Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Alone among nature’s creatures, we humans know that there will be a future. Our lives are lived in the shadow of choices not yet made and destinies not yet achieved.
In the elusive present, we are as shaped by our anticipations as we are by our memories. Being social creatures, our musings on what may yet come are as much a product of culture as our own personal sensibilities.
In my adolescence in the mid-late 1970s, mainstream American culture seemed to be overwhelmingly hopeful. Perhaps it was an outgrowth of being between 10- and 15-years-old, but I swam in a sea of guarded optimism.
Star Trek showed us a future where humanity had survived the nuclear era. Star Wars demonstrated that universal human struggles to fight evil and pursue love would not become obsolete in some technocratic dystopia.
Even the apocalyptic themes in Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica were what humans struggled to overcome. Armageddon was the beginning of these tales, not the end. Their challenge was to maintain hope against despair in lives fraught with difficulty, where courage and skill could win survival and even victory.
The Lord of the Rings had the most unlikely of heroes save the world, often despite their frailties, because they kept faith with their common sense and intrinsic decency. In Dune, villainous plots were confounded by personal choices that shifted the path of history.
Even beyond these rather nerdish explorations, I found a bright exuberance in music, movies, the arts, and popular culture. Despite the defeatism and malaise of Jimmy Carter’s failed administration and the still resonant echoes of Vietnam and Watergate, the stories which we told to ourselves about ourselves were shot through with a faith that good would endure despite many temporary evils.
Perhaps it was the still fresh memories of Americans walking the lunar surface from July of 1969 through December of 1972, but we seemed to genuinely believe that there was no challenge beyond our capacity to eventually overcome. Mankind would colonize the solar system, plumb the depths of interstellar space, and meet aliens as peers among the stars.
This all seems impossible to believe from today’s fraught and broken America. Many of us gaze back at the time between August 15, 1945, and September 11, 2001, as a Golden Age of relative material prosperity, social progress, cultural achievement, and scientific discovery. We wax nostalgic about a past that really never was while we bemoan our present fate, brooding about diverse dark futures.
What a waste of life is self-indulgent nostalgia. Instead of mooning over past memories, we could be building wondrous futures. Rather than whining about our difficulties, we should be exerting ourselves to overcome them.
Today, we must overcome despair. Nearly every noble story that had previously uplifted the human spirit has been, “rewritten for a modern audience.” What that means is that epic sagas have been infected with identity politics. Glorious escapism has become trite propaganda.
NASA has not returned to the moon. We haven’t even had a working spacecraft since the Space Shuttle. Our weakness has wrought the undoing of the Pax Americana, with horrendous prospects of premature mega-death for much of the world’s population.
We Americans are more divided than we were in the 1960s; arguably more so than since 1865. One major political party has abandoned the concept of loyal opposition, and is undermining the Constitution at every opportunity in a quest for total power.
Meritocracy is attacked as inequitable, freedom as privilege, and biology as oppressive. Nothing is sacred as woke zealots endeavor to destroy everything that is not of their ideology.
Our cities burn, our borders are betrayed, and our dollars are diminished by inflation. There is so much gloom and doom, so much despair. How could beings like us ever think we were worthy of the stars? We might not even be worthy to walk the earth for much longer.
If we wish to be better than we now are, and if we aspire to build a worthwhile future, we had best shake off this siren song of doom and awaken to new hope. Despair is a lie. Disbelieve it, and instead take heart and confidently chart a worthwhile future.
