A Not So Brave New World?

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

----Seneca

Yes, it’s the holidays and we are all busy with a thousand things that need to get done so perhaps it’s not the time for deep thoughts and philosophy? Too bad, I’m going with it anyway. When one year is ending and another is beginning we tend to turn our thoughts to what is going away and what is coming along.

Arguably, no matter which candidate got your vote, the presidential election is a perfect example of this. The eight years of President Obama are over, that was a given, the election results were not going to change that. As it should be. The law says no one gets to stay longer than eight years in the White House, so a new family will now enter those hallowed halls. Ahem…it’s safe to say we ain’t seen nothing yet, right? I won’t get into politics exactly except to say that if anyone needs me I will be snuggling in the corner with my pug puppy for a little while until my head calms down a little.

Change doesn’t usually bother me, but it seems as if our country is on the precipice of something that no one has ever seen before and I can’t be the only one that’s a little freaked out. Retreating to my favorite vice, after Penny pug, I was binge-watching some Netflix and two documentaries caught my eye. One was about the assassination of President Kennedy and the other was about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Both of those happened at this time of year, in the midst of the holidays and both ushered in a new era of change. Oh, and violence, death, re-birth, and eventual victory. Think about how people had to feel on that random Friday when one minute the President is waving and smiling and the next minute he’s dead. Two days later the man accused of killing him is also shot, and it’s all on live on television when television was barely beginning. People were pretty freaked out then too, how could they not have been?

It was much the same way in 1941, when WW II hit home, literally. A lazy Sunday morning and the next thing it’s almost Armageddon. There was no instant news in those days. It was hours before the first reports of it were reaching the mainland. A cable from Washington DC advising the command in Hawaii of the breakdown of negotiations wasn’t seen by officials there for close to 8 hours. Meanwhile, almost two hundred planes were descending on Pearl Harbor and just like that we were at war. A day later the President is on the radio, trying to be reassuring, and it was an historic effort and while many look back on it with warmth and nostalgia over what would become “The Greatest Generation” you have to know there were more than a few people sitting curled up with a friend, a spouse or a dog and thinking, “What fresh hell is this?”

Those two events were turning points in our history, just as I suspect this most recent election will be seen as. These events signaled the end of much of what we had come to know as familiar and safe. I can’t even imagine how the addition of social media would have added to those tense times. My sense of it though is that while the Internet, Facebook, online news, texting and Twitter have given us many advantages, they are a huge distraction, and yes, Mr. President-Elect, I am talking to you. Look around at what’s happening. This is not a time for Tweet-storms and Facebook fights. We got sh…um…work… to do. That’s what happened after the President was shot, and it’s what happened after Pearl Harbor. People got to work. Rosie the Riveter and Rosa Parks come to mind. I believe women are going to accomplish great things in the next few years, which is typical of us, if I do say so myself. Not just women of course, but we are going to be especially unstoppable I think. Not to be sexist but we have some real skin in the game.

Some really good parts of what we have all come to know are ending, but there will be new beginnings as well. The words of one amazing woman I know are echoing in my head. She watched in horror when JFK was taken from us. Her husband had worked for him; she knew what we were losing. When I was a new mother, the first Gulf War was starting and everything around me was swirling in a sleep-deprived fugue she simply said, “Hang on, darling.” You got it Mary. I’m hanging on no matter what comes.