The following letter from me was published in the Chicago Tribune yesterday.
“We fear what we do not know, and we hate what we fear. The recent attacks on Jews in Colorado and DC, along with the continuing slaughter of civilians in Gaza, indicate that the killers knew little or nothing about their victims, except that those people are somehow the “enemy”. It is easy to dehumanize a person if you cannot recognize him or her as being like yourself in some way. In our world the hard thing to do, the courageous thing to do, is to reach out and attempt to understand others, especially those who seem to be our enemies. However, to end the violence that is what we must do.”
We took our grandson, Asher, to the May Festival a couple days ago. The May Festival is an annual event put on by the Tamarack Waldorf School. It celebrates the arrival of spring, which in Wisconsin is well-worth celebrating. We live in a climate where it is not unusual for people to wear hoodies on Memorial Day or even well into June. It has only been within the last week or two that all the trees finally have their leaves. When our world suddenly turns a vibrant green it’s definitely party time.
The festival was held in a tiny park a couple blocks from the school. Tamarack is located on Brady Street on the lower east side of Milwaukee. The school really has no green space of its own, so the park is better place to celebrate the annual resurgence of the natural world. There is a small knoll in the park. That is where everyone gathered in a circle at the beginning of the festival. Karin, Asher, and I got there just as the show was about to start. We found a place in the circle. It was an eclectic group: caregivers, little kids, and a few teachers. The school has a diverse population. It even had that twenty-five years ago when our children attended the school. In a way, it felt like we were back home.
One of the teachers led the entire circle in an a cappella version of a Waldorf song. The tune was accompanied by body movements. The teacher had told all the newbies to watch what the older kindergarteners (“the tall pines”) did and just follow their lead. The song was a hymn of praise to nature and springtime. It might have been a bit overly sentimental, but it struck a chord in each person in the circle.
After the song, the kids dispersed to do other activities. The school had set up a station to give each child a temporary tattoo (the logo for the school). There was also a table to get bags of popcorn. There was a place to blow soap bubbles. Most of the children gravitated to the jungle gym. That’s where Asher went.
I stood on the mound and stared at the other families at the gathering. My mind flipped between the present scene and images from a quarter century ago. There was feeling of disorientation and profound sadness. A lot can happen in a family in twenty-five years, and in our family a lot did happen. A kid went to war. A kid got divorced. A kid did time in prison. Those are just the highlights. My mind flickered between memories of our children when they were innocents and the current group of kids playing and laughing in the park where I was standing. So much was different and so much has been lost. I didn’t know what I was doing when I raised our kids. As I watched the children, I asked myself, “Do I know any better this go around?” I have no idea. Then I caught a glimpse of Asher doing exactly what a four-year-old should be doing. I got my balance back.
Karin and I struck up a conversation with a kindergarten teacher who might become Asher’s guide in the fall. We told her a bit about the old days, when this school was just starting. Karin and I were there at the very beginnings of the organization. We didn’t stay long. I couldn’t deal with the chaos and conflicting interests that accompanied the birth of the school. I was an angry and impatient bastard back then, and I was not at all helpful. We homeschooled for three years and then we came back to school after the dust settled a bit.
The teacher was fascinated by our history lesson. Karin drifted off to talk to other folks that she knew. I told the teacher more stories of the school. She seemed interested and I love an attentive audience. I told her about the time I was a chaperon for our youngest son’s class trip to New Orleans. We went there in 2008, three years after Katrina. That was an adventure, but then I am convinced that any visit to New Orleans qualifies as an adventure. The teacher I spoke with had been to “N’aalins” years ago and she fell in love with the town. So, did I. We agreed that the city has a soul, and it teems with both angels and demons.
Later, I found Karin again. She was talking with a young man who had once been a teacher at the school. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hair was thinner, and his middle was thicker. We talked for a while. He remarked that we were back in the school with Asher, and that we had “come full circle”.
That’s not quite accurate. A person never comes full circle. A person may return to a place or to an organization, but that individual comes back different and returns to something that has also changed and has changed forever. We are coming back to Tamarack, but it isn’t the same school. Oh, the school is still in the same building, and the curriculum is pretty much the same, but in some ways, it is alien to us.
I looked at the new parents at the festival and I saw strangers. They have more tattoos and piercings than my generation ever had. They have different views of what it means to be a family. They have different challenges, and they probably can’t understand our struggles. They are bringing new things to an education model that is already a century old. Their children, like our Asher, are entering a world beyond my comprehension.
At the same time, I can see, or better feel, the similarities between these young people and me. We have the same fears. We have the same hopes. We might all become friends. That is my hope and wish. My wife and I are entering the winter of our lives. The other parents are beginning their summers. All of our little ones are laughing and crying in the early springtime of their generation. We have that in common.
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” ― Carl Sagan
“Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.” – Heart Sutra
“All things must pass.” -George Harrison
It’s springtime. Finally. The trees have leaves, even the walnuts and locusts whose branches remain bare until almost June. There are flowers blooming, although the tulips and the daffodils are fading fast. It is a time of rapid and obvious change. The world seems to be waking up after a long, cold winter. However, it was awake and in motion even then.
Some change makes us sit up and take notice. Some of it is so slow and gradual that we can be convinced that nothing is happening at all. However, everything is transient. The only constant in this world is change.
Sometimes I feel like each day is a lot like the last one. Then, suddenly I become aware that new things are happening. Our four-year-old grandson, Asher, lives with us. Every once in a while, I look at him and it is like seeing a completely different boy. He’s somehow taller or he’s able to ride a bicycle without any help from me. These changes sneak up on me. There is a flash of consciousness, and then I know that Asher has become somebody else, somebody new. The feeling is both exciting and a bit disturbing.
If Asher is constantly changing, then I am too. I occasionally notice that when I look into a mirror and see an old man staring back at me. My beard that was once almost black in color is now mostly white. Most of the hair on my head is long gone. There are lines on my face that have become increasingly deep and rough. Physically, I am not the man I was ten years ago, or even the man I was ten minutes ago. It’s all in flux. I am a shapeshifter like everybody else, like every other thing in the universe.
Am I the same person on the inside? I don’t mean in a physical sense, but more in a spiritual way. Would I even recognize the person who I was when I was in my twenties? What would I have in common with that individual?
There is a Buddhist tradition about the five Skandhas. Skandhas are different attributes of people and things that are continually shifting and evolving. The bottom line is that nothing and nobody has any permanent being. It’s all ephemeral. If that is true, then there is no “Frank” writing this article. Or if there is one, that version of “Frank” will not last.
I would like to think that at the core of each human being there is an eternal soul, that there is something that survives change and even death. If there is such a thing, I don’t think we can perceive it. It is covered up with the Skandhas, veils of illusion. God may know who I really am, but I don’t.
Perhaps, when I leave this world, I will see things as they really are. Maybe, I will even see who I really am. And maybe what I really am is something constantly in motion, a tiny dynamic force that is part of a much larger evolving whole.
I took Asher to a playground yesterday. My grandson likes to go to a local park that has a sandbox. The sandbox is big enough that he can use his shovel and rake to make roads for his Hot Wheel cars. Occasionally, he buries them and forgets where they are hidden. I expect that some other four-year-old will play archeologist and find the cars later. Fortunately, Asher has a plethora of toy cars, so it’s not a crisis if he loses one.
Asher decided to play on the monkey bars and the swings while we were at the park. Other kids were there at the same time. Another couple my age (old) came to the playground with their young boys. I didn’t pay much attention to them. Then I heard somebody call out my name. I turned away from Asher and noticed a tall, grey-haired gentleman smiling and walking in my direction.
I did not immediately recognize the guy. He greeted me and then I knew him. He didn’t look the way I remembered him, but his voice was the same as it was years ago. He sported a different haircut. His hair was steel grey and brushed back. He wore glasses with black rims. It took me a moment to match the person standing in front of me with the man I worked with over a decade ago.
We talked for a bit as we watched over our grandkids. My friend is caring for his grandsons like I care for Asher, except that his gig was parttime. My wife and I are Asher’s guardians, so he is with us always. My former coworker is responsible for his grandchildren every other weekend. That’s still a big commitment.
My friend made some small talk, and then he mentioned his son. I had met his son once a long time ago. From what I remembered, his boy had issues with drugs. I didn’t want to ask the guy any questions about that, but he brought the subject up on his own.
The man told me this about his son, “He passed away a couple year ago, back in 2022. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was shot and killed.”
Ow.
How does a father deal with that? My dad buried two of his sons. He never got over it. One of my brothers died in a freak car accident. The other died of a heart attack. But how does it feel when a child dies due to an act of violence? How does a parent come to terms with the fact that a son or daughter has been killed by someone else?
One answer to that question is that the parent cares for the survivors, or as my friend calls them, “innocent victims”. The grandparent fills the void left by the absence of their own child by taking responsibility for the children of that son or daughter. There is a generation gap, and somebody needs make it whole.
As I think about it, I have come to realize how common this situation is. My friend and I are not the only grandparents, or older people, caring for small children. I had a friend from a Bible study group who was caring for her grandson. The boy’s parents were addicts and abandoned their son. The grandmother died relatively young from cancer, and her husband adopted the young man. I have a younger brother who is raising a little boy with his wife. The lad is the grandnephew of my brother’s wife. His biological parents are both dead. My brother and his wife adopted the little guy.
There are any number of reasons why a kid’s parents might be absent. Some reasons are dramatic, some not. Sometimes the absence is temporary, sometimes it’s permanent. Regardless, the child needs someone to provide love and protection. That may mean that an elder has to raise another generation.
When I was growing up, we had a family tradition of ignoring problems. The more obvious the problems were, the more effort we put into pretending they weren’t there. It wasn’t at all logical, but that’s what we did. Apparently, the idea was that if we were willfully blind to an issue, it did not exist.
I am certain that my experiences as a young person were not unique. Denying reality is a common human response to scary or uncomfortable facts. I have a book from Cornelius Ryan called The Last Battle which describes the final struggle of the Nazis to defend Berlin from the Soviets in the spring of 1945. One of the most disturbing parts of this historical account is the description of the mindset of the German leaders stuck inside of Hitler’s bunker. Even in April of 1945, they believed that they were going to win the war. Even with Russian artillery blasting Berlin into rubble, they were convinced that it was all going to be okay.
It wasn’t.
This brings me to the subject of climate change.
Despite the current efforts of the federal government to pretend that climate change does not exist, or that it isn’t really that big of a deal, the evidence is overwhelming that climate change does exist, and it really is a huge issue. The problem is that, in many cases, the effects of climate change are causing havoc somewhere else. I live in Wisconsin, which is kind of a climate sweet spot. We haven’t had massive wildfires. We don’t get hurricanes. Our winters have grown milder, which actually seems like a positive thing for those of us who dwell in the frozen north country. Our summers are hotter, but not painfully so. The attitude of the locals is often, “Yeah, climate change is a real problem, but not here.”
That attitude is changing, at least mine is.
A year ago, on May 7th, we had intense thunderstorms roll through with large hailstones. We’ve had hail before, but it was pebble size, and it didn’t do any real damage. The hail that fell a year ago was big and oddly shaped. The hailstones were not round. They were like ice cubes, rough and angular. They caused damage. A contractor came to see me almost immediately after the hailstorm. I called my insurance, and an appraiser came to our house and told us that our roof and gutters needed to be replaced. The insurance paid us $22K to get the work done. I was a bit shocked. We have lived in this house for thirty-four years, and I had never even filed a homeowners claim prior to that hailstorm.
Because of a variety of delays, including the need to remove a monstrous glass panel from top of the house (it warms the contents of our solar water heater), the actual replacement of the roof and gutters did not occur until two weeks ago. Within three days of the replacement, we had another nasty hailstorm. The hailstones were golf ball sized. As far as I can see, the new roof is intact. The skylights are undamaged. The gutters look alright. I think we got lucky.
The next morning my wife asked me to look at our Toyota Corolla which had been sitting in the driveaway during the storm. The hood and roof of the car were full of dings and divots. It’s an old car, so I don’t care too much about those. However, my wife called my attention to the crack in the windshield. The glass must have taken a direct hit. There is a crack on the passenger side that is a perfect circle about three inches in diameter. That’s a problem.
My insurance will send a guy over here right after Memorial Day. I need a new windshield.
Are these hailstorms freak coincidences? Or is this the wave of the future?
I’m betting that we will see more wicked storms blow through our part of the world.
I went to visit a friend of mine. It was a couple days ago. I go to spend time with him every week or so. We sit around, share a beer, and commiserate. I met him a long time ago at the synagogue. He’s older than I am by about sixteen years. We’re both writers. We are both retired, at least in the sense that we aren’t earning a wage anymore. We keep busy. Being retired and being idle are too very different things.
My friend lives only a block away from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. I have to drive by the school grounds to get to his home. This means that I see numerous students walking around the area. Traffic tends to be heavy near the campus, so there are frequently cars in front of me that are waiting for a light to change or a pedestrian to cross the street. I have time to observe the latest generous of adults…and think.
I was a student almost fifty years ago. I look at these young people and I ask myself, “Was I like that?” The answer is, “I don’t know.” I really don’t.
It’s hard for me to remember things that happened half a century ago. Hell, it’s hard for me to remember things that happened five minutes ago. I can recall very few specific incidents from my youth. However, I can conjure up feelings that I had in the past. Now, that I have managed to get through the wormhole and I have survived several decades of chaos, I feel mostly a sense of relief. For better or worse, most of the big decisions in life have been made. Carl Jung wrote that the first half of life is the story, and the last half is the commentary. You are reading the commentary.
My youngest son, who is several years older than the college students, is not shy about telling me that I don’t understand the challenges of his generation. I’m sure that he’s right. He has struggles that I never had to deal with. The economy today is very different than it was when I was his age. The odds of him enjoying the financial security that I currently have are low. Many people his age will never be able to afford a home or even be able to pay off student loans. My son is doing well in his chosen profession, but the ground keeps shifting under his feet. He can’t make long term plans.
His generation’s views on relationships and sexuality seem exotic to me. Among his contemporaries, marriage is an anachronism, and relationships often seem to be transactional and transitory. Gender identity is now a multiple-choice question. When I was in my twenties, I knew only one openly gay person. Now, I know gay couples who are happily married. The ground has shifted under me too.
I don’t like social media, but I am still on the computer a lot (like right now). The students at UWM and other universities live and breathe technology. They have always had the Internet. They have always had Facebook. They have seldom written a note by hand, and they have probably never licked a stamp.
I am not saying that the new social environment is good or bad. It is probably a bit of both. All I know is that it is alien to me, but natural to these younger folks.
So, back to the question: “Was I like that?”
In some ways, definitely not. I managed to earn a bachelor’s degree, but that was at West Point. I was not a “college” student. I went four years to a school that only had only superficial characteristics of a university. USMA was like going to an Ivy League college and doing time simultaneously. Even when I was an undergraduate, I did not fit in with my civilian compadres. I was an outlier when I was young, and in many ways I still am.
So, did I have any similarities with the young people I see at UWM? Human nature does not change much, if at all. When I was their age, I was energetic, curious, idealistic, and naive. I was painfully awkward with members of the opposite sex. I was cocky and terrified at the same time. I am certain that the students who pass me by on the campus feel some of same things.
The students I see are trying to figure it out. They are trying to understand the meaning of their lives. They are trying to make sense of their world.
I met with a friend, Danny, a few days ago. We worked together for decades, and now we are both retired. We had a couple beers and talked. As usual, we discussed how other former coworkers were doing. During the conversation, I found out that one of our colleagues is constantly busy helping his partner. The guy’s wife has diabetes, and her blood sugar level fluctuates, causing her to have difficulty concentrating on what she is doing. This means the woman can’t drive, which means that our old buddy from work has to be her chauffeur. Danny and I also have a friend whose wife has kidney failure. She requires dialysis treatment a couple times a week. I know another coworker whose wife had a stroke last year. This friend of mine is his spouse’s fulltime caregiver.
The fact that so many people our age are either ill or caring for somebody who is partially incapacitated makes me think. My wife, Karin, and I are both healthy…for now. Part of the aging process is that a person will eventually become ill and/or disabled. That’s guaranteed. It is likely that Karin or I will need to care fulltime for each other at some point. That doesn’t really bother me too much. What makes me think is the question of what happens to our grandson, Asher.
Karin and I care for Asher 24/7/365. The boy is four years old and will start kindergarten in the fall. Currently, he needs our help almost constantly. That will change as he gets older, but right now he depends on us. Watching over Asher is a job that requires two people. We have to work as a team. If something happens to Karin or to me, then what becomes of the little boy? I cannot be the caregiver for both my wife and our grandson. Karin cannot care fulltime for me and for Asher. Something will have to give.
Our youngest son has committed to caring for Asher if something happens to my wife or me. That eases my mind somewhat. I try not to worry about that future. The present moment is enough to keep me busy, sometimes more than enough. We can try to plan ahead, but I have to focus on today.
As I sit here typing on my keyboard, I am listening to the sound of drills and saws outside of our house. A crew is putting up new gutters all the way around our home. Two days ago, a different team of six men replaced our roof. It took the roofers only nine hours to complete the project, and that’s including their lunch break. I’m not an expert on roofing, but it looks to me like they did a good job. The guys working on the gutters today are, as far as I can tell, working efficiently. I don’t expect these workers to be here very long, and I anticipate that they will do quality work.
All of the people working on our home are Latinos. All the people who came here two days ago were Latinos. Only a few of them speak English. I am not being judgmental. I am merely stating a fact. From what I have seen from other construction crews is that they are almost always made up of Hispanics.
Why is that?
I suppose I could ask one of the guys working outside why they chose this particular line of work. However, I won’t do that. In the current political climate, I would never do that. I don’t know the legal status of any of these men, and the last thing I want to do is to spook them. Sadly, it is best that I don’t know their stories, and they don’t know mine. It’s a new version of “don’t ask; don’t tell”. I have met migrants who are undocumented, and they live in constant fear of being deported. Perhaps, some of the men working on our house are here illegally. If they are, I don’t want to know, and I’m sure they don’t want me to know.
My mind is full of questions. What are they getting paid? Do they get paid in cash? Do they pay taxes? Do they get any benefits? What happens if they get hurt on the job? They are doing work that apparently does not appeal to native-born white guys. Why aren’t there any white boys outside pounding nails?
I can only conclude that the men working for me today are not getting enough of a compensation that their jobs would induce a homegrown American to join their team. The Latinos putting up the gutters, along with the roofers, are doing the work that most Americans do not want to do. It’s always been like that. It was like that when my great-grandparents came to this country. The new guys do the shit work. Immigrants start at the bottom.
The difference now is that a hundred and twenty years ago, the migrants were encouraged to stay here and work at dangerous, backbreaking jobs. Now, for reasons that I will never understand, the government of the United States wants to drive out all these people that keep the economy going. So, what happens if they are forced to leave, or to go underground?
Who will do the work?
The guys are cleaning up now. I looked at the new gutters and the downspouts. One young man was picking up the old metalwork.
I came up to him said, “Gracias.”
He nodded.
Then I told him, “You all do nice work.”
He gave me a confused stare.
I thought, “Damn it, I can’t remember any fucking Spanish.”
I got a text yesterday from our daughter-in-law in Texas. at 12:40 PM CDT.
She wrote, “Great news! America is gonna make the Catholic Church great again!”
I momentarily felt queasy. I replied, “Seriously?”
She said, “Depending on your definition of great, but we got an American pope for the first time.”
I had a brief panic attack. I thought to myself, “Sweet Jesus, did they elect Cardinal Raymond Burke?!”
I took a deep breath and wrote to my daughter-in-law, “Who?”
Her answer: “Robert Francis Prevost.”
That name meant absolutely nothing to me. So, I replied,
“I will have to look him up.”
My daughter-in-law wrote back that she had heard that he was a progressive.
My response was, “That will piss off MAGA.”
Apparently, it did.
I, like millions of other people, did look up the biography of Leo XIV. My conclusion is that he is very Catholic, and that can mean all sorts of things.
I was born right at the end of the papacy of Pius XII. He was pope during WWII, and his legacy is, well, mixed. Since then, the Church has had leaders who have been pretty decent: John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I (who only made a cameo appearance), John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. All of these popes shepherded an unruly flock of believers, and they inspired many of them. They also infuriated a substantial minority of Catholics. They were world leaders who tried to promote peace and justice. They sometimes succeeded, like when John Paul II acted as a catalyst for change during the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Sometimes, they failed, like with the Church’s sexual abuse scandal. They tried to teach eternal truths in a world that is constantly changing, while acting as a symbol of unity for millions upon millions of coreligionists. How can any person do all of that?
Pope Leo XIV will surprise us. That’s what these popes do. John XXIII was elected as a caretaker pope, and he initiated Vatican II, which changed both the Catholic Church and the world at large. John Paul II was instrumental in taking apart Soviet communism. Francis placed care for our planet front and center as a moral imperative. These popes also surprised us with what they did not do. They never agreed to allow priests to marry. We still don’t have women deacons, much less women serving as priests. Reading Pope Leo’s past for hints about his future is probably a fruitless effort. Once these guys get elected, all bets are off.
There are perhaps 1.4 billion Catholics in the world. Any number that large means that the population will be diverse. I have often met Protestants, mainly Evangelicals, who are convinced that the Roman Catholic Church is this monolithic organization that demands absolute obedience from its adherents. I find that notion to be laughable. Anybody who has ever attended a parish council meeting of a Catholic church will see that it is all barely controlled chaos. Take the population of a typical parish (if there is such a thing) and make it exponentially larger, and it becomes astounding that so many people can be unified at all. The genius of the Church, when it actually does its job, is the ability to combine diversity with unity. I mean “unity”, not “uniformity”. The fact that Catholics can do anything together is a miracle.
Pope Leo in his first address to the public as pontiff emphasized unity. Good luck with that. It is a worthy goal, but one that is probably beyond the capabilities of mere humans. The Church is often a mess. There is no doubt about that. I have to remember that it is, and has always been, a work in progress. Leo will take the next step in the process.
I recently read a book from P.D. James, an author best known for her crime novels. The book I read was The Children of Men, which falls into the category of speculative fiction, an off shoot of sci-fi. The story is set in a world of the future where no children are born. In the novel the planet has been without a human birth for a quarter century, and our species is slowly but surely heading for extinction. Books about a dystopian future derive their power by describing a world that is much like our present one, but one that has also taken a frightening trajectory. These stories can get stale when the future becomes the now. However, The Children of Men still has an edge to it, because what it predicts is in some ways still plausible.
The novel never explains why humans all become infertile simultaneously. It doesn’t need to do that. What the author does is give a detailed and poignant description of a society that is collapsing. James writes well, and she conjures up an image of a decaying England that is both tragic and occasionally funny in a dark way. The overwhelming feeling in the book is that of hopelessness. The unspoken, but obvious, question in the story is. “Why do anything?” Most of the characters in the book are just killing time or waiting for time to kill them. Without a new generation, the future has no meaning.
Does this book matter? I think it does. It mirrors the world around me, but in a distorted way, like a funhouse mirror. Are women still giving birth to children? Yes, of course. The world’s population is still growing. However, the pace of growth on our planet is uneven and it is slowing overall. Some parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, still have explosive population growth. Other places have steep declines. Russia, China, Japan, and most of the EU are experiencing a loss of people. Even countries with modest growth, like the United States, only have more residents because immigration, not from the birth rate within the national borders.
Is it a bad thing for the world’s human population to stabilize or even decline? Maybe not. Every other species on the planet would probably benefit from fewer homo sapiens. However, humanity has never before dealt with a universal loss population. There have been great disasters in the past, like the Black Death, that decimated whole nations, but nothing quite on this scale. The current decline in the birth rate has kind of snuck up on us. It is nothing like the sudden wave of infertility that James mentions on her novel.
I think about this sort of thing for two reasons. First of all, I am objectively old. If the United States government gives me Social Security and Medicare, then I am by definition elderly, and my time on earth is clearly limited. Second, my wife and I are caring for our four-year-old grandson, Asher, whose future stretches out before him like an endless vista. The Children of Men reminds me of my mortality, and it pounds home the preciousness of every child.
I was the eldest of seven boys in my family of origin. Large families were common when I was young. This is no longer true. There are many reasons for this: the higher cost of raising a child, increased access to contraception, anxiety for the future, changing gender roles, etc. Some of these reasons are good, some perhaps not so much. The fact is that, when I was a child, having kids and rising a family was the priority for most people. Now, it just one goal in life among many. Once again, I don’t know if the change is good or bad. All I know is that things are different and we, as a species, need to adapt.
For example, much of what we do is dependent on growth of some sort. Capitalism only works when there is growth. The economies of most of the world require constant growth to raise the standard of living. Humanity worships “more”. Enough is never enough. In order for capitalism to function, there has to be population growth to drive economic growth. So, what do we do when there aren’t enough producers? Or enough consumers? A number of countries are wrestling with these problems right now. How long will it take before we have to radically change our consumption of material goods and services? How long before we radically change our values to focus on things that cannot be bought and sold? Our current economic system is not sustainable.
I want to go back to the mood expressed in James’ novel. It is often a depressing book, and as I age, I identify more and more with the zeitgeist. It is hard to keep going when things are falling apart both inside and out. That is why Asher is so important. Asher can be a real pain in the ass at times, and he wears me out. But he gives me hope. Every day he shows me who he is and who he may become. He is constantly learning and growing. He needs me in order to grow, and that gives me purpose. He gives meaning to my life.
Asher is the future. On my own, I am not. I experience the future through a little boy. He makes it all worthwhile.
Frank is Emptiness 