A Thin Grey Line of Hope

“I want another child, but my friends think I’m crazy for bringing children into this world.”  A woman spoke in a group last year, the sky grey and the sun-tinted red, as the now second biggest forest fire in California history blew smoke from over a hundred miles away. This year, she had that second child.

These forest fires burned as cities burned over social-injustice and petty anarchy. They burned as right-wing militias clashed with left-wing militias in cities around the United States and the world.  They burned as vaccines with billion-dollar profit margins were being torpedoed through production and testing. They burned over whispers of civil war. They burned over 4 million people dying around the world with a virus of still-mysterious origins.

They burned as this woman told a story about a near-ultimate hopelessness, one which was driving a mother, who wants a sibling for her child, to reconsider creating life.  A year later, new fires burned as she brought her second child into the world despite it all. 

In the last 18-months we’ve experienced massive global disruptions that have upset much of the human order on earth. No need to list them all here. I’m going to assume the big ones are obvious to anyone reading this, and the smaller, local, personal ones need to be remembered too. If I tried to list them all, I could only miss many.

In the past month, it has become increasingly clear we are not heading toward a new normal. 

Normalcy being a felt sense of stability, of calibration.  Ironically, we seem to be continually stripping ourselves of normalcy, stability, of the known, in our search for the known.  While I might be wishing for a deep clear breath in the middle of endless forest fires, it’s not coming.  

We are learning how to breathe in the smoke.

This reality settled in while sitting to get my vaccine at the pharmacy a few weeks ago.

Reading the statements on the patient disclosure was like a deep breath of wildfire smoke in the summer: “No vaccine is known to prevent covid-19,” “This vaccine is undergoing a clinical trial,” “It is your choice to get this vaccine,” I realized in this moment that there was a great lie at hand here about choice. It’s not a choice when it's bound. The vaccine gave me a glimmer of hope of new normalcy. The other choices we have been presented with are our own death, the third-degree murder of people we love, of social shutdowns, of the end of life as we know it. Essentially we are not choosing a vaccine, we are asked to choose between hope and hopelessness. So is there really a choice there?  

Then the headlines came bursting out in the media about Delta variant, Lambda variant, 44% efficacy of the vaccine, breakouts in our town and the surrounding counties, new mask requirements, businesses closing due to breakouts. Companies, families, individuals changing our plans again.  Hope is being eroded, and the blame is flying.

I saw a friend's post that encapsulated this for me. “I'm isolating at home because I got that post-vaxxed Delta sh¡t. I'd like to offer a very hearty (f - you)to all the YouTube MD epidemiologists and societal contract-breaking conspiracy dingbat petri-dish d¡ckheads out there that are making this neverending nightmare possible. cheers!”   While on the other side, equally blameful friends and colleagues rallying against those joining the side of totalitarian freedom-killers.  I don’t agree with either. Both seem to be missing the point, which is we want to know how to get out of this; to make some meaning out of chaos.

I walked out of that vaccine appointment. Reconsidering this choice. Weighing the risks of getting the vaccine, catching covid, or planning on any return to the life I, and we had known.  The last seemed the riskiest of all.  

The greatest collective risk, I believe, is that the urge for easy answers will accelerate.

Easy, fixed answers are like little utopias in the minds of people. Every human utopia needs codes of conduct, values, beliefs. These codes need enforcers. They need an inside and outside of the compound. They need an in group and an out group. They need to dominate. In the human realm, even when the lion and lamb lay down together, it is because the gates and the guards are holding back the barbarians. 

Think of that intractable argument at a holiday dinner between family members, each jockeying for the supremacy of their belief, for example. Did you all  find the solution to the problem they were arguing over? 

 Or every “God is on our side” campaign waged by righteous against the wicked. What would God say about crusades, manifest destiny, genocide?  

Or, in contemporary terms, the “science is on our side” war against feeling, meaning, soul, intuition, and even the miraculous nature of existence itself. Without the creations of science and its human avatars, would we have climate change? 

Humanity is walking a knife’s edge, our view beyond the next step obscured by the smoke of a world on fire, and any step to the right or left means a drop into the abyss of partial-knowing, where we are consumed by the inevitable echo-chamber of our personal or shared paradigm. While in the past we could take others into this with us through dominance, coercion, control, and “win,” it seems like now we will all fall if any side“wins.”  The stakes are global and apocalyptic.

So this thin line of hope we are walking is tenuous. It requires us to breathe in the smoke, and not think beyond the next step. Then make the minute adjustments required to balance. To not look too far to either side lest our attention pulls us over, sending everyone behind us and before us over the edge. To trust our walking, and perhaps trust that should we fall, there will be nothing to catch us, but also no bottom.  To trust that we have been falling all along, and that, perhaps, is the point.