I Just Got Here Myself
Election day is upon us (tomorrow, in the U.S.).
Among the polarization and the whirlwind of weekly surprises and daily news and hourly predictions, I’m reminded of the writer Kurt Vonnegut. In his book, A Man Without a Country, he wrote this:
I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess… And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.”
It’s the most perfectly concise way of describing the very human tendency to throw your hands up when someone points at the messiness of the world: “Don’t look at me. I just got here. Blame someone else.”
We—the collective we, meaning human beings—adopt this mentality regularly. And in politics in particular, it’s very easy to blame everyone else for everything, and seemingly impossible to admit failure yourself. “Don’t look at me. I just got here.”
Funny that we don’t adopt that mentality to bestow forgiveness on anyone else. When fingers are pointed and accusations go flying about who’s responsible for what (in politics as in wars), we rarely kindly offer the benefit of the doubt to others by saying “Don’t look at them. They just got here.”
It’s a luxury we afford ourselves and those who agree with us, and nobody else.
While reading the news, I often think of people like Vonnegut. He’d make sense of life with his unique brand of dark wit. He passed away almost two decades ago, so we’ll never learn what he might have said in response to today’s world.
Well, I suppose we can always ask ChatGPT to fill in the blanks:
On second thought, we’re better off leaving those blanks blank after all.
A Positive Take
In response to Vonnegut’s cynicism (for he was the greatest of all cynics), one has to look to an optimist for an answer.
Here’s one that comes to mind: The very end of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (or the almost very end of the film Cloud Atlas, adapted from the book). In the 1850s, when the character Adam Ewing tells his father-in-law that he plans to join the abolitionist movement, the elder man insists that it would be futile. Doing so, he explains, would amount “to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.”
I suppose you could say that about voting in tomorrow’s election. Your vote is “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.”
But Ewing, the optimist, finds the perfect response. He replies, “What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”