Comfort

A person can’t help getting a bit discouraged these days. It dismays the strongest American heart to realize that we have gone from “fireside chats” in 1933 to “tweeted” threats of civil war and murder of our political opponents in only 86 years. That’s a normal life span of one of us these days. Not a very long time, would you agree?

Contrast that with Ancient civilizations. Egypt’s dynastic period started with the reign of its first king, Narmer, in approximately 3100 BCE, and ended with the death of Cleopatra VII in 30. That’s a longer period of time than that which has elapsed since the fatal asp bit its way into history. We seem to destroy with a speed and vengeance rarely matched in history. It ain’t hardly reason to hold up a “We’re Number One” glove, now is it?

Something has happened to us. A president in 1933 came on the radio to comfort our parents and grandparents who were distraught and suffering from the devastating effects of The Great Depression while, at the same time, they were watching fascist monsters threatening countries across both oceans. I’ve heard that families gathered around the radio and held hands when FDR spoke and felt a little better when he finished. It was going to be all right. Somehow, it was going to be all right.

Now, a different president avails himself, at hours, with digitized diatribes against any American who isn’t, at least for that moment, on his team. Only a relatively few Americans actually read his threats, insults, and terroristic blather. But the press repeats each blustering bit of babble as if it were carved in stone on the heights of Mount Sinai itself. After each outburst, we feel a little worse. America’s not going to be all right. Somehow, this time it’s not going to be all right.

Some blame technology. Maybe. But the ancient Egyptians toyed with technological advances that must have been as dramatic and mysterious to them as the advancement of artificial intelligence is to us. Do you think those pyramids at Giza were simply great stones piled upon one another? Would you believe that they involved intricate and masterfully imagined structural techniques that kept them from sliding past one another, or collapsing? There were even failures. One, the so-called “Bent Pyramid, located at Dahshur, seems to have started at an untenable angle before corrections saved the day. Our ancients made adjustments.  Does “Twitter” need to be re-oriented in like fashion?

Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was partially right when he ended Gatsby with “So we beat on, boats against the current …,” but wrong about being “… borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We seem to be riding the rapids into a terrifying future while we ignore the past lessons of history.

Mister, we could use someone like FDR again.

Egypt's Bent Pyramid. Like Twitter, the
 demands of reality required rethinking.