Uttered this meaningless thought before, maybe several Times over the last thirteen years of this nearly daily journaling along as I make my way through life, but looking around me here in October 2023, I'm thinking it again. A dozen or twenty years from now, or maybe less, it won't have mattered at all when I lived my life, and if in, say, 2043 I could look at a Time line of some sort and re-choose when to have lived my life and turn clock and calendar back to start there, I think it would be in the generation that Alfred, my father's brother (born 1899) would have had if he had lived; or the generation of Linda's father (born 1905), and through most of the 20th century. America wasn't greater then by any means, and it could be my perception in having matured a generation later and looking back, but life was smaller scale, from my point of view more small town-ish, life moved slower, it seems like values were clearer, and cleaner. In America, automobiles were coming along, but long distance travel was by rail, convenient and comfortable, especially if you could get an air conditioned Pullman car and a lower berth with window to watch the night go by.
Seems like people were kinder, more courteous. I don't know, I'm probably wrong, rose-colored glasses of idealization. My father remembered when St Andrews Bay was alive with fish, I came along later than that, but mullet were still plentiful; and we still could take the boat across the Bay toward Redfish Point and fill buckets of scallops in the hours of a Sunday afternoon. Wading in the Bay shallows with a crab net, and a couple of grouper or snapper heads on a long cord, and floating a washtub along with us, we could fill the tub with blue crabs in short order and be boiling and cleaning them that afternoon for supper that evening. I missed the railroad spur into St Andrews, but the old train depot was still here when I was a boy and into my teens, and fishermen around me remembered the days when.
Linda's father was born and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and he used to tell me about summer 1925 when he and a buddy drove a Model T Ford out to the Grand Canyon and back. Rutted dirt roads instead of highways, and frequent stops to fix flat tires, but ... . I still envy him his lifetime.
If I were allowed to begin again and choose my "era" I might start life 30 or 35 years earlier. Young enough to miss WWI and old enough to miss the WW2 draft, and maybe finish up in a Time of seeming peace after America's adventure in Vietnam.
Just thinking of technology, not the folks that I adore and because of whom I would not really change anything anyway, what would I have missed that I appreciate having lived into? Well, weather satellites, laptop computers, open heart surgery, cellphones. Power steering, air conditioned cars. You can keep automatic transmissions, I'd like to have my stick shift Ford Taurus back, and my Volkswagen Beetle.
Why does my mind do this? Because I see America slipping away. Every generation has people like me who remember when life was not so crowded, who, remembering an earlier Time, realize that the world is going to hell in a hand basket faster and worse and more unstoppable than ever. I'm sad to have lived into "too late." There was a Happy Time, at least for my forebears, in a little window of Time starting after my grandfathers were born and raised but before my father was born. There were wickednesses then too, but they are more ominous today than ever, even the nation itself seems not unlikely to fall as values become more selfish and morals devolve.
No, I don't truly want to have lived someone else's life, but it's a great place to go in my daydreams.
Not a good snapshot, I had to adjust it too much, ...
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From online The Atlantic Daily, here's an article I appreciate.
T88&c
Lest darkness fall
Democracies overseas are under siege, and some Americans think the United States should stay out of those struggles. But supporting our friends and allies against barbarism is both in our national interest and part of our identity as a people. |
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Last week, I mentioned the field of counterfactual history, the intriguing what-ifs about how great events could have turned out differently. One of the most celebrated of all such stories is a 1941 novel by the prominent science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp titled Lest Darkness Fall, in which a 20th-century archeologist named Martin Padway finds himself suddenly transported to sixth-century Rome. Padway knows he has arrived just before the final Gothic War, after which Europe would descend into the Dark Ages, and he uses his knowledge of history and technology to fend off Rome’s collapse. In the end, he secures a better future for Europe and perhaps the world: “Darkness,” the book concludes, “would not fall.” Padway succeeds because he has the gift of hindsight. He knows with complete certainty what will happen, when, and why, and so he can intervene at key moments to avert disaster. In real life, the rest of us have to plod along in sequential time, doing our best with what we know at the moment. But sometimes, history shows us the darkness in the distance. We are living through such a moment now. The conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are warnings of the darkness to come. For many Americans, wars in faraway places seem to be only dangerous snares that might lead us into the jungles of Vietnam, the mountains of Afghanistan, or the sands of Iraq. Involvement seems pointless. Advocates of a more isolationist foreign policy quote what they see as a prescient warning from John Quincy Adams to stay out of the global fray: America, Adams said as secretary of state in an 1821 address to the House, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Wise words in 1821. Today, however, free nations cannot hope to keep their liberties safe in a hothouse while authoritarian tornadoes bear down on them. America and its allies might not want to go abroad looking for monsters, but sooner or later, the monsters will be looking for us. We all have every incentive, in the most personal and concrete way, to prevent such regimes from roaming the Earth at will. Step back for a moment from the specific nations at war in Europe and the Middle East right now, and think about what kinds of conflicts we’re seeing. In Europe, a giant, paranoid, nuclear-armed dictatorship has embarked on a war of conquest and genocide against its democratic neighbor. The aggressor, abandoning all pretenses, has simply declared that another nation should not exist and its people must accept their new masters or die. In the Middle East, a militarized terrorist organization is undertaking a campaign of slaughter, with the intentional aim of inflicting gruesome torture and murder on as many people as possible. Two wars: one of conquest, one of terror, both aimed at national extermination. As the Atlantic contributor and Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen has put it, these conflicts pit civilization against barbarians. If the barbarians win, they will inflict more devastation, expand their goals, and encourage other regimes to engage in similar barbarism. Over time, they will join hands and ally against us. They will have one another’s backs not because of any tripe about “honor among thieves” or Milton’s “firm concord” among devils damned but because they are not fools: They know that their survival depends on supporting one another in their crimes. If these barbarians succeed, they could one day affect the lives of Americans in ways most citizens cannot imagine. They could control the passage of goods across the skies and seas; they could hold hostage U.S. citizens who dare to travel abroad; they could imperil American lives by denying access to any number of resources. And if we squawk about any of it, the nuclear-armed powers among them can threaten to immolate an American city as the price of resistance. The safety and the security of the United States is the easiest case to make for maintaining our commitment to help Ukraine and Israel. But we should not fall back on such narrow definitions of utility and interest. If we are not willing to offer our help and support to Ukraine and Israel at this moment, what does it even mean to be an “American”? Blood-and-soil nationalists would dearly love to have Americans think of themselves as people attached to only borders and dirt (and, for some, particular strands of DNA) rather than an idea. But “American” is not an ethnic identity. It is a choice, a bond to the Constitution and its ideals. America is not a defense compact or a customs union. It is a statement: Human beings have rights that can never be taken away, and our nation values and defends those rights. For Americans to say that they will protect such rights only for ourselves is to betray a fundamental part of our identity as a nation and as a people. But what can the average citizen do? Stay engaged. Just a third of Americans can find Ukraine on a map; be an informed voice among your fellow citizens. Stay in touch with your elected representatives. Do not let the most irresponsible voices be the only voices. Members of Congress—and I speak from experience as a former staffer—do in fact pay attention to messages from their district. And remember that voting matters. Poland on Sunday turned back an authoritarian challenge with an approximately 73 percent voter turnout. Meanwhile, the state of Louisiana just elected the far-right-wing lawyer Jeff Landry as governor with a turnout of about 35 percent, meaning that Landry will walk into office as the choice of 18 percent of Lousiania’s eligible voters. We live in an exceedingly dangerous time. And yet we continue our childish bickering. We wring our hands over false choices. And, perhaps worst of all, some Americans seem interested only in how these crises can help in their grotesque and sometimes inane efforts to score political points. Darkness threatens to fall. But it can still be stopped, if Americans can summon the maturity and the will to embrace their responsibility as the leaders of the free world. |
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