Astonishingly, These are the Best of Times: So We Must Look Leftward and Do Much Better

To understand history is to be an activist revolutionary and a radical feminist. 

 

The future of humanity lies around a sharply leftward bend.

 

Some combination of my ongoing research into the history and present of education in the United States, generally and in Minnesota particularly;  a bevy of reading on the history of the United States and a vast array of fiction and nonfiction on all manner of topics;  rumination at virtually every moment of the day on the prehistory, history, and current condition of humankind;  has given me a deep sense that there is an abiding misunderstanding among human beings as to their own natures and reason for being.

 

Inasmuch as my reading and contemplation have given me an enormous store of information and philosophical insight upon which to draw, I marvel more as each day transpires how thinking people could ever be conservative or reactionary---  by definition intending to either preserve life as it is, or go back to some imagined better time.  Regrettably, there was no better time than now, even when the attractions of pre-technological and pre-industrial life are considered:  Life at those stages, featuring more honest and less-impeded human interactions, nevertheless was, following Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.”

 

In the United States, as I consider the history of that nation, a police state prevailed over vast portions of the population until, let’s say 1968, since that year seems to be a dismal reference point for conservatives.  Until that year, environmental abuse was rampant;  planned obsolescence and other corporate shenanigans were rampant and induced among many a lot of winking and nodding;  many women’s lives were unbearable;  Native and African Americans had been knowingly brutalized;  and most of our initiatives as a world power had served to prop up autocrats who similarly brutalized their own people.  

 

But in 1968, the lid came off a pot of nasty soup, we saw all of our transgressions and brutality even if we wished and often tried to turn away, and the consequences poured forth, giving us the perceived and material dilemmas that we have today.

 

But seeing matters more clearly puts our problems starkly before us as undeniable reality, giving us a chance to set about the task of making of ourselves a better people and of creating across the global expanses more hospitable places for Nature and for humankind:

 

Astonishing, these are the best times the world has ever seen. 

 

Environmental awareness is keen, even if we are still doing terrible things to Nature.  We have moved through autocracy and aristocracy to proto-democracy.  Capitalism, though rapacious and inducing greed, has given us material prosperity and a middle class that, if jerked from personal universes of distraction, pretension, and petty amusements, is positioned to begin the process of democratization.  Long abused people will never again accept the level of ill treatment due to matters of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or any other biological or demographic identifier that they have in the past.

 

Thus, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to transform the world that we see before us.  We must progress from capitalistic greed and firm inclination toward self-centeredness, toward an ethic that considers all women sisters, all males brothers, all children our own.

 

The only life acceptable is that which we now have the opportunity and responsibility to create.

 

For that to happen, all people must be educated.

 

Deep knowledge and shared ethics are the conduits to the world that we can and have the obligation to envision, materialize, and spiritualize.