Charles Peek
“at the edges of our country’s attempt to get it right” (Dr. Bob Haller)
**
Victor Frankl begins his long ago written but only recently published Say Yes to Life with this sentence: “To speak about the meaning and value of life may seem more necessary today (1946) than ever” (21).
Coming just after two devastating world wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the Soviet Union’s betrayal of the West, it was understandable to think that “more…than ever” 1946 was the time. Sadly, as I write a month before the 2020 USA election, only 75 years and three generations later, I could still say the same thing—November 3 presents us once again with the need to now—more than ever—focus attention on the meaning of life.
How could it be that we would have so swiftly forgotten the lessons we learned and the values we cherished with renewed devotion? Why didn’t the problems we addressed in the rebuilding Europe and Japan and the redirection of American industry to peace-time uses lead us much further than just the post-WWII/pre-Vietnam era?
Is it not because we failed to identify the real spiritual causes of the vices and villainy so evident in the Stalin-Hitler world? Because in our “exceptionalism” we felt exempt from the temptations of the post-modern era?
Ike began to tumble to our problem in his speech warning us (too late it now seems) of the Military-Industrial Complex, but even Ike, after all a General not a Moralist, failed to see the underlying causes of our increasingly excessive reliance on arms for the many and economic growth for the few.
Post-WWII/pre-Vietnam! That was the era in which many of us grew up, many who accepted without question white, male, American supremacy. Some knew even then that our problems were an increasingly corrupting moral and spiritual decline—a decline in our attention to meaning. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” the film and song asked. We didn’t know, didn’t much care, didn’t have an answer. Greater and greater blame was cast on people and movements and institutions, but little in the name of any higher moral principles, any deeper spiritual foundations.
The Churches were filled with hypocrites? Hurrah, they were soon to empty out quickly. Are we better off without them? Our schools were behind? We can fix that—fill them with curricula aimed at producing workers for the new economy and shooting the moon. We championed careers over education, technical skills over understanding. Remember the Maine and pass the ammunition.
All this turned to fertile ground for a Bannon-esque nihilism that exploited white nationalism to set up a puppet President molded from the mindlessness of a bigoted and bragging showman. His skills: to rule by distraction and sow chaos. To cater to fears and destroy credibility. And because the buffoon had only himself as a cause, he bought it completely and beats its drum daily in illiterate prevarications. The perfect instrument of politics in a world of shallow spiritualities where dark money can buy almost anything, including elections.
In the sand-box fighting that ensues, we seem to have forgotten that the Supreme Court is, in fact, not the supreme Court. There is a higher judgment than our whims and fancies, our power plays and partisanship.
We cannot fix this on November 3! But we can take the caricature of a president out of the picture and we can take the presidency out of the hands of the bullies and bogus patriots.
We can unite some traumatically torn apart families and more justly distribute privilege and power. We can take steps to lessen the predatory natural disasters rooted in climate change.
We can choose Democracy over Oligarchy, values over cynicism.
As Frankl writes, “All the programs, all the slogans and principles have been utterly discredited as a result of these last few years. Nothing was able to survive, so it should not be a surprise if contemporary philosophy perceives the world as though it has no substance. But through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism . . . we must strive toward a new humanity” (25).
He could have easily have been writing about today and the last four years!
As someone recently noted, if power corrupts it does so by attracting the corruptible. For over fifty years we’ve attracted plenty of them, even for four years now to our highest offices. November 3 won’t be The Answer–but if it keeps the vicious and ignorant even just a little at bay, it can give us a future where truth can be discerned, goodness pursued, beauty restored, and the whole planet can get a renewed lease on life.
For God’s sakes, VOTE!
It’s been a while since I closed with a poem but now seems a good time:
Farming Blind
Like a homecoming queen festooned with flowers
she’s not usually accustomed to wearing,
the Middle Loup River today is flowing among
gleaming golds and oranges, trees highlighted
by a bright sun in a cloudless sky, and unlike
some of the fields to the northwest where
scant rain fell this year, our hay meadows
are weighed down by the big rounds that fell
from the massive balers getting the last harvest
of the season, and only a Trump flag
stuck precariously in one of them says,
“So much hay . . . but can’t see the sunshine.”
capeek 