By Mary Schmich
Adapted by Prayables
The other night I ran into a woman, an ardent news consumer, who told me she’d given up listening to a certain popular daily podcast in the mornings because the news was too upsetting. She said it was no way to start the day.
Funny, I said. I usually listened to the same distressing podcast in the evenings and I’d recently decided to stop listening at that hour because it was no way to end the day.
That conversation was just another example of the exhaustion that pervades our great nation from morning to night these days, an exhaustion mixed of anger, fear, confusion and the non-stop nature of it all. The weariness feels like a kind of grief.
Where is the world headed?
We think about the plight of the Kurds. The plight of the Syrians. The plight of refugees and migrants and the dispossessed everywhere. Many of us, too, think about the plight of the American people pitted against each other and against the world.
Add to that the tyranny of technologies we don’t really understand — except to sense that they’re undermining truth in ways that place us all at risk — and many of us feel not only exhausted, but disoriented.
What have we lost? What are we losing?
Day after day, we wake up and go to sleep with evidence of the worst of what humans do to each other.
What can we do, we wonder, what can we do?
There’s no neat answer, but here’s a thought: What if we flip the script?
What if this exhausting moment is not all bad? What if this moment of acute chaos is the rocky beginning of something better? What if it’s a way of pushing us forward even when it seems we’re moving backward?
“Could there actually be something good, if extremely uncomfortable in the process, to come if it awakens us to a better life?” a woman I know mused recently.
It’s not a ridiculous hope. Think about it.
Would the #MeToo movement have advanced so fast and far in a more harmonious time?
Without unwillingness to acknowledge the dangers of climate change, would a 16-year-old named Greta Thunberg have gained a worldwide audience for her pleas to take the dangers seriously?
Would we be thinking so hard about what democracy is and why we value it, if the system were working?
I was recently talking to a group of people in their 20s. They were lamenting the state of the world. Their mood seemed darker than circumstances called for and despite my own dark mood I found myself saying, “You know, the world is better now than when I was growing up. For as awful as it seems — for as awful as it is — the bright side of this ugly time is that all the issues have been flushed out into the open. Racism, sexism, homophobia, gender issues — all
the unspoken stuff is out there now. We didn’t even have a language for a lot of it until not so long ago. And this is still a country — unlike some countries — where we’re free to wage these wars of ideas loudly and in public.”
After I gave them that little pep talk, I remembered an interview I read a couple of years ago with Benjamin Ferencz. He investigated Nazi war crimes after World War II and, at 99, is the last living prosecutor from the military trials held in Nuremberg, Germany. However dark our times seem, that time was worse. He saw the evil up close and retained his optimism.
“Fundamental things such as colonialism and slavery,” he said in the interview, “the rights of women, the emancipation of sex, landing on the moon, these were inconceivable not long ago. But miracles can be performed.”
Miracles of that type require human effort. They also require optimism.
Optimism is not blind acceptance of the world as it is. It’s the belief that if we stay vigilant and work hard, things can get better, even if on the way to better they’re sometimes awful.
But it’s difficult to stay vigilant when you’re exhausted. So do yourself a favor. Step away for a while from the podcast or whatever version of humanity’s ugliness is dragging you down.
Go do something nice for someone. Go outside and look at the autumn trees. Read a good poem.
Here’s a snippet of one from Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who wrote a poem for every occasion. This one, “Reality Demands,” is about how people always recover from the ravages of war.
It begins:
Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on
And it continues:
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
