A matter of perspective

We've almost finished reading Carol Bly's fascinating and delightful memoir, An Adolescent's Christmas 1944. This morning we read a section on page 52 that we want to share. We believe it helps put this terrible, awful, very bad year of 2020 in a different, and haunting, perspective.

even snowflakes have turned into gold

Photo by J. Harrington

... We liked Ike and eight years later would say so. We didn't know he was worried about a military-industrial complex. We didn't imagine that in the next few years rich advertisers would dominate American living rooms with sights and sounds of murder, hour in, hour out, because violence fascinates ill-educated people, and people habituated to fascination like fascination better than thinking and they buy products more readily than thinkers do. We knew no group psychology. We could not have guessed that critically massed rich men, once they sit in meetings together, apparently can't control their own behavior: they can't make themselves stand up against what is wrong. If a little task force of two or three come to a meeting, reporting after months of committee work, and make their proposal, the others apparently can't make themselves speak up against it. Irving Janis had not yet done his amazing book about "groupthink."...

The preceding excerpt seems to come very close to capturing a beginning of the slippery slope we've been careening down since at least 1944. We now have a government in which controlling interests in Congress believe it appropriate to provide higher levels of funding to the military-industrial complex than to the sum of all other discretionary spending. The observations about violence fascinating ill-educated people and rich men not controlling their own behavior seem all too fitting for the events of the past four years. We haven't read far enough to decide if Bly proposes responses to the concerns she cites above. That's for tomorrow and, if needed, Christmas morning. Meanwhile, we'll be trying to figure out whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about the condition that "the more things change, the more they remain the same." Perhaps by this time next year we won't have Scrooge in either the White House or as the Majority Leader in Congress.

The Christmas Letter - John M. Morris

Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
in the same place
and hope you are the same.

The dead have died as you know
and will never get better,
and the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.

So in closing I send you our love
and hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
like the present. It lasts forever
wherever you are. As ever I remain.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.