Friday, December 01, 2023

Macro/Micro



 (This is from three years ago, just after the 2020 election.)

There is every reason to be hopeful in the larger sense, with vaccines apparently coming for Covid, a wiser hand soon to be at the helm of the ship of state, and an economy so large and diverse it is almost guaranteed to prove resilient. 

But none of that necessarily translates down to the individual level, where it's the little day-to-day events that make us more hopeful or less.

If you listen to the meta-messaging that never lets up targeting us, there are but two important things we can do in our role as citizens and consumers. We can vote and we can buy.

Well, we’ve voted. So now we are expected to buy.

Oh, there was a third thing -- wear a mask -- but the messaging has been decidedly mixed on that one all along. 

But part of the the problem with paying too much attention to the macro is we live in the micro. 

***
Yesterday we trouped to a beach on the Pacific shore where the air was fresh and clear. in the photo above, I am framed in the diamond formed by two of my grandsons.

What I've been musing about recently is to what degree each day we live in these times is a microcosm of the whole. It's so difficult to remove ourselves from the context -- McLuhan said "the medium is the message" -- by inference "you are the times you live in."

Yet when I go to a place like that beach, which is called Limantour, part of the Pt. Reyes National Seashore, its rhythms take me back 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. In other words, back to many different "times." The long perfect waves crash just as they have forever, the strands of kelp wash up on the beach, as do pieces of lumber lost at sea, chunks of old sunken boats, crab shells and the occasional whale bone.

It's exactly the same whether Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama or Trump is in the White House. And whether I'm buying stuff or living like a monk. Or feeling hopeful or hopeless.

I walked down to the water's edge and stared out to the west, at the lovely endlessness. I've flown over that ocean many times, and I can taste and smell the places over there -- Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and others.

Since Pt. Reyes is a protected zone, it has a timelessness to it that the built-out places lack. The city of San Francisco always feels like the same city, for example, though large chunks of it change all the time.

That is the rather tortured analogy I am seeking about our lives-- we are here, for a while, but the system that contains us, like the physical world, goes on and on with or without us.

What was terrifying to everyone paying attention about Trump's reign, soon to end, was not so much his impact on our little lives but on the macro system of laws and conventions we all depend on. Even now, his unwillingness to concede means we have no real closure on the election. Biden won, but the electoral process remains unfinished and uncertain.

That is Trump's poisonous legacy. Let’s hope he never comes back, because next time would be a disaster on the macro and on the micro as well.

(Five weeks later, the Jan. 6th riot occurred.)

HEADLINES:

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)