Enthusiasm, Followed by Reality

"Here, Life Is About Contentment in Everyday Rituals, As Much as the Dazzling Novelty of Different Experiences." So reads the motto from a high-end realty site in London.

Meanwhile, down here on earth, where most of us live our lives of quiet desperation on a daily basis, “contentment in everyday rituals” is likely to include shaving. If an impossibly wild and additional expression offers itself, a percentage of us may floss our teeth. One can only wonder, does an overdue notice from my landlord rate as “a dazzling novelty of different experiences?”

And thus, I hobnob on a daily basis, with the likes of Bezos and Musk

But then, I am a writer, and careful observation enables my fiction and social commentary, in which contentment in everyday rituals and the dazzling novelty of different experiences are paramount. There may have been a day when such heady stuff was available to the common man, including myself, but no longer.

And even that flitting era was short-lived. I place it at about two decades beginning in 1948 or so, when Rosie-the-Riveter came back home to the bosom of her family and America was the undisputed industrial powerhouse in a war-ravaged world.

Even then, long-term vision ended at our nose

Eagles can spot a mouse on the ground from a thousand feet, polar bears smell prey from a hundred miles and the common robin feels an earthworm burrowing silently beneath its feet. We humans, blessed with the most advanced brains in the animal world, can split the atom but neither house the homeless nor feed the hungry.

It must be a trade-off. Author Kurt Vonnegut claims our big brains are killing us, and he is probably correct.

There is no other excuse.

I had close friends who went to war for their country and came home shattered

They killed other men, who went to war for their countries, and saw things none of us would ever care to see. They do not hunger for contentment or dazzling novelty. Their hope is for endless quiet Sundays, alone in the back yard, staring down what they have seen and done, wishing to awake and find it erased from memory. Those of us who have not been there cannot possibly understand.

And my point, if a point can be found, is that we drifted

Privilege and getting what we can became the norm, shouldering our way to the head of the line. Compared with those animals we consider lesser than ourselves, we choose to embrace a mirage of our lives as we see ourselves shimmering in the middle distance. The land of the free and the brave quietly became neither free nor brave. It’s confused, frightened and in danger of giving up on itself.

America the Beautiful’s lyrics declare, “God shed His grace on thee,” and it may have once been so. “And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea!” still exists in our collective mind, except for those we step around, who live in cardboard boxes or sheltered doorways.

And yet…and yet, it’s all still there in the brotherhood we abandoned

There’s not one in a hundred among us who would turn away from a friend’s call at 2am for help in an emergency. We are hard-wired for that response, and it is not yet dead.

It’s 2am in America and our nation is on the phone, in an emergency.

The question is, will we answer the phone, or roll over to tuck the blanket up and over our shoulders?