that they are in a dangerous situation in which they are extremely close to disaster or failure. “The king now stands on the brink of a political precipice.” – Collins Dictionary (collinsdictionary.com).
Around me I see a complex world, a planet filled with hatred. This virulent animosity is more often than not, fueled by economic disparity cloaked in righteous indignation. Individual or group righteous indignation can arise from many sources but two main ones stick out: tribal and religious (and these two can be very, very intertwined). Ours is a world stuck in a cycle of conflict generation after generation. True believers vs infidels, red vs blue, baby killers vs individual rights advocates, blue eyes vs brown eyes, and dark skin versus light skin pigment; pick one, pick two, and you will find people willing to kill and die for the distinctions. But if you dig down the real battle is about who gets more rice, beans, bread and drinkable water.
Samuel Clemens in his later years was bitter. He endured the death of most of his family, an era of economic depression, bankruptcy, and his works falling out of favor. He was a learned man and a skilled writer. As his fortunes declined and his woes increased people abandoned him. Ultimately, the world’s ugliness beat him down and he hated the world and its people for it. I am not there yet, but I can get there. Still, I have some small measure of hope left alive inside of me that the world can right itself at least enough to avoid climatological or nuclear destruction based on divisions that at their root are economic.
The world needs complex answers, not simple ones. We are far beyond the stage where “simple” fixes anything. But yet we yearn for easy answers. We long for quick fixes.
My old law school professor once said, “If you want the A you must do the work.” The man I am speaking of has never been willing to do the hard work, and do it honestly. Bluster and rage will not conceal the fact that his primary talents are manipulating balance sheets and crushing the little guys hired to work for his companies. He doesn’t have the capacity to do the work, he has never had it.
Authoritarians don’t have an impressive record of fixing problems or treating citizens fairly or well. Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Un, Putin, Franco, Pinochet, Salazar, the Duvaliers and the list goes on. They didn’t listen to competing, rational voices in opposition, they erased them. Pretty much each and every one of them had a slogan containing an implied promise of moving forward and making things better. Their PR people may not have come up with something as catchy as “Make America Great Again,” but it was all the same noise and gibberish. Wealth flowed one way and pain and deprivation the other.
Children are dying and hostages are at risk. Large swaths of the world’s waters are severely polluted. Global temperatures are increasing, the last 12 months being the hottest on record. Oceans fill with trash and microplastics. Deserts are expanding and ice caps are melting. A selfish, angry authoritarian is not the solution to our problems. Please don’t buy into bad choices based on a desire for a return to a world that never really existed. Face the world we have and work to fix it. To my mind that means abandoning the previous President and moving on.
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