Midday Reflection: These days it feels like everything is “too political” or there’s too much to worry about, but I wonder if every generation of Americans has a global/local crisis to come to terms with. Our parents lived through the threat of nuclear annihilation, our grandparents lived through WWII, their parents lived through WWI, their parents and parents’ parents went through the Civil War and its aftermath, etc.
In all these crises, there were accompanying economic and social changes. New distributions of wealth and power. Refugees, migrants, settlers: vulnerable peoples. The “in group” and “out group” dynamics kept changing, becoming more complex. The outcome is never without terrible cost, and yet it’s always been something to build off of.
What is our crisis today? What is our story? Who are “we”, who are are comrades and who are our enemies?
Are we in an accelerated and intensified variation of the same old pattern? Is the New again shattering through the Old?
[Historically, I’d be interested in the contemporary narratives of these crises, i.e. how people understood what was happening to them and to others, what was their “just cause” for fighting (violently and non-violently)]
