Meditation 26: History Happens

Times do change. It is a commonplace, but what does it mean?  The status quo can appear engraved in stone.  Our lives are so short that we suffer from congenital myopia.  We have the tales of parents and grandparents, but before that most everyone is dead.  Many people live in places that seem to be eternal.  However, many others live through the realization that just like everything else, our human institutions and societies pass away, despite the fact that some of them are quite long lasting.  To live through their passing is traumatic, and impossible to grasp from the outside.

Who predicted the passing of the Soviet Union at the time it was falling apart?  Suddenly, the impossible had happened.  Certainty vanished.  If that vast empire could fall, then anything is possible.  Wars have come in the wake of this collapse to ravage peoples and countries who had had, only a short time before, a better life, an ordinary future of family and work, careers, old age.  Suddenly, it is all one can do to stay alive. Everything is on hold.  These changes are historical, because their effects will not be fully revealed or known for years.

Yet despite the changes and displacements of history, the ordinary takes over our lives even in extraordinary times.  We can only stand so much change before we take refuge in some kind of routine.  Whether this is the routine of dodging bullets on the way to the market, hoping not to encounter a suicide bomber at the wrong time, waiting to get some food at a collection center, or living as though a war will not break out.  The masses of people in such places can do nothing in extraordinary times but try to find a way to live, find a routine, find normality in extremity.

For those who live outside the more troubled areas of the world, the local scene gives an increasingly illusory feeling of normality and security. The comfort and order of the advanced economies of the West are not immune to the anger and despair of those who wish they had it so good, or who wish to move to a non-Capitalist, non-globalizing world.  History has just happened to everyone, but the realization will take awhile to sink in, and its effects will play themselves out for good or ill.  The nervousness in the world just now is the inarticulate expression of the feeling that the future has suddenly become more unreadable.  We do not know how it will turn out, and rather expect it will be for the worse.