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This journal is about hope... but we're not going to start there.
Some days, the world just sucks. Okay, maybe a lot of days.
Today, it seems like a toss-up between folks who say that we're going to hell in a hand-basket, folks who are *trying* to send us to hell in a hand-basket, and those of us just trying to make it through. We're bombarded by elders relating nostalgia about "better times," paired with stories of violence and looming threats of societal surveillance and control. With all that, it's easy to lose our way, and to forget that things are a bit better, and quite a bit more chaotic than we usually admit to ourselves.
I just finished reading Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars, and I'm here to tell you that they're not going to win. Not the assholes, not the totalitarians, not even those who think that juuust a little tweaking of the human state would somehow make us better people. (We know how that ends, too...)
Yes, there is immense suffering in parts of the world. Yes, there are things terribly broken in our governments, in our relationships with each other, and even our relationships with ourselves. But we are *learning*. For the first time ever, we are collectively starting to pay attention and see the problems that abound, and our society is (more or less) stable enough that we can start to deal with them. Yeah, it's going to be brutal at times, and yeah, we'll lose our way more than once; but we *will* make it. The message of that novel, and of art in general, is that humanity *will* endure and learn and grow beyond the wildest dreams of those poor souls who seek to control its soul. The stars call to us, and that is a dream that no one can ever destroy.
Some days, the world just sucks. Okay, maybe a lot of days.
Today, it seems like a toss-up between folks who say that we're going to hell in a hand-basket, folks who are *trying* to send us to hell in a hand-basket, and those of us just trying to make it through. We're bombarded by elders relating nostalgia about "better times," paired with stories of violence and looming threats of societal surveillance and control. With all that, it's easy to lose our way, and to forget that things are a bit better, and quite a bit more chaotic than we usually admit to ourselves.
I just finished reading Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars, and I'm here to tell you that they're not going to win. Not the assholes, not the totalitarians, not even those who think that juuust a little tweaking of the human state would somehow make us better people. (We know how that ends, too...)
Yes, there is immense suffering in parts of the world. Yes, there are things terribly broken in our governments, in our relationships with each other, and even our relationships with ourselves. But we are *learning*. For the first time ever, we are collectively starting to pay attention and see the problems that abound, and our society is (more or less) stable enough that we can start to deal with them. Yeah, it's going to be brutal at times, and yeah, we'll lose our way more than once; but we *will* make it. The message of that novel, and of art in general, is that humanity *will* endure and learn and grow beyond the wildest dreams of those poor souls who seek to control its soul. The stars call to us, and that is a dream that no one can ever destroy.
