Just Sayin'

response to all the new year's missives from Substack.

CLICK! I just finished reading a long collection of New Year’s poems, essays, and resolution reports from all my Substack friends. I cleared out most of the inbox except for a few I wanted to peruse and muse over in a quiet time to truly relish them. I find it difficult to focus on some pieces because a sentence here or there will inspire an idea for a story or poem, or will blast me with a sudden epiphany. It makes it hard to finish a well-written article. As you can see and undoubtedly experience in your own reading, Substack is an overwhelming mother lode of spiritual delights as well as disturbing messages.

One message that continually enters some writers’ work is the heavy weight of all the craziness in today’s world. Climate crises. Political ideologies battling for supremacy. And actual wars fought on real battlefields. Death! Destruction! Dismay!

At the risk of sounding flippant or unsympathetic, I’m an old lady (74) and came of age during Watergate, Vietnam, social change, and an upwarldy-mobile economy skyrocketing into upwardly-mobile inflation. As Michael Dempsey, a character in the British TV show, Dempsey and Makepeace, often said, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

The Cold War Era was a crazy time, but they were relatively serene. Though seeing today’s world with that perspective, I can understand young people’s desire to withdraw and call for Grub Hub. But that doesn’t solve anything, including the turmoil of your individual lives.

The other day, I creaked open my aging ebook, wanting to start reading the books I’ve stored there. Scrolling through the selections, I realized most of these novels dealt with events taking place during World War II.

Focus on that last phrase there: World War II. We’ve euphemized it a bit by calling it WWII. THAT was a horrible time to be alive. From the books I’ve read so far, people endured horrific and death-defying stories. They were threatened with extermination, hiding or fleeing from a killer regime, barely surviving in the midst of broken supply chains, mistrust and betrayal of neighbors and friends, and making the best of these situations as they watched people being ruthlessly murdered around them. Whole communities were wiped from the earth.

You can replace a town, its buildings and economy, but you can’t replace the community of people. Each person is a library filled with history and creativity. When a people is wiped from existence, you can’t replace it. The destruction of towns during WWII cannot be compared to the towns destroyed during the past few years due to wildfires, tsunamis, or war because there are still people who exist to preserve those communities’ stories.

In America, we were sheltered from most of the big horrors, informed by snippets of radio news. We were horrified and indignant, sending our menfolk over there to war. Even when Americans altered their peaceful daily lives to help the cause, making sacrifices we haven’t been expected to make since then. we still did not face the destruction that happened around the world in the 1940s.

My old lady admonition to people today who think we are living in harrowing times is to focus on where you are. What’s happening around you that is so distressing? What are the real problems that threaten your existence? Can you directly do anything about it? And here’s the most old-fashioned idea yet: count your blessings.

As I shake my cane in your direction, remember how good you’ve got it and realize your avoidance of life because it’s too overwhelming isn’t going to solve anything. And it’s might even make it worse.

Just sayin’!