Its death throes & a new civilization is struggling to be born
The problem with living a somewhat long life and being cursed with a memory of past events is that watching new events feels like watching the rerun of a movie I’ve already seen a dozen times–and not a favorite you enjoy. I was struck by that realization recently after finding a handwritten note in my grandmother Fay’s photo album that explained quite accurately what we are experiencing now — it was written circa 1952:
To me this war in Korea indicates more plainly than in either of the previous wars just one thing. That is, that the present civilization is in its death throes & a new civilization is struggling to be born. The struggle to be born results in labor pains. There are always those who seek to perpetuate the old & retard the birth of the new.
Now one only needs to replace the Korean War with the one in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or now Iran. Because it ends up being quite the same thing: the perpetuating of the old and retarding the new.
It wouldn’t seem so much like a whiplash to the past if we hadn’t had a decades-long cultural revolution of civil and voting rights, personal acceptance of diversity, and the expansion of cultural values that Trump and his allies are now trying to stomp on and shove back into a tin can of faded values and intolerance. In short, the culture war is a very real attempt to strip women and minorities of all the equal rights that they have fought for and won over the last 150 years.
The rebirth of the new is a very long, long struggle. In fact, my great-great-grandfather, a Midwestern farmer socialist, could probably have summed it up with stories about railroad barons, wealthy bankers, and corrupt politicians keeping the working man down. Even what was published as a children’s tale, The Wizard of Oz, when you understand it as a political allegory, is about the political battle over whether the dollar was going to be based upon either the gold or silver standard. This was a workingman’s issue in the 1890s.
One comes away asking, just who do Dorothy, the lion, the tin man, and the scarecrow represent? And who was the man behind the curtain — the Wizard of Oz. This and other stories that have been told reveal this continual struggle between the moneyed class (think billionaires and tech bros) and the working class.
Now the experts explain that déjà vu is a minor glitch in the brain. It happens when the part of your brain that handles new information briefly crosses paths with the part that handles memory retrieval. You feel a strong sense of familiarity, but your brain cannot match it to a real past event. According to the Cleveland Clinic, it is usually harmless unless it happens very often or comes with other symptoms like confusion.
What will the “experts” say when, in fact, the past scenarios are being replayed like a worn-out old broken record? You see, economically we are trained, almost by instinct, to go after everything new or shiny: the spectacle of a new film, a pop star performance, the NFL playoffs and the halftime show. However, there’s a new appreciation for the vintage, the inkling that the past holds some clues. And the note from my grandma Fay tells the truth for sure.
We are now on a threshold, where we see the crumbling artifice of corruption and graft. It’s come here before with the rise of early 20th Century progressives, then the FDR New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society and yet there’s always those who push back, like the Red Scare of the 1950s the Palmer raids of 1918 or the incarceration of the Japanese during WWII, that come back to us now resembling the ICE raids in LA or Minnesota and the immigration concentration camps.
We will not be silent Germans afraid of this Gestapo. We will not let the immigrants become modern-day Jews.
There is a wind rising, like it has done so many times before, that will stand up for the righteous, the just, and the truth. There will come a time if you haven’t yet chosen — freedom and justice for all or to be slaves to the tyrannies of abuse. That wind will blow in like a storm off of Point Fermin, and it will spread across this land. It will quench the thirst for this draught of progress, wash away the injustice like a flood, and in the end we remake our democracy in a rebirth of the true vision of America with real liberty and justice for all, with all the inalienable rights granted by nature’s god.
That’s the birthright of us all.