In the days of sailing vessels, there were two main problems: too much wind (see Typhoon) and not enough wind (doldrums). Sailors also speak of the quiet before the storm. That pre-storm quiet is a well-known warning of things to come. I suspect the metaphor also applies to political life: there’s a period of quiet before “all hell breaks loose.” Metaphorically speaking, the same concepts apply to political life, where we fluctuate between having too much going on or not enough happening.
We seem to be in such a period now—not just in the States, but in many countries around the world. I’m writing this on New Year’s day (2019). Most of the new years I can remember conveyed a sense of promise for what would happen in the year to come. People celebrated “out with the old, in with the new.” I can still remember the first year my parents let me stay up past midnight as the old year “went out,” and the new year began. I remember being disappointed that nothing magical happened when the clock ticked past midnight. This year I have mixed feelings about the coming year. I have a sense of hope that we will somehow have a return of political sanity, and I also have a sense of dread, a fear that things may actually get worse. I am old enough to remember both Eisenhower and his VP, Richard Nixon, who became the standard bearer for the Republican Party with his promise of a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. That one was “my” war.
I had not been home from Vietnam very long when Nixon revealed his “secret plan,” which was basically to turn-tail and flee. Considering the alternatives, however, leaving in a hurry was probably the best we could do, in spite of the way many captured U.S. soldiers were left behind, needing to be repatriated later. I also knew quite a few Vietnamese who worked for the U.S. military who were very fearful of what would happen when the US soldiers left. On the bus from Oakland Army Base where we landed to the center where we were to be discharged, the conversation was primarily about places along the highway that would make a good location for an ambush. You can take the soldier out of the jungle, but you can’t really take the jungle out of the soldier. Time in a combat zone changes people even when, like me, they never directly experience combat.
In some ways returning was a time warp. I basically went from Vietnam back to graduate school at the University of Illinois, and I went with a chip on my shoulder. Although the faculty I had known before were sympathetic (some had previously experienced military service), many of the students I had known before my time in the military thought I had been a traitor to the cause of peace. They were angry at me because I had entered the military instead o fleeing to Canada to escape military service. One of the people I had known before had giving up working on his Ph.D. in political science to sell shoes in Canada. After a year of doing that, he went out into his yard, sat against a tree, put a gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His widow returned to the States.
I wore my jungle boots to class and rode my motorcycle faster than was prudent. It took the birth of my son a year or so later to put me back in a more “civilized” frame of mind. My guess is that graduate school also helped, given the combination of good professors, interesting things to read, and friends who were interested in an active mental life. I completed the Ph.D. (dissertation title: “Consciousness as Disease in Early Nineteenth-Century English Literature”) and subsequently spent 30 some years teaching at the university level. So … a lot of water has gone under my bridge and has influenced my perspective. I had hoped we (humanity in general and those of us in the States specifically) would be in better shape by now. When Obama was elected, I thought we were heading in a better direction.
The saying, “Two steps forward, one step back,” seems to be the way humanity measures progress. It seems as though we (humanity in general) need to take more than two steps backwards from time to time. The major wars in our history represent such times, even though they may “clear the way” for better progress in the future. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. My current hope is that our political situation (primarily but not only in the States) will provide the impetus for a major increase in liberty and justice for all.
So … we may be off to a slow start, but we seem to be heading more-or-less in the right direction. Perhaps we are just expecting too much progress too quickly. Perhaps Stevie Wonder got it right when he said, “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away”:
