These Times

Let’s see the whole picture

Kirk Ericson | Feb 22, 20240

The world is not going to hell. It’s not going to heaven, either. It’s going to where it’s always been going and where it’s always been: Planet Earth.

This world of ours is a mix, a kind of impure puree. Sometimes, the heaven part coagulates at the top, and sometimes, the hell part’s at the top.

That’s the ebb and recharge of the universe’s experiment with Homo sapiens. Many of us humans have worked hard to learn how to exist amid other Homo sapiens, and many of us have worked hard to destroy other Homo sapiens.

The record of our species is not all bad. It’s not all good. We’ve had our failures, and war has to top that list. We’ve had our successes, and I’d put music, humor and medicine in that top 10 list. Our score includes some achievements open to interpretation, including zoos, underwear and Florida.

But it seems — if I can speak here for the entire human race, past and present — that we’ve been out of whack lately with our view of the world. It seems we’re being bombarded and regurgitating our failures more than our successes. The fact that movies set in “dystopian futures” enthralls many of us is revealing.

Something else revealing is the popularity of unsocial media reaping our emotions by promoting negative takes on the human condition. A video of a child enraptured by a bumblebee pollinating a flower won’t do as well as a clip showing some stumblebum falling on ice. Cable TV “news” operates on much the same level.

They’re selling you an unbalanced and unfair view of existence. Beware of people and groups using phrases such as “This is the worst it’s ever been,” “It’s never been this bad,” “It was so much better in the past” or “They’re destroying us!” They aim to keep you in a state of angry animation.

It’s chic to be a cynic. It’s cool to smirk and be sarcastic. That’s easy.

Being open to the totality of human experience, in equal measure, now that’s hard.

I’ve recently retired from cynicism. Something happened in my life to cause that, and now I’m aiming to rebalance my outlook by trying to see the wonders of this world and the improvements in human existence that humans have created.

Here’s something: In the mid-1910s, a University of Washington graduate named Alice Ball, born in Seattle, created the most effective treatment for leprosy known to science at the time. She was just 23 years old and was African-American. Leprosy had been a scourge of the world for millennia — you might recall lepers from the Bible and Monty Python movies — and Alice Ball’s creation prevented millions from suffering from the disfiguring disease of leprosy. So, whenever you don’t see a leper, think of the amazing Alice Ball.

One more: In our early days, clans had a firekeeper who was responsible for carrying and preserving fire in a container. That person’s job was essential to the survival of the clan. Fire cooked food, kept ravenous animals away from the campfire while the clan slept and provided heat. We can now carry fire in our pockets. Imagine the prehistoric fire-carrier’s reaction if you handed him a lighter.

We should excise from our life glibness, smugness, and lying to guard our pride and behavior.

When I was in my teens, my father introduced me to a quote that remains one of my favorites:

“Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying goodbye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof.” — Lin Yutang, “The Importance of Living”