WHERE HAVE WE BEEN? WHERE ARE WE HEADED?
(…coming from the certainties of roads past-travelled onto the ambiguities of highways to parts unknown)

Like everyone else, I have my moments of doubt and uncertainty. This seems to be one of those moments.

The way technology has made us all so interconnected, we now seem to exist in a constantly swirling mass of information having both inconsequential and significant importance, and hardly daring to draw breath for fear we might choke on the stuff. It’s not just disconcerting but even disorienting at times.

In the face of all that I’ve often been asked how I manage to pick out a subject to write or comment about. I really don’t know. It just happens; but, I do consciously try to avoid joining the thundering herd of opinion and punditry on any given one, if I can help it. Much like a dumpster-diver picking through a mass of info-garbage, I just seek for one of those illusive aluminum can nuggets in it, from which my satirical bent will find a maverick perspective, instead.

It doesn’t always work, but my batting average seems “respectable” enough. Which brings me to this present contemplation: Where have we been? Where are we headed? Coming from the certainties of roads past-travelled, onto the ambiguities of highways to parts unknown, we perceive ourselves to be in a fogbank with a strange mixture of both anxiety and anticipation about the future.

Everywhere we look around the world all we see is turmoil, violence, and upheaval. Here, at home, our institutional foundations appear to be eroding away from the onslaughts of venality, greed, hedonistic license, increasing ignorance, and expanding economic dichotomies. In short, things are just going to hell in a hand basket, and from the looks of things, we’re in that basket, and it’s already at that destination…or so it seems.

But is that really true? Maybe not.

From its birth our republic has passed through a number of extreme storms and stresses…economic, political, social, and those of war. Yet it has survived and it is still here and in more or less one piece. It has managed to do so mainly because the Founders of it somehow were able to come up with a near perfect system of governance, a dynamic blueprint for maintaining a very delicate balance between free-wheeling individualism and controlling collectivism. It’s that balance which has given us the resiliency to recover from such extreme stresses, even if in the process our society was changed by it each time.

It’s that resiliency which has become the hallmark of our culture and society, allowing it to change its norms so as to adapt to each new generation’s circumstances. For those of a pessimistic outlook this is seen as ultimately leading to the demise of our nation. For those of an optimistic outlook (to which I’m inclined to be), this is viewed more as opportunities leading us on to another future. What kind that might be, or what our society might become because of it, doesn’t really matter. It will be what it will be.

That’s not a bad case of a Louis XV outlook, it’s just that each generation can only see so far ahead down those highways; so , it will be up to each succeeding one to keep things firmly …on those highways.

CENTURION