I don’t know about you, but it’s been a bit of a messed up week for me, feeling more than a little bit adrift, and sensing an uncertainty about the future that I remember from a very long time ago. Last Saturday’s political violence reminded me of the horrible choices some will make because they’ve lost hope and tell themselves that there is no other way. In 1970 it was kids in uniforms, firing on and killing fellow citizens, none of which needed to happen. But we lost faith in our nation’s leaders and from that point forward many were less willing to believe what we were being told by the government or person’s of authority. None of this is not to say that the target of last Saturday’s assassination attempt is any kind of hero or victim, especially when one remembers that when his time came to serve this country in the 1960s he let others go in his place and feigned to be physically unfit for service. And he would later claim that “surviving” the challenges of being a young single playboy in Manhattan was his “Vietnam.” So, I’m not making that comparison, except for the insanity of violence in the face of civic/political disagreements. 

There is so much that is “better” now than in 1970, when young men were being shipped to Southeast Asia to die in an unjust war. “Better,” but we can certainly do much better still. But this “Better” will never come about by the use of a gun or violence or intimidation. So, I wanted to remember the chaos and violence of the 1960s & 1970s with this Neil Young song from that time in our country’s history. It’s just too easy to become desensitized at what our species still does to ourselves because we lose hope and lose our way. We’re better than this. 

Earlier in the week I took a bit of time to watch a Disney movie that came and went pretty much unnoticed called, Tomorrowland (2015), which begins with a farm kid/inventor genius coming to the 1964 NYC World’s Fair to win a prize for his Jetpack invention and is amazed at how everything is “space age” and modern. His invention is rejected but he meets a strange girl who gives him a secret pin to wear so that he can get into a secret part of the “exhibition,” which then begins his adventures in this modern wonderland. Then the movie jumps to a contemporary teenage girl living in Florida with her little brother and her father, an under-employed NASA engineer who’s current job is to dismantle what’s left of the Cape Canaveral launch facilities and then he’ll be out of a job. She still has hope and is the only one not buying the inevitability of everything falling apart (which is being taught by her high school teachers… and all the media). She sneaks out at night to sabotage the equipment to hopefully delay the dismantling of said launch facilities. She gets caught, sent to a holding area and when she’s released and given back her possessions she has a pin that she doesn’t recognize, but when she touches it, it shows her a virtual world that looks just like 1964 World’s Fair only bigger and better. Nobody else can see it or believe in it. And so her adventure begins. She never comes out and asks directly, but the theme is trying to figure out what happened to change the world from the positive “anything can happen” space-age era of the 1960s to this contemporary dystopian “everything is going to inevitably fall-apart” reality? Her dad asks her why she keeps trying and she says that she learned it from him as a little kid, the story of the two wolves, hope and despair, the one that survives is the one you keep feeding… 

Like I said, the film came and went and I didn’t see it when it was in theaters. Of course when it came out in May of 2015 I was living in Florida going through my own little economic collapse, getting laid off from my Full Sail teaching job then getting hired back seven months later for a much lower paying “summer camp” job. Yeah, I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the future. 

And what happened after the 1960s Space Age and the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” was Kent State, Vietnam, and Richard Nixon. We “won” the Space Race and then withdrew from the moon and further manned exploration except for low earth orbit. Eventually Communism was “defeated” but it was replaced with corporate greed and corrupt Capitalism. We stopped believing that we could fix things and, through good engineering, “work the problem.” We settled for grabbing what we could while we could before it all goes away. We lost hope. I was part of a group that was waiting for Jesus to come back and rapture us away from all of this horrible evil.1 

Here we are fifty-four years later and which wolf have we been feeding this whole time? We’re a bit selective in our reactionary pessimism, having some hope in our small group and some members of our family, but everything and everyone else is evil and only up to no good. Which wolf have we been feeding? This isn’t to say that there aren’t bad people out there. The utopians of previous centuries and the 1960s hippies got that wrong and made some poor assumptions. But it’s never been “everyone” or “everything.” Yeah, things do break and/or fall apart. That’s part of living in a physical world. Then you fix it and/or make it better. 

I get that “everything can be better” optimism has never been a universal reality across the world, and that you can try to do all the right things and things still go to shit. But how does assuming that it’ll all go to shit and give up hope… how is that some kind of solution? I don’t believe in a magical reality where things just automatically get better. It takes work and trial and error and lots of failures before “better” becomes a reality. 

I spent 28-years working with a room full of potential, kids with so much energy to do good and be their best. Yeah there were some nut jobs who needed more than a hug and a smile, maybe something more direct to counteract generations of unmet needs and trauma. But it was never the whole room and it was never reducible to simple blame. These are complex problems in a complex world that cannot be ignored or brushed aside with one-size-fits-all solutions. But they can be addressed and, like all good engineers, we can work the problems one step at a time. Which wolf are you feeding? Are you entertaining simple blame and get what you can/while you can? Or are you doing what you can to fix what doesn’t work because you know we can do better?

Please, have a great weekend, y’all.

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Tags: Neil Young Ohio, the wolf u feed, Tomorrowland movie, video Fridays, we lost hope:

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FOOTNOTES:
  1. And when that didn’t happen we weren’t prepared to become adults and make adult decisions and create a future, but assumed that everything outside of our small church culture was evil and eventually God would save us from it all.[↩]