Last Day of Summer 2020

Happy Last Day of Summer 2020 (pat. pending)! By broad considerations, 2020 has been a strange and unenviable year, but in the particularized context of my family life, I find that I have few complaints. All the predictable joys of watching a two-month-old grow into a fourteen-month-old have visited my house and I have greeted them all with growing gladness of heart. Of course, there is a bitterness that accompanies the sweetness of seeing your child reach new stages of development and that bitterness comes from knowing that once a stage is outgrown, it will never again be revisited.

I remember rejoicing when Levi learned to crawl but then it dawned on me that I could no longer simply set him on a blanket and walk away to some other task, fully confident that when I returned I would find him unmoved from where I laid him down. It wasn’t long ago that he took his first uncertain steps that were without the aid of some stabilizing implement. To help steady himself, he would keep both of his hands raised straight up into the air as though he were trying to scare off some predator by pretending to be bigger than he actually was. That particular stage, adorable though it was, only lasted a few days. Now he happily toddles along his way, arms occasionally outstretched toward his quarry but otherwise swinging casually at his sides.

So parenting is pretty fun so far, I’d have to say.

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Regarding the year of 2020 through a more national (and global) lens, there are reasons to be a little less joyful. In our fair land we are seeing increasingly vulgarized political rhetoric emerging from all corners, racial tensions are sitting an elevation I can’t recall ever seeing before, our western seaboard is reeling from punishing forest fires, and of course all that is couched amidst a backdrop of a global pandemic which, even after so many months, still seems to defy lasting medical consensus. Unquestionably, for folks looking for a reason to despair, it’s a buyer’s market.

Still, I take a bit of irrational solace in the view that, as bad as all of these many woes truly are, they are not the sort of challenges to which human progress (and the American people in particular) is a stranger. It may not be an encouraging comparison, but the late 1960’s also featured a lot of the social pressures that I identified in the previous paragraph. There was a pandemic (the Hong Kong flu) that killed millions of people worldwide, the radical organization called Weather Underground was bombing government buildings, marches and demonstrations protesting both the Vietnam War and racial injustice were features of college campuses and metropolitan areas all across the country, and a general sense of malaise and purposelessness seemed to drape over the nation like a pall.

“But Ryan,” you might say, “the late 1960’s sucked. Why do you take solace in comparing our current moment in time to then?” You know, that’s a good point. I suppose I don’t know why other than to note that all those travails combined did not wind up spelling the end of our republic and so there’s reason to be optimistic that we aren’t on a one-way track bound for ever worsening social strains. On the other hand, if you were to consider the last 10,000 years of human history, you would find scores of kings, emperors, warlords, and chieftains while democratic republics would pop up on the scene only in the last few hundred years and only spottily even then. My point is, we don’t really have a preponderance evidence to suggest that these non-monarchical systems of government are especially durable in the grand scheme of things and so we might do well to take care of it as best we’re able. That said, I tend not to believe that any permutation of elected officials (especially those promised to be on offer this November) will wind up immanentizing the eschaton. Rather, the surer way of introducing warmth into our various communities and boroughs is by being kind to our neighbors. For sure, that method of advocacy has a pretty limited footprint and you may never see effects of your labor reflected in the larger society, but I would also say that in comparison with some other method of political involvement, you’re a lot less likely to regret your efforts in the fullness of time.

If you’re still reading this as blog with its once-a-year postings, I hope that you had a nice summer. I also hope that things look up for the rest of your year.

Regards,

-Ryan