I was pondering last night, with a vague ache, that I have feared for the end of the world since learning of nuclear weapons. I was in high school at the height of the arms race, and feared often it would get set off.
More generally, though, I think many of us fear strip malls, too. We fear television. We fear packaged frozen chimichangas.
What do I mean by this? This: we fear banality. I remember growing up thinking “is this all there is?” Another cherry slurpee at Circle K? Another movie with Clint Eastwood shooting someone? Gilligan’s Island?
Then you finally score with the girl, and it wasn’t quite what you thought it would be. Somehow looking at all those girlie magazines you had conjured something–different. And the girls, of course, are always compromising, compromising, compromising. They think their love fantasies will be met if they just give the boys what they want. And they are almost always disappointed. None of us grow up with honor. We grow up with Sweet-Tarts, and playing video games, and cops and robbers. We are rude to our parents, who fall all over themselves trying to diagnose our moods.
We go to air conditioned moview theaters, and watch insipid humor, or insipid, morally meaningless violence, while eating popcorn and sipping on carbonated syrup.
We tend to marry for convenience, in something that might feel like love, but is really something else, and that first marriage fails at least as often as it succeeds. We have to find ourselves. We have to try new things, meet new people.
Then it is the same crowd, themselves recently dispossessed of someone else, so they, too, could “meet new people”.
Ennui, mid-life crisis: what to do? Take up yoga? Skydiving?
To my mind, this is another cataclysm, a soft one, a creeping one, a moral one. Evil easily enough creeps into this world. It has legs in this world, of people who longer know themselves or one another because they have been led by the hand through their lives by a sybaritic desire for easy pleasures, and simple decisions. They don’t exist, because they have never been asked to exist.
This is what political radicalism offers for many. It is the root of Nazism, Fascism, Communism. It is the root of black magic and actual sacrificial cults, of genuine Satanism, which I think we will find in our midst at some point, shocking the media and rest of us alike. But we will know, on some level, that all was not perfect in our land, the plastic facades and glittering showrooms notwithstanding.
We need to do better, and this starts with honesty and courage. It starts with taking the harder path because it is the right path. It starts with refusing the easy ride offered to you by a smiling stranger in his car, leading, he says, to a sense of purpose without effort, belonging without identity, and growth that results from no decision of yours.
We can survive. We can even thrive. We can build heaven on Earth. But first we must tell ourselves the truth about who we are and what we have built. We have built peace. We have built a generally kind, overly tolerant people. But inside I think many are alone, lost, despondent, and vulnerable.