~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I am most moved by this past election, more than I’ve ever been in my life. Because of my growing skepticism through the past four years, I am humbled by the outcome. The slight majority vote has shown the need that half of us in this country have for peace, decency, compromise, allowing everyone we know to have his and her opinion and for all of us to carry on as one, with our opinions shrugged off to some waiting room in our brains so that together we have the time and energy to make the democracy work. No one wants to live under any other kind of government if they know anything about rule other than self-rule.
We who live now, in this tiny era of the brief history of humans on this planet (about three seconds if you use a 24-hour span to represent the age of the earth itself), could make the most of the time we survive here. If we read history, we know that empires, advanced civilizations, dictatorships, royal demand, oligarchies, democracies come and go. We will have a short history in the experiment of our democracy, thinking that this is all there is, has been, will be, knowing so little why we live at all.
Because we are a thinking, hoping species, we are damned – for to do it right, we must think about all the other species who live here with us on this planet. Our burden is so huge, we sometimes just give up and do what we want – eat the animals, decimate the foliage, poison the soil, air and water. We will not survive our greed here, but the earth will revive and carry on after we implode.
One would think that once we knew we were ruining it all that we might just stop and do it right. The stress of selfishness takes its toll on us as well as on our planet.
History will record us when they dig us up. Our art, our literature, our architecture will tell who we were, as we in this era discover who came before us by what they left – their buildings and art, their books or scribblings or scratches on cave walls.
Once we’re dead and gone, who cares? We will not know how the future describes us and then judges us. And they will. Being revealed as good, kind, sincere and thoughtful would be a refreshing footnote to history.
To do this not for future folks digging around our graves and houses and public squares but for our own time on this plane? We could make all our lives worth living. That those future diggers might discern from our leavings that here was the era of the species that took the time and effort to know that all human life is about taking care of one another, not making enemies of everyone who doesn’t look and act like us.
Our hope being that by the time those future archeologists will be digging us up out of our ruins and finding the first of the species that made them evolve into kind, thoughtful and loving humans as the origin of the species intended.
Now, wouldn’t that be grand? Our contribution to the betterment of the species, the idea of humans hand in hand rather than guns in hand. Each generation better than the prior, eventually a utopia.
Pollyanna rides again.
