Good ships are built to withstand heavy seas.
I once sailed as a merchant seaman on a ship on high seas in the Pacific, and I felt the ocean tossing around the 700-foot vessel beneath my feet. With each wave, the ship pitched up then down before righting itself and plowing into the next, oncoming swell.
The effect was frightening and nauseating but ultimately exhilarating, a testament both to the skills of the shipwright and the steadfastness of the crew.
But even on stout ships, in some storms the helmsman steers too tight or wide, or a wave hits that is too big and the vessel leans too much to one side, reaching an angle from which it cannot return. It floats at a precarious pitch for a moment before the next wave hits, turns it over and takes it down.
There are many among us who fear that our nation is now a vessel paused at that frightful angle, fearful that it cannot be righted and that the Trump presidency represents the wave that will turn it on its side, irreversibly. Or perhaps already has.
I know intelligent, capable people who hold this view and held it years before Donald Trump was elected. They believe there is no regaining our nation’s equilibrium, that in only a smidgen of time we will capsize.
Many good people of my generation are depressed, perhaps even despondent. What happened to our country? How did things become this bad? Where do we even begin to right the ship?
We are up against huge forces, including elected leaders, courts and media that have been purchased to further the political agenda of others who have small regard for the future. The corporate model – profits at any cost – has become gospel not only for once-venerable institutions like churches and universities, but also for individuals. After years of immersion in a bankrupt culture, too many of us are ready to offer the means at the altar of the ends, to trade notions of dishonor and dirty money for the bumper-sticker mantra that he who dies with the most toys wins.
In response, some thinking people have taken refuge in smaller, personal pleasures or in the notion that we had a good run, and that the American Empire is making its inevitable slide into mediocrity and decline. Or they take the impossibly long view, that although our species may self-destruct, the good Earth will carry on and some other, more deserving critter will inherit what’s left here.
This is all a bit melodramatic, no? Our parents or grandparents who survived cataclysms like world wars, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression certainly would scoff at such apocalyptic thoughts. The 1960s divided the nation into raging camps on the issues of war, race, and sexuality and we survived that, didn’t we?
But in the 1960s, not so much of the government was owned by such a small, powerful minority, and the news media were less fractured, stronger and more independent. Anchorman Walter Cronkite’s pronouncement that the Vietnam War was unwinnable convinced LBJ that he could no longer sell victory in Southeast Asia to the American public. There were no Russian trolls or Fox News to contradict him.
Our parents and grandparents were born before The Bomb, before the massive budget-busting expansion of the American Empire, before gadgetry stole the nation’s attention like a magician showing one hand while keeping the other, unseen, behind his back.
Thinking people are fretting for good reason and part of the reason is that other people are not thinking, or are not thinking critically enough and maybe never learned how. Thinking people justifiably fear that a generation raised on bread and circuses always will be happy with distraction, and that those who understand their self-interest have become a permanent minority.
Turning around our country will be a herculean task, and it may not happen. In the real world, the good guys lose. Democracies fail. Empires fall. Ages of enlightenment are followed by Dark Ages.
If you believe this couldn’t happen in the U.S.A., or that things aren’t that bad or the stakes aren’t that dire, pick up a history book. Through the ages, many right-thinking people in many prosperous nations in many eras paid a steep price for their blind faith in the status quo.
We’d rather not believe that our comforts and freedoms could dissolve in short time. History tells us otherwise.