End of Days, or Not

This past week has been weird and depressing. A growing number of fires in California cast a pall of smoke into the atmosphere over the northern part of the state, like a high fog but with a gritty perspective in the middle distance and bits of ash floating silently down, so that your car’s hood and fenders are speckled white. There’s a cold, red-orange darkness at noon, like the fume out of Mordor, or like life on a planet under a red-dwarf star. You’ve seen the pictures on friends’ Facebook pages—not quite as apocalyptic as my stock photo here, but still disturbing. It’s like—and I think this is a quote from either J. R. R. Tolkien or J. K. Rowling—you can’t ever feel cheerful again.

On top of that, Monday was the Labor Day holiday. So, for those of us who are retired and only loosely connected to the working world’s rhythms, that day felt like a second Sunday. Then Tuesday was like a Monday, Wednesday like Tuesday, and what the hell is Thursday supposed to be? Glad as we are for a holiday, it throws off the pace of the week and makes everything feel subtly weird.

And then there are the overlying, or underlying, or background burdens of 2020. The pandemic drags on and on, so that we are isolated from family, friends, and coworkers, except through the synthetic closeness of a computer screen. We wear masks in public, so that we are all strangers to each other, even to the people that we know and would normally smile at. We avoid people on the sidewalk and in elevators, maintain a shopping cart’s distance at the grocery store, and feel guilty about touching a piece of fruit in the bin and then putting it back when we find a suspicious bruise. This illness, unlike any other, is not so much a matter of concern about personal safety as a national and social pall that has descended on everyday life.

Because of the closures, our robust, consumer-oriented economy has tanked, and we don’t know when it will come back. The stock market has revived from its swoon in the spring, apparently rising on shreds of pandemic optimism. But anyone who follows the market knows that these weekly swings of 500, 1,000, and 1,500 points on the Dow alone, with comparable lurches in the other indexes, just can’t be healthy. It’s like the entire investor class is cycling from mania to depression, too. Meanwhile, we all know people who have been laid off and are scrambling. We all have a favorite restaurant that is eking by with takeout service or a favorite shop that has closed, apparently for good. We all miss going downtown or to the mall for some “shopping therapy”—not that we need to buy anything, but we look forward to what the richness of this country and its commercial imagination might have to offer us. Buying dish soap, toilet paper, face masks, and other necessities off the Amazon.com website just isn’t as satisfying.

And then there’s the politics. The divisions in this country between Left and Right—emblematic of but, strangely, not identical with the two major parties—have grown so deep and bitter that friendships are ended and family relationships are strained. The political persuasion opposite to your long-held point of view has become the other, the enemy, and death to them! We are slouching, sliding, shoved inexorably into an election that has the two sides talking past each other, not debating any real points of policy but sending feverish messages to their own adherents. And whichever way the national polling falls out—with the complication of counting votes in the Electoral College from the “battleground states”—the result promises to bring more bitterness, more rioting, more political maneuvering, and perhaps even secession and civil war.¹ There’s a deep feeling in the nation that this election will solve nothing.

The one ray of hope in all of this is that things change. This is not a variation on the biblical “This too shall pass.” Of course it will pass, but that does not mean things will get back to the pre-fire, pre-pandemic, pre-boom, pre-strife normal. This is not the “new normal,” either. There never was, never is, any kind of “normal.” There is only the current configuration, life as we have it, and what the circumstances will bring. But this is also not the “end of days.”

Every fire eventually burns out. The rains come, the ground soaks up their moisture, and the stubbornest embers are extinguished for another year. We may have other and worse fires—or possibly better drought conditions—next year, but this year’s firestorm will eventually be over. Yes, the ground is burned, homes are lost, and a number of lives and livelihoods are upended. But the ground is also cleared for new growth, and the way is clear for people to start over. As someone who sits on a forty-year pile of accumulated possessions and closets full of just “stuff,” I sometimes think a good fire is easier to handle than a clearing operation where I would have to weigh and consider every piece of bric-à-brac against future need or desire.² Sometimes you just have to let events dictate what happens in your life.

Every plague eventually fades away. The virus or bacteria mutates into a harmless nuisance, our immune systems adapt to handle it, or medical science comes up with a vaccine, and a devastating disease disappears from our collective consciousness. Yes, we have death and disability in its wake. But death and disability come to us all, if not from Covid-19 then from the annual influenza, or a cancer, or accident, or other natural and unnatural causes. For those who survive, our lives and our attitudes become more resilient, more grounded, more able to take life’s hard blows. That which does not kill me makes me stronger—until it or something worse finally kills me. And this is the way of life on this planet. The essence of the human condition is that we have the self-knowledge, foresight, and insight to understand this, where for every other animal on Earth, life’s stresses are pure misery and death is the ultimate surprise.

Every economic downturn paves the way for growth. At least, that is the cycle in countries that enjoy free-market capitalism. “Creative destruction,” the watchword of economist Joseph Schumpeter, captures the vitality of markets that are able to respond to current conditions and meet the needs and demands of people who are making their own decisions. In my view, this is preferable to one person or group, or a committee of technical experts, trying to guide the economy and in the process preserving industries, companies, and financial arrangements that have outlived their usefulness but provide some kind of national, political, social, or emotional stability that this group values above letting the mass of people make their own decisions.

Every political crisis passes. Issues get resolved, the emotions die down again, and life goes on in uneasy balance. The new stability may not reflect the goals and values that you were prepared to fight for, actually fought for, or maybe even died for. But the resolution is usually a compromise that most people can live with … unless the end of the crisis is a terminal crash, a revolution, a civil war, and a crushing loss that results in a majority—or worse, a virtual minority—beating the other side’s head in and engendering animosities and unhealed wounds that fester for generations and destroy everyone’s equanimity. Sometimes the best we can hope for is an uneasy, unsatisfying compromise that will hold until the next round of inspirations and aspirations takes control of the public psyche.

There never was a normal, just the temporary equilibrium that kept most people happy, a few people bitter, and many people striving to make things better. There never is an “end of days,” because history has no direction and no ultimate or logical stopping place—at least, not until the human race dies out and is replaced by the Kingdom of Mollusks, if we’re lucky, or the Reign of the Terror Lizards, if we’re not.

1. But see my take on that possible conflict in That Civil War Meme from August 9, 2020.

2. I recently completed such an operation with a forty-square-foot storage locker that I was renting, and the exercise took three months and was exhausting. You stare at a book you once thought you would read, or a jacket you once wore as a favorite, and have to decide its ultimate fate. Sooner or later, you just have to let go and throw this stuff away.