This phrase comes to mind often as I click through alternative news and commentary web sites or leaf through mainstream newspapers left behind on the Metro. The disconnect between these two worlds, from my perspective, is as palpable as the Europe I met for the first time in 1966 and the Europe in which I now live, nearly fifty years later.
The Europe of my youth was a place of unimaginable cultural and linguistic differences. Each border crossing presented new challenges, a difference in atmosphere, something new on my plate, stones rather than bricks, wine instead of ale, francs instead of pounds, croissants instead of toasted white bread, and so it went, from country to country.
And along with all those new differences, there was one general sentiment that seemed to be shared wherever I happened to be, and that was a sense of relief, for whatever reasons, that the worst was a thing of the past. The wars were finally over and there seemed to be a consensus that people would “Never Again” submit to such horrors. Former colonies were being liberated (granted sometimes reluctantly and not without blood) and, a few post war internal “réglement de comptes” aside, generally speaking, there appeared to be a shared sense of optimism and and non-interference, a sense of “live and let live” as the Europeans went about rebuilding and rethinking the folly of two world wars.
And while it is certainly comfortable to look back upon that time as a naive young American discovering the incredible variety of my own country’s roots firsthand, what I see now developing now around me is a nightmare.
True, while I was no genius, it didn’t take one to wonder, as I often did back in the late fifties and early sixties, why we couldn’t pay a fair price for our coffee or bananas, or why a Russian farmer would want to fight an American farmer, or why politicians seemed to parrot one another in saying the same things over and over again, why it was so important that Ike be elected, or why, years later, it was such a sad day in our living room when Nixon was forced to resign, while I was celebrating. You get the picture.
Positive physiological conditions of youth foster a glass half full perspective and the opposite applies to the older man’s view. Our internet informed awareness adds a reality to an already more real depressed picture. True reality which is neither positive or negative, constantly changes, and is unpredictable. Yet we are so rarely paying attention, caught up in our bubbles, sometimes nostaglia for a past that never existed anywhere but in our imagination. If reality is elusive, it must be sought out and not assumed to be lurking in our imagings. Get over yourself. Live in a shanty town in Asia or Africa for just one day.