Hope is Alive

Bertha wrote this comment on a recent blog of mine: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Your blog made me sad. It made me scared for our soicety. It made me scared for what my kids' generation is going to be like. I didn't know what the freedoms were, but I knew that the last Simpson child was named Maggie. I found out that the five freedoms declared in the first amendment are: Freedom of Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, and Petition. I think that is right. I googled it. Are you that disappointed with the Honors class this year?

What a beautifully concise statement of everything that is still right with the world!

I knew when I wrote it that my blog might have seemed a little heavy-handed. My usual "voice" is often cynical, but I generally offer a way out, a solution, something to make my readers (and myself) feel that everything will be okay despite all the things that are wrong with the society. But that time I didn't, and Bertha (one of a handful who bother to read this blog) picked up on that subtle touch of underlying hopelessness.

I'll be honest. Sometimes it does seem hopeless to me, and I do fear for future generations who will grow up in a world run by (and completely devoted to) the selfish pursuit of personal gratification at the expense of critical thought and social consciousness. I fear both for the kids who grow up believing they are entitled to every personal pleasure they can imagine and for the kids who (through no fault of their own) grow up with nothing. Due to the influence of popular culture that they see on their own "TV walls," they both grow up with the twisted value that material wealth is more important than thinking.

Here are some attitudes I see pervading our culture:

• Who cares about the losers who have nothing as long as I have everything I want?
  
  
• Who cares about the environment as long as I can afford to drive my massive SUV thirty feet to get to school every morning?
  
  
• Who cares if I learned anything so long as I get an A in the class?
  
  
• Who cares if it's cheating so long as I maintain my GPA?
  
  
• Who cares about getting decent grades when the society measures success in dollars, not intelligence, and some of the least intelligent seem to be the most successful? Professional athletes who can barely read make more in one minute of one game (whether they are playing or not) than police officers make in an entire year. Celebrities who have never raised a finger to help anyone but themselves get 20-million dollars per movie, while a teacher who has spent five years in college to earn a degree and a teaching certificate starts his career making $26,000 a year. (After 17 years and a master's degree, he will approach the $50,000 mark, and still won't be able to afford to pay the bills generated by a family of four.) Career politicians vote themselves annual raises, lifelong pensions, and perpetual health care coverage--all paid for at the taxpayers' expense--but they repeatedly refuse to raise the minimum wage so those taxpayers can earn a dignified living. Is it any wonder so few people care about education, learning, reading, or thinking? What difference does any of that make when life is about the cash and the power it brings? And as long as I have plenty of it, who cares about the rest of the world, right?

I shudder when such attitudes are expressed not by jaded old businessmen whose fingers are tainted green by the money they've extorted from a lifetime of suckers who just didn't know any better, but by junior high school students who base their entire world philosophy on what popular culture dictates. And that's why I didn't finish that other blog with something hopeful. I am worried.

But I'm not hopeless.

Hope is alive, Bertha, in people like you. People who trust in something besides the almighty dollar. People who know the frustrations and the joys of listening, learning, and thinking. People who watch out for others' interests with the same passions that they guard their own. People who bother to look down the road a few years, maybe even to a time after they have shuffled off the mortal coil, and say, "The world should be a better place, and I am going to make it that way!" People who recognize injustice and seek to right it...even if it means they have to sacrifice something in the process. Nice people. Decent people. Good people.

Like Faber in Fahrenheit 451, I am not a religious man, but there is a certain spirituality in my way of thinking (although it is usually buried under the thick hide of all career teachers and the self-defensive cynicism that so many years in the trenches may enngender). I think there is within most people a natural sense of cooperation and "goodness." I'm not going to argue where that may come from, but I do know this: All my fears about the future of our world are based on my belief that there are too many Mildreds and Beattys running around and too few Clarisses. When the Mildreds and the Beattys run everything (as it appears they sometimes do), we're in trouble! At such times it pays to "consider the lillies of the field...."

So part of what I hope you take from your study of the book (and all of my blogs and "lectures") is that thinking and learning are the keys to fighting the Beattys and Mildreds, even if, as in the novel, it seems like they are insurmountable. The novel relates Guy Montag's journey from idiotic automaton in a corrupt society to hopeful revolutionary who wants to build a better world. This journey, Bertha, is one that the thinking people of your generation (and those that follow) may find necessary. Based on your comment above, it appears you are ready to begin the journey.

Such simple evidence of a thinking mind and a caring heart is what keeps me from being overwhelmed by the hopelessness and turning into a Beatty myself.

Thanks for the reminder!