Where Lies Hope?

So heavy is this human baggage that sometimes it drags us to a halt for years, centuries even. Other times we slog forward like put-upon snails. Occasionally, something else happens.

Recently an anonymous editorialist for the Times of London struck a phrase while writing about the rise of Barack Obama and spoke of "America’s prodigious ability to re-invent itself."

There, I thought, when I read it, there lies hope.

In so many parts of the world the past lies so heavy on humans that hope is at best a desperate dream.

The Arabs are chained by ancient religious and tribal enmities so binding that the simple daily struggle to survive requires all their energy.

The Jews are rent, divided into those in bondage to old books and prophecies and those of vision and the wisdom of the new.

The Russians have twice made astonishing breaks with their past—1917 and 1989—but now as unearned and undreamt of oil wealth fills their leaders’ pockets they are in serious danger of backsliding into serfdom.

The Chinese, the Indians, the Catholic nations of Latin America—so many examples of so many struggles to discard the worst of the past while keeping the best and then finding a better way forward.

By chance and good fortune, America—brave new world, indeed—got off to better start than most. No geographical baggage and the cultural baggage we brought with us was at least not quite as heavy as that of the stay-at-homes.

Right at the beginning a foundation of bracing cleverness was laid—the constitution—that went a long way toward ameliorating one of the two basic human social problems: power and the corruption that ensues. Divide the sons-of-bitches into three branches of government and give all of them ways to check and balance each other. It’s a system that doesn’t solve the problem of power corruption (which is probably unsolvable) but it went a long way toward limiting the corrosive effects.

Sadly, for all their wisdom and foresight, the vaunted founders had nothing—nothing!—to say about the other human social problem: greed.

A lack, a failure that led to all kinds of horrors—genocide, slavery, oligarchy—right up to the present day.

Along the way, other humans were keenly aware of the greed problem and tried to come up with ways to fix—or at least ameliorate—it. The unfairly unvaunted Marx being chief among the would-be fixers. His solution, clever as it was, turned out to be fatally flawed because he missed the disastrous effects of the power problem.

Now, against formidable odds, it falls again on America to do something about both problems. America. home of the improbably (some would say obscenely) rich, the frighteningly powerful, the voraciously greedy.

Incredibly, in spite of unprecedented levels of governmental and corporate and—yes—religious corruption, we find ourselves caught once more in the most unlikely and difficult and of all challenges to Yankee ingenuity, the one which the Times writer got spot on: self re-invention.

Embodied in one candidate but the process involves us all, or at least enough of us to elevate that one candidate to a place where he—and we—can do something about the two problems of power and greed.

He—and we—being human, all-too-human, no doubt the mistakes to come will be humdingers, and appalling.