There is a bunch of stuff to talk about this morning, but we suspect you are getting as tired of hearing of that phrase as we are of saying it. We are in the weeks of real and dramatic change in our seasonal alignment. The Chairman had directed a general cleanup of the headquarters campus and then marched forthrightly away in search of something more entertaining.
We were stuck with dragging digits around to try to make some sense out of the lives that immediately preceded the ones we are currently extinguishing. Let’s try to capture the moment now to balance the magnitude of the changes that confront each new generation in this world. Each one has vast challenge before it passes, and the one in which we exist now has some remarkable and frankly apocalyptic aspects.
We will not attempt to elucidate them all this morning. There is a conflict in process in one or three of the Great Faiths which we do not pretend to understand and is some 1,400 years in progress. It has a curious resemblance to similar schisms since Rome fell from Empire. Some are familiar: Rome versus Protestant, Sunni versus Shia and that sort of thing. Both saw the slaying of many folks over some equally ephemeral issues of dogmatic dissension. We have added disputes over the various hues associated with change- Red, Green and Blue being popular shorthand for the manifestations.
There is some breathless talk of the perils confronting us in proliferation not seen since the previous generation nearly blasted new holes in the atmosphere, and which is a subtext to the images seen above. We are hoping we manage to stumble through this one unscathed, though there is an increasing world stage of drama that evokes the memories of other horrors that spanned our earth. We may lurch into another showdown that represents the simmering cauldron of conflict so vast as to be divided into numerical chapters.
We were looking at the one in which our grandparents struggled. It was known then as “The Great War,” since it was portrayed on a canvas of a scope never before seen. That had to be changed, of course, since another and larger one was only twenty years away.
We followed the two-part struggle with one measured in temperatures. The conflict with Moscow and the West was determined to be downright chilly and frankly cold. Parts of it were warm, like the ones in Korea and Vietnam. We may be inching toward something incandescent as entirely new and revolutionary faiths enter into something that resembles the old religious wars. And some of the ancient players mixed with new.
There was a moment of brief clarity on that. It was called the “Abraham Accords,” a series of bilateral agreements between modern states based on old ideas. That provoked peace and more turbulence between two of the three participant states in old conflicts. This week it includes airstrikes by one side against the other’s senior leadership, even as a secular conflict in Ukraine is demonstrating a fervor that seems religious in the level of furor. The landscape is remarkable, and conflict now spans the circumference of the globe, China to Taipei, Red Sea north to Jerusalem and across the great rivers that sunder the eastern flank of Europe.
We get weary of this conflict, since with each iteration it becomes more complex, with old conflicts jammed up against new ones. We thought it might be useful to look at the generation now almost completely disbursed to memory. The young man who drew the pen-and-ink sketches that frame his journey from war to jet-age peace show the odyssey of his times.
With tens of millions of others, he was swept into uniform, right hand itching to capture the tumult around him filled with roaring propellor-powered aircraft. His release from service meant returning to academic training at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. The great canvas of post-War life was filled with sleek automobiles and bold designs, like the prim Metropolitan design he helped bring to life at the Nash Company.
That vibrant life had an uneasy collision with basic biology, not dissimilar to the one raging in our society today. We may be edging toward another chapter as significant as the ones we recall with the numerals “1” and “2.” We are inclined to accept that we may see another numeral to describe what will happen in our times. To see how the last generation managed change.
We will likely see how well we do by comparison in fairly short order. But the take away for this morning is that there is room for optimism in our ability to get along and keep the good ideas coming.
There are plenty of bad ones, which we will do our best to ignore. But we prepare for the total eclipse of the sun in a couple days, and the reminder to not look up at the objects dancing in our sky without some basic protection. We think that might get us through.
Or at least get us to the kitchen by lunchtime.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com