A LIFE IN WORLD EVENTS
I was born the day Nazi Germany started World War II. And the holocaust followed soon afterward. The end of the war and Roosevelt’s death hung over my preschool years and then the Korean War started up, seemingly side-by-side to the McCarthy hearings.
But throughout that time I was most terrified by the spectre of an imminent hydrogen bomb slamming into my city, warned by a teacher as I sat cross-legged in the school basement, that all of us would be instantly vaporized. How does that feel, I wondered. Would it hurt?
In the stretch of time between the two Asian wars, the civil rights movement took off, spurred on by MLK, ending with some advancement of equal rights. But then came the ferocity of the anti-Vietnam war protests and tv revelations of the horrors of that war.
Meanwhile I was enrolled in medical school, interrupted and scarred by the assassinations of MLK and John and Robert Kennedy. Good years smacked around.
The free-love enlivened, Bob Dylan accompanied, Hippie philosophized, Beatles attended, Hair epitomized years soon was flattened and even eviscerated by the AIDS crisis and Reagan conservatism. Not easy seeing old friends die hideous deaths at still young ages.
Clinton’s tomfoolery was disrupted by the rise of Columbia cocaine cartels and the sell off American health care to for profit health insurers, not to forget the Serbian war and the Rwanda genocide, Liberian civil war, and AIDS still unchecked. While I was busy raising two sons.
Then came the Islamic upheavals and 911, leading into more middle east wars, the recession, domestic terrorism here and elsewhere, the Madoff debacle, Afghanistan, and everything sliding toward a global swing to the right.
And now Trump.
I turn my face into the pillow, close the light, turn on my airpods and watch an intolerable five minutes of Instagram before switching to my current audiobook, a murder mystery by Anthony Horowitz who traces murder against a calm, urbane, moneyed, Western society with no politics and no struggles. And ideal nostrum and soporific, promoting a night of sleep colored and enlivened and desecrated by mildly terrorizing dreams. The price of living through a long time of unrest and evil, technological super advancement and (for a special love of my own) glorious advancements in the field of music, opera and ballet. Figurative art is making a way back from the inert and deadened abstract.
All this is not re-stating the question, is life worth living, but is a swipe at the world each of us finds themselves having to suffer and extol that life despite (and partially because of) the difficulties that surrounds and even engulf us. That we get through it is some kind of testament, if not an endorsement. And we get through, each in their own way, by managing our circumstances, trying on a daily basis not to fall victim to the rocks flying our way. Jus think of a beach we used to play on, building sand castles while waiting for a candy apple to be offered by a doting hand. Isn’t that where joy squeezes its way past the beasts and barriers that surround us?
And they call this the October years.
