This old world keeps spinning round
It's a wonder tall trees ain't laying down.
-Comes a Time- Neil Young
I think maybe the best thing about humans is that we are getting increasingly better at living in peace with each other. Even as I write that sentence I smile at the thought of everyone reading it in disbelief. I've grown into an optimist, and maybe it's because I've been lucky in my life, but maybe it's because the more I learn about this world the more I see hope for us all. Even though many people I know will not agree with me and will call me naïve or blind, I know that they are getting lost in the forest of cynicism surrounding them while I can rise above it all and see the forest from a different perspective. To me, cynicism is for the young. Optimism is something you have to grow into.
When I went to vote on Tuesday, I wasn't doing it because I was filled with patriotic pride. I didn't do it to honor those who died to bring me that right, and I harbored no illusions that my vote held some kind of power to sway public policy. I did it because in this country, we exist in that electrified no-man's land between theory and practice. There is a tension to our lives and it isn't, as most cynics will claim, because the world is falling apart and we are blowing it as a species. The tension comes from the unknown, the unprecedented. There is no such thing as a perfect philosophy. There is no social or economic theory that can account for the happiness of everyone everywhere. Every idea that all the great minds of the past have put forth can be expanded and carried into the absurd and unworkable. If you argue for a central government or "state", then you can take that argument to its natural conclusion that the state is more important than the individual, and with that you can argue that indeed, it is only right and proper that individuals should be sacrificed to preserve the state. If you argue that the individual should be completely free and not bound by any laws, then you could argue that the individual has the freedom to engage in any behavior he/she chooses, even if that behavior might harm others! Why do we do it? Why do we even bother to form into civilizations? If life is meaningless as the pessimists say, then what drives us to join together? They will say that it was mainly for survival. They'll say that the survival drive became corrupted by greed and lust for Power over each other. They aren't wrong in thinking that. That's probably exactly what it was. But to me, the fact that our consciousness is constantly growing, the fact that we have been able for the last 2000 years to leave a trace of ourselves for the next generation to learn from our mistakes, is proof that we are still in the process of shedding off our natural instincts of annihilation. For the vast eons of our existence, the world was nothing but a zero sum game. You had good water and hunting grounds and I didn't, therefore I will take it from you by force. Ingrained in our DNA is the idea that not all men are equal, and that the only way to survive in this world is to become stronger than your enemy. How we have progressed!
Happiness is as fickle and fleeting and undefinable as love. Our country, our democracy, is defined by us as we go along. We are making it up on the fly. We have taken some basic ideals from previous empires but each day as the sun comes up over the Atlantic we argue and debate over the way we are doing things until the sun sets over the Pacific. There is really no good explanation why we have lasted this long as a country. By rights, we should have flown apart at the seams a long time ago, or at least spread ourselves across the planet until we were stretched way too thin and the barbarians could storm the gates. Our Founding Fathers never could solve their debates. They never actually did come up with some perfect world, but they knew that they couldn't do it on their own. They were fully aware of their own limitations, and were conscious of the flow of time through the ages, so they left us with a government that could adapt and redefine itself. There is no one right way, there is only the way that works right now. This constant debate, this anger and rhetoric and discourse, it is how we have always lived. We argue our theories back and forth, and we could easily stand our ground and say "You are wrong!" until the world actually does fall apart, but in the end, we compromise. We say, "let's just try it this way and see if it works, then we can revisit it in the future." This is how a government should operate... this is the Action after the Thought, and it has led to great things.
Until we meet again.
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