History is Coming For Us and It’s Going to Hurt
My Teenage Brain on History
When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, my grandfather told me that during the darkest days of World War Two, he purchased property in Hawaii as an insurance policy in case the war went the Nazis’ way. He figured that a Jewish family had a better shot at life in Hawaii given its diverse mix of races and its distance from Germany.
I was thrilled by the story. My grandfather was a traveler from a time of Real History when the American way of life, especially the Jewish-American way of life, had hung in the balance. He had assessed the dire historical situation and had considered it necessary to take action to prepare for the worst.
As for teenage me, I considered myself doomed to live in a world where monumental history was finished. The World Wars were over, so history was over, and if there was another World War, all that would happen was a flash and then oblivion. No triumph of good over evil, no opportunity for heroics, no combat maps for me to follow in the newspaper.
Welcome to the world of my adolescent brain divided between good and evil, between gods and monsters. My teachers and influences were comic books, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I yearned for heroic history without understanding that I was hoping for savagery.
Escaping History
Now that my brain is more or less formed, I have a different take on my grandfather’s Hawaii escape plan. I still admire his ability to game out the possibilities and devise an option that made sense on paper. But if history had come for him and his family (including his daughter, my mother) I don’t think he would have escaped. If anything proves you can’t escape history, it’s the history of the Jewish people and our three thousand year ordeal of repeated persecution. The American diaspora has so far been our exception.
The ultimate failed escape artist is the biblical Jonah, who is commanded by God to preach to the wicked people of Nineveh so they can be saved. Jonah, however, is not a Nineveh fan, so he books passage on a ship to take him far across the sea to hide from God. The sea rages against the ship until Jonah is thrown overboard, is swallowed by a whale, repents, is spat out, and eventually does as God commands. The Jonah story will be read in synagogues all over the world this Monday for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. 1
When I think of escaping history, I think of how lucky I was to have been born in 1962 America to affluent parents as a white male. And it would be foolish of me, obtuse even, to assume that my view of history as expressed in this post could ever be separated from my specific and fortunate circumstances.
American History Considered From 1980 to Today
That said, it seems to me that during my adult lifespan, from 1980 to now, America has been blessed by good fortune and been relatively unscathed by history. We won the Cold War, and the feared armageddon of a third world war did not come to pass. The questionable wars we did fight were far from our shores and were wars of our own choice. While we have suffered the ethical scars of becoming a far more unequal and stratified society, the material standards of living of every strata have improved significantly.
And then there’s the moral arc. Even taking into account recent and disheartening setbacks, if we compare today with where we were in 1980, the moral arc is still much closer to justice today than it was back then. 2
When September 11th happened, we thought it was just the beginning, but so far it’s been a one time event. When Covid struck, we were told it would take many years to develop and distribute a vaccine. It took nine months, and we seem to have quelled the pandemic. The financial crisis of 2008 did not cause a repeat of the Great Depression. The system held, and we haven’t had a severe financial or economic crash since.
Writing these words, I feel as if I’m spitting into a whirlwind.
My point is this: history moves in cycles, and my fear is that America has been inordinately lucky during this recent cycle of history. My assertion is that our luck with history is due to run out.
Arguments Against My View and My Responses
We’re already going to Hell in a Handbasket
“You say we’ve been inordinately lucky? You must get your news from the Good Ship Lollipop! 3 In the real world, things are awful and getting significantly worse. Climate? Crime? The 2024 election? Do any of these ring a bell?”
Sure, each day’s intake of modern “news” will furnish stories that seem to contradict my assertion of good fortune. But most modern “news” has become a useless carnival of taking isolated incidents and having them masquerade as existential bubba meises. 4 That’s what sells.
Don’t Bet Against America
“You basically said it yourself. America is an unstoppable and exceptional engine of ingenuity, strength, and prosperity. We won the Cold War and now we're degrading Russia and confronting China. September 11th was a one-time deal. Our companies invented the vaccine. Betting against America has always been a bad bet.”
That’s the Recency Bias talking, where you judge what will happen in the future only by what happened in the recent past. Compare the last eighty years of American triumphalism to the eighty years before that. In that older era, we suffered the Civil War, the “Spanish Flu” (worse than Covid), the Great Depression, and two World Wars in which millions of Americans fought. What makes you think we’re permanently immune from massive wars, financial devastations and deadlier pandemics? Or political upheaval?
“A Republic, if You Can Keep It”
For almost 250 years, we’ve met Benjamin Franklin’s challenge of “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We met the great and bloody challenge of the Civil War, necessary to end slavery. We met the inane yet tragic challenge of January 6th.
But how confident can we be that America will always meet Franklin’s challenge?
Agency
I realize I’ve been writing about history as if it were some monstrous, uncontrollable beast waiting “for its hour to come round at last.”
But we are not powerless. After all, every historical event of the past was once in the unknowable future, and its course was determined by the actions of individuals, some with great influence, others with little. Some motivated by malice, some by charity. Some concerned only with themselves, others with the courage of noble convictions.
We all have a role to play, we all have a choice.
Question for the Comments
Do you agree with my premise that the last 80 years has been a time of progress for most Americans? But that we’re due for some serious bumps in the road.
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Every year at this time, I read the story of Jonah. But not the biblical version. Instead, I read the Jonah sermon near the beginning of Moby Dick. It’s a marvelous piece of writing. Link below.
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/634/chapter-9-the-sermon/
Confession: I’ve tried a number of times, but I’ve never gotten past that sermon chapter to meet Ahab aboard the Pequod. A gap in my literary education.
The overturning of Roe vs. Wade being a notable exception.
My hypothetical opponent watched Shirley Temple movies when they were a child, just like I did.
Bubba meises is Yiddish for Old Wives Tales or something unimportant. The phrase “existential bubba meises” is self-contradictory, but it gets the point across and I sort of fell in love with it. See the work of
for a comprehensive look at the uselessness of modern journalism.
Do you agree with my premise that the last 80 years has been a time of progress for most Americans? But that we’re due for some serious bumps in the road.
There can be no doubt that we have made progress in our lifetimes in many ways. That said, it is still a journey in the making. We have not arrived at some final destination in which all is well, all problems solved, so we must keep working to improve conditions -- our own, in our neighborhood and in the world writ large. It is also worth remembering that progress is never written in a straight line. An upward trend has dips in it and there will be dips to come, some harder to overcome than others. Using the Jewish people as an example much older than the US, I think antisemitism is not as bad as it was in times past, but it still exists and we will (this is not a maybe) see times when it flairs up here or there but we will continue to find ways to flourish. We learn to adapt as Jews and we will learn to adapt as a larger society.
An interesting Jewish history lesson was taught to me in my late teens, around 1967 I believe. Why are so many Jews brokers or engaged in practices of law or medicine or small one-man businesses (like tailors)? Because we could pick up our business and leave town on a moment's notice and you can't do that with a farm, store or factory and, as Jews, we knew we might have to flee once more. We knew that the cycle of oppression would likely return and we needed to be ready. It was not until finding a more secure home in the US that we began investing in more physical structures that we cannot pick up and carry away overnight.