Tag Archives: Optimism

The First Quarter-Century

The First Quarter-Century – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago.

25 years ago, I was a young boy of 7 when I witnessed the ringing in of the New Year 2000 in my Aunt Jennie’s living room. I was a new arrival here in Kansas City, having only lived here for close to six months, and surrounded by people and places that were fairly new to me. The end of the twentieth century was a significant turning point in my life. It meant that I would be a part of the first generation to grow to adulthood in the third millennium of the current era. Despite this I’ve always felt drawn to the 1990s as the decade when I planted my roots and began to seek out an understanding of my world and what might lie beyond.

I remember throughout the day sitting in front of the television set watching several things, including my first viewing of Star Trek: The Next Generation, whichever channel it was showed “The Best of Both Worlds” Parts 1 and 2. Yet they also cut to the new year’s celebrations in cities around our planet. I remember seeing the fireworks go off atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge and later along the Thames. At 11 pm our time we watched the ball drop in Times Square, and then again, an hour later the networks rebroadcast that ball drop for us living in the Central Time Zone. We stayed the night with my Aunt Jennie and cousins Chelsea and Isabella and then drove north to Smithville, Missouri on the morning of New Year’s Day to buy a new sofa before returning to the farm my parents bought the previous summer where we were still building our house. That winter we lived in a 10-foot long trailer that had to be moved into the farm’s barn in the winter to keep it from blowing over in the high winter winds. This way at least we could be on the build site so my parents could be around to oversee the entire process of our house being built. The only other thing of note from New Year’s 2000 was that it was the last time I visited the town of Smithville until February 2019 when I gave a public lecture at the Smithville branch of the Midcontinent Public Library system. I’ve since made the trip to that northern Kansas City suburb once more in April 2024 in a vain effort at seeing the Northern Lights when I could’ve stayed home and seen them perfectly well in the city.

As New Year’s 2025 approached this year then I began to reflect on my memories of New Year’s 2000. In all honesty it was the first New Year’s that I can remember staying up for, let alone my first New Year’s in Kansas City. It’s one holiday that I’ve continuously celebrated in this city ever since. Yet what I’ve been thinking about more is what I was reading at the time about future technologies that were just around the corner. On a recent episode of the Startalk podcast hosted by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and Comedian Chuck Nice they interviewed Dr. Charles Liu, a professor of astrophysics at the City University of New York, Dr. Tyson talked about how the most futuristic thing that he looked forward to from the original 1960s Star Trek series were the videophones that they used. I too remember an entry in one of my childhood factbooks that I loved reading around the millennium which included one of these as one of the great up and coming technologies. While we may not have landline telephones with video capabilities like that entry suggested our portable smart phones all largely have this very function. The funny thing about it is that I rarely use FaceTime on my iPhone. Looking at my call logs the last FaceTime videocall I made was in March 2024 when I was excited to show off the room upgrade that I got in a hotel in the Chicago Loop to my parents. We’d stayed at that same hotel together several years before in the week between Christmas and New Year’s and had half the space for the three of us that I had in this room on my own.

A Tandberg E20, the sort of videophone I expected we’d all have.

I tend to make more videocalls on my computer over Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger and very rarely over Skype which Zoom largely replaced in 2020. Zoom has become the de facto videocall platform for many of us, especially in professional contexts. I even use Zoom to record lectures thanks to its screen sharing features. I do wish the technology could improve further though. It would be great to have an easier way to have the camera be set up higher so that it’s not looking up at me but instead straight-on or slightly downward. While an aesthetic preference it also speaks again to the old Star Trek ship-to-ship on screen communications seen in all of the series. Star Wars’s holographic communications would be an even neater step forward, and while I remember seeing a story about how the French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon used holography in his bid in the 2022 French presidential election and another that ABBA is touring again in holographic form the technology still seems to be far from ubiquitous enough to be a regular form of communication.

An Air France Concorde at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in Virginia.

Another technology that I remember dreaming about in 2000 that was in active commercial use then yet has lain dormant for most of the quarter-century since is supersonic flight. The Concorde last flew in 2003 thanks to its extreme cost and the fatal crash at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2000. Yet I remember my Mom often saying that she wanted to cross the Atlantic at least once on a supersonic jet. While there are many aspects of the in-flight experience on your average transatlantic flight that I enjoy, I do actually enjoy the food and movies in economy for the most part, I certainly wouldn’t mind a quicker jump across the water to Europe. The average supersonic flight between New York and London or Paris was 3.5 hours compared to the 7 hours it tends to take on subsonic aircraft. That’s closer to the travel time for a flight from the Midwest to Southern California today. Looking at supersonic aviation now and the promises of companies like Boom at restoring supersonic flight to commercial service, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to someday fly on one of these planes. In the short term I’m more hopeful that Kansas City might finally get a nonstop service to one of the European capitals in time for our hosting duties in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. On my last return trip from Paris to Kansas City via Washington-Dulles while I enjoyed a great many aspects of the flight I do remember a growing sense of annoyance at how long it takes to get to Kansas City from Europe when compared to most other American cities our size and larger.

Finally, at the turn of the millennium one of my favorite TV shows was the natural history program Eyewitness co-produced by the publisher Doring Kindersley, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and the BBC. Surprisingly for how influential it’s been, I haven’t written about Eyewitness on the Wednesday Blog yet. This program brought the factual book series of the same to life for its viewers and set the stories of life, the universe, and everything it told in a computer-generated space it called the “Eyewitness Museum” which acted in some ways like a physical museum yet in many others with unusual camera angles and hallways it was entirely an edifice of the mind. I remember loving this series because it gave me the space to imagine and wonder at nature, the world, and human history in a manner which few other programs have done. I remember hoping that I could visit such a museum sometime in my life, and in some ways I’ve done that time and again. Many of the cultural artifacts in the program are on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and when it comes to the animals & plants on camera it’s well and truly on display in natural history museums around the globe that I’ve gotten to visit.

I rediscovered Eyewitness again in my early twenties when DK began uploading the episodes onto YouTube. By that point I’d already been making videos of my own for nearly a decade, and rewatching this old show from the ‘90s I was inspired to try to frame the material I wanted to describe in videos and in my teaching in a similar minimalist fashion on a blank white background with the object of my videos and lectures taking front and center. As it turns out, white is a much harder color on the eyes so in 2019 I switched to a light blue which I continue to use. My former students will certainly be quite familiar with my blue slideshows that form the core of my teaching materials. Those old Eyewitness episodes disappeared from YouTube in Fall 2023, in fact the last time I watched any of them was when I showed one to my seventh graders as part of their World Geography class.

Yet when thinking about the Eyewitness Museum itself the technology exists today that the viewer could tour that structure through virtual reality headsets. I still haven’t tried one of those on yet, at first from what I understood they didn’t fit over glasses, yet I’m curious about what potential they may hold for both education and entertainment. It would be fascinating to use such a headset to wander through that labyrinth of galleries famous for their all-white surfaces and see everything they hold.The last twenty-five years did not meet our expectations in many respects. Paul Krugman’s final editorial for the New York Times published on 9 December 2024 speaks to the loss of our millennial optimism in the face of 9/11, the Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, the Great Recession, and all the other crises that have crashed on the rocky shores of our world. Where for a while we thought we might have fine sandy beaches that heralded a prosperous, safe, and happy future now we have fearsome cliffs which act as much as walls defending our “scepter’d isles” as limits to the possibilities of things in our world. I feel a dissonance in my own life with the world we live in because I am still an optimist, and still dream of things that we could do, new monuments to that optimism we could build, and like the Irish quarrymen brought to a young Kansas City in the nineteenth century by Fr. Bernard Donnelly, the founder of the Kansas City Irish community, ways in which we can break down those cliffs and build a city of fountains and gardens in its place. I’ll write more about all of this next week in a reflection on what I hope we will see realized in the next quarter of the twenty-first century. By the time we reach New Year’s 2050, I will be 57 years old, far from the young boy who watched humanity ring in the third millennium in what was for him a new city in a new time full of hope.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

On Democracy

On Democracy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

One of those great efforts with which human history is concerned is the question of what our original nature was at our beginning and if and how we have changed that nature. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the primitive as “closer to humanity’s origins” and living in a state without the societal and technological innovations “that obscure their nature” evokes this original nature, what in Christianity is called our original sin, or biologically our evolved state as a particular form of bipedal mammals among other lifeforms.[1] The seeming natural state of human societies until very recently has been toward forms of monarchy and aristocracy, the Tory Party in Britain today still refers to itself as the natural party of government because they descend through many generations from the old Cavaliers who supported Charles I and the aristocrats in the Parliaments of the Stuart and Georgian centuries who opposed the liberal reforms of the Whigs. Here in the United States, our own whiggish political tradition sees its modern manifestation in the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or G.O.P., whose founders in the 1850s included former Northern members of the Whig Party once led by our own aristocrats, men like Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in the early republic.

Yet those same men stood for something beyond just preserving their own aristocratic power within their own society. These American Whigs and their Republican and Democratic successors aspired to a high ideal of human nature that entrusted power in the hands of the many rather than in those of a few or the one. Dr. Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote in her Letters from an American about how the Secessionists who dragged this country into our Civil War in 1860 and 1861 were trying to assert their own aristocratic vision of the republic that would benefit the few at the disregard of most and the expense of the many. As James J. Sheehan reminded us in his essay in the December 2024 issue of Commonweal, Tocqueville wrote that the chief difference between the source of power in an aristocracy or a monarchy, or their corrupted forms oligarchy and a tyranny, and the source of power in a democracy is that “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”[2] The despots rely less on our trust in their rule, and in many of the cases we see today they sew discontent in government, the economy, and for all of us with each other in order to assert their authority and keep hold of power. 

Democracy is a far harder thing to keep, as Dr. Franklin knew well. The inclusion of more and more people complicates any organization, yet it also allows that organization to better reflect all involved. Democracy requires the efforts of all of us to survive; if left unwatered and unnourished by each generation it will wither and die like any other flower or fruit on the vine. Throughout my life, I’ve looked to heroes in our history from Lincoln, Mandela, Óscar Romero, Popes Francis and St. John XXIII, to people closer to my own life. What all of them have in common is a desire to improve the lot of humanity, and in the case of Lincoln and Mandela to promote democracy in their homelands. When I look ahead and worry about what might be coming in these next four years, I often wonder if I would be safer, happier, healthier, and living a more fulfilled life elsewhere in another country where I can leave the troubles of my own behind. Yet I remember these heroes, MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse, my great-grandfathers who fought in the two World Wars, the dreamers and optimists who organized and marched non-violently for civil rights here in America and in Ireland too, and looking again at our own day I pause. This is our time to make life better for our successors while we live to overcome the long winter of fear before us. If I left now, could I look those heroes of mine in the eye when my time ends?

I believe in democracy because it is the best form of government we’ve yet imagined. I believe in representative government because I would rather have a say in my neighborhood, my city, my county, my state, and my country than not. I believe in democracy because I believe in humanity and that all of us can make something better if only we believed in ourselves and in each other. I believe that before that original sin there was original grace, original goodness; that before the first frown there was the first smile; that before the first thoughts of lust there were thoughts of love. I believe in democracy because I need to believe that I will have a future, that all the things which I’ve done in these last 31 years are building up to something which will, in Bill Nye’s words, “change the world,” no matter how small that change may be. To do any of this, to see any of this goodness in our hearts, to believe in ourselves again we need to be willing first to acknowledge our faults and second to forgive ourselves and put in the effort to make our lives better. For all our technology and our ever increasingly complicated ways of life, we are still the same humans as our ancestors living in Lévi-Strauss’s primitive manner. We retain the same bodies and souls. Because of this, we can build a future for our posterity in a spirit of grace, compassion, and optimism that would make the heroes of old proud.

[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Montaigne to Montaigne, trans. Robert Bononno, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 25.

[2] James J. Sheehan, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” Commonweal, December 2024, 13.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Olympic Optimism

Olympic Optimism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In celebration of the last few weeks of the Summer Olympics in Paris, I want to write to you about the optimism that the Olympics embody. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

In celebration of the last few weeks of the Summer Olympics in Paris, I want to write to you about the optimism that the Olympics embody.

I’m an optimist at heart. I think that’s what has gotten me through these last 10 years of graduate school, and what keeps me going through the hard times we find ourselves in. Every two years, my optimism is renewed by the staging of the Olympic Games, summer and winter. Each Olympiad resides in my memory in its own different way, the character of the host city and the joy of the individual athletes shining through the broadcast of the games. Here in the U.S., the Olympics are actually the one big thing that I think of when I watch NBC, while Rio 2016 was a rare Olympiad that I missed most of being in London at the time with the events at odd hours for Europe. The Olympics reinforce that optimism that we humans can truly work together for our mutual betterment. We have the potential to grow beyond what Carl Sagan called “our adolescence as a species” dominated in the last two centuries by nationalism, division, war, and genocide toward a better future where societies work for the betterment of all.

This year, I was in Paris a short while before the games began and got to see aspects of the Olympiad in preparation. The rings were mounted on the north face of the Eiffel Tower in early June when I visited the Musée national de la marine at Trocadéro, and all around the city the lavender-colored placards advertising directions to Olympic venues were hung in the metro. It gave me a sense of what it might be like to be in this city a few weeks later when the games began. Paris is a city which has such a long history of both oppression and liberation that it speaks better than many others to the collective human experience. It truly was a wonderful city for this Olympiad to be held at a time of tremendous pessimism and conflict around our globe.

I set up alerts on the Paris Olympics app on my phone for Team USA and Team Ireland, and for several specific events which I wanted to follow, especially the Fencing, I was a saber fencer in my pre-teen years for a while. While I wanted to support my own national team and the national team of my ancestral homeland, I still cheered on whoever was competing at a given moment. I like to say often that it’s better to have a wide margin of victory when I have a team in the competition: I’d rather see my Cubs win by 5 or 6 runs than by 1 run in a late season or playoff game. Yet, when I’m happy to see the competition itself and see these athletes perform their best on a stage watched by billions, I love seeing a tight race. For me then, as much as I love seeing Team USA march into the Opening Ceremony, or in this year’s case float down the Seine on their boat as the second-to-last to launch from Pont d’Austerlitz, I love even more the moment when the national flags join together and march toward the podium following the Olympic flag. All nations united in a common cause empowered by their hope and joy.There’s a song that was composed for the Rugby World Cup, which is just as pertinent here, World in Union, set to Holst’s Jupiter theme from The Planets which ought to be sung here too. The idea that every two years we all can join together, for several weeks, and form that very same world in union is what fuels my optimism that our days of division and strife are impermanent. I recognize the realists who say that we need to focus solely and whole-heartedly on the trials of our time, the wars and oppression happening in our midst; yet we should also keep this hope in mind that we might one day grow beyond war and beyond feeling the need to oppress each other. There should be as many diplomats and negotiators offering a chance at peace as there are soldiers carrying on the fight because at the end of any war there will be peace again, and the form that that peace takes will determine if any other wars will follow on.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

The Art of Joy

The Art of Joy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This past weekend, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art debuted a new retrospective exhibit on the life and work of Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. One of her great initiatives was to express rebellious joy in her art, especially later in her career. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This past weekend, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art debuted a new retrospective exhibit on the life and work of Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. One of her great initiatives was to express rebellious joy in her art, especially later in her career.

I wasn’t familiar with the name Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) before the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art announced they would be hosting the first American retrospective exhibition of her work, yet having seen aspects of it, particularly her Nanas, I find that I do remember seeing these around here and there. The exhibit begins with her early work, highlighting her tirs paintings (1961–63) which involved her shooting paint-filled collages of popular material objects each with their own cultural meanings, until they bled their paint out. I found these hard to appreciate, the violence at the core of these pieces and the claustrophobic nature of their assemblages filled me with a sense of dread.

Yet, it was the latter two thirds of the Saint Phalle exhibit which I returned to, the section radiating and erupting in light and color in a manner that felt welcoming and brilliant as though it were made to bathe in the warm rays of the Sun. These portions of the gallery were filled with her Nanas (1964–73) and other works in the same style. Saint Phalle created her Nanas as an evocation of the power of women, often drawing from ancient fertility figurines like the Venus of Willendorf, today housed at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Even the serpentine figures which I would normally be wary of felt warm and cheering.

So, what then is it about Saint Phalle’s work and this dramatic change between her early creations in the 1960s and 1970s to her later works in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s that the latter ones feel so different? In my two visits thus far I’ve gotten a sense that early on she was fighting back against oppressive forces and that her resolve was to take hold of the ancient model of fighting violence with violence, while later once she felt liberated from these old shadows, as much as she could’ve been, she began to create in a spirit of wonderous joy.

I’ve had a hard time with joy lately, and I’m usually the eternal optimist. In many respects, I feel my emotions have had a softening in the last year and a half out of fatigue more than anything else. After I finished my teaching job in the Fall, I could not feel much for a good two weeks; I was so tired that Christmas came and went with only a passing acknowledgement from me. I gave every last drop of my enthusiasm and optimism in that job, knowing that I would have to do no less if I wanted to do that job justice. Joy then, the emotion that I felt even in the darkest and most terrifying days of the pandemic as I dreamed of better tomorrows, is something distant from me even now.

Yet I prefer to be optimistic, to live joyfully, rather than to be consumed by the trends of pessimism and destruction that are well in vogue now. There are horrific things happening in our world every single day, and I applaud those who are fighting to stop those horrors from spreading. The great fight of our time is one to defend democracy in a year when it is very well and truly under threat. It might seem naïve to some, yet I feel it is my vocation to try to keep a positive outlook and remind the people around me of all the good things we’re fighting for. What good is war if we give up any hope of finding peace again? Like Saint Phalle, I see joy in color and light. Where years ago, I would want to keep the shutters closed on my windows today I love having the sunlight dance between their opened gates and radiate an exuberance that reminds me of St. Francis wandering the fields around Assisi 800 years ago. There are great horrors in our world, and we need heroes who will face them and restore them to their box, yet we also need people to remind us of the good times so that we have a reason to envelop that darkness in light.

In the arts, the greatest periods in recent American history of optimism and joy are the New Deal and the Great Society, two moments when the political will to make life better for all Americans translated into an artistic awakening which sings the spirit of the times. The New Deal policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to a time of great pessimism and trouble for America and the globe, when at the heart of the Great Depression he and his brain trust found ways to invigorate society through economic and financial reforms as well as new funds for the arts that had not been known at any time before. Here in Kansas City, we look to the paintings of our local artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) to evoke the regionalist style of the day, or nationally to the works of Georgia O’Keefe, Edward Hopper, and Grant Wood. I often associate O’Keefe’s art with the bright colors and lights of the desert Southwest, a region that was conquered by the United States from Mexico in 1848 yet not fully realized into our national mentality until after World War II.

For me, the great voice of this optimism is Aaron Copland, whose music evokes the same regional influences of the painters just mentioned. A long standing question in American classical music is how best do we define our national voice? I say we here because the compositions created in this country live or die by the audience’s appreciation. I found it fitting then when I read that the Kansas City Symphony’s first European tour, happening this August, will include performances of Copland’s Third Symphony in Berlin and Hamburg alongside performances of the works of three other great American composers: Bernstein, Gershwin, and Ives. In Copland’s music there’s a sense of the enduring youth of this country, the optimism of a new society building itself from these foundations.[1]

I love how the third symphony uses his famed Fanfare for the Common Man as a central theme, this idea that while in other countries fanfares would be reserved for only the great and the good descending down to our common level on their golden escalators, in our country that fanfare is open to anyone who is willing to live their best life. We are all capable of greatness as long as we live within that brilliant sunlight that so dominates the most optimistic periods in our art.

The greatest challenge that we humans have ever received is to love one another, to be kind and generous with our compassion, and to work for the betterment of all of us. I see that message fading somewhat today, its brilliance drowned in the neon glow of our own individualism and aspirations for fame and riches. It runs contrary to our culture as it has developed that we ought to prefer charity over transactionalism, that we ought to be kind to each other for no other reason than because it’s the right thing to do. I worry that this is lost amid all the revolving cycles of fads and trends that catch our attention for but a moment only to be overshadowed by the next.

So then, perhaps what I appreciated the most about Niki de Saint Phalle’s later works was as much the longevity of their creation as it was their brilliant colors and joyous expressions. These are works which are meant to last so that generations of people will see them and perhaps in their forms feel a sense of their creator’s joy. I certainly felt that, even now 22 years after Saint Phalle’s death. I took one photo in the exhibit, of a color lithograph she made with a dualistic figure, on the one side with a human face and body and on the other the human frame surrounded by planets, moons, and stars. Beneath the dual figure Saint Phalle wrote in French and English, “La mort n’existe pas / Life is eternal.” I believe through our joy, no matter how childlike it may be, we can live on even after death. As St. Paul wrote, “Rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all.” (Phil. 4:4–9)

[1] Yes, there’s a great deal of problems with that new society’s foundations in the conquest and colonization of this continent.

Niki de Saint Phalle: Rebellion and Joy is on view in the Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from 27 April through 21 July 2024. More information can be found here.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

A Sunrise

A Sunrise – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, a reflection on the rising Sun. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week on the Wednesday Blog, a reflection on the rising Sun.

Last Friday as I drove south to reach my classroom in the morning I was awed by the pink and yellow rays of the rising Sun that appeared in the east. It seemed to echo some sort of hope of things to come. These last months have felt as though I’ve been caught up in a storm both unfamiliar and of my own shaping, and it has left much of my life from my part time work to even this Wednesday Blog to be written at the eleventh hour each week. Unable to set foot on solid ground over these months, I’ve prioritized staying upright in my life while putting my best efforts into my work. Still, even that hasn’t seemed to be enough to balance everything.

I am more used to the pattern of having several part-time jobs which fit together however imperfectly, so the introduction of a full-time position on top of everything else sank all those other things that I previously worked on to the detriment of all. There were weeks when I even ignored my own needs as my new duties required every shred of focus, every aspiration of my emotions. This has left me exhausted of many of the things which kept me going and I feel hollowed out by the harsh tides of the world.

This sunrise then spoke to me of hope. It was a sunrise that only the long nights of winter could forebode, a bright eastern glow whose radiance was more pronounced because it followed a long, dark night. I gazed up at it when I could on my drive south and thought of all that had transpired, and all the possible futures that these next months and years might hold. I know, of course, that the Sun appears to rise as our planet continues in its revolutionary course, the Earth spinning on its axis with each passing day so that this sunrise has surely been seen by many before and will indeed return again to grace our mornings. Yet amid all that the sciences can tell my emotions speak louder in my interpretation of its very natural phenomena.

There have been many sunrises in my life that have moved me, after all I’m traditionally far more a night owl than an early bird, so until recently I rarely saw the sunrise. In my childhood my bedroom looked out to the west and each evening was warmed in the glow of the setting sun. With all our popular fears and worries about endings today, they are far louder than any wonderings about new beginnings, it seems that we as a civilization looks to the setting more than the rising Sun. We see our future as a fading echo of distant glories, our lives existing in the ruined monuments of earlier generations. Our stories are populated with more Ozymandiases and fewer Abrahams and Jacobs in spite of the newness of so much of our built world here in the Americas and the other old settler colonies.

I think our transition from the early decades of this new century into the first of the middle decades has a great deal to do with all of this. The generations now being born will surely see the last century as something in the past existing behind a veil just remote enough to not be touched. When I show pictures from my travels of old monuments today my audience and I are both struck that often they were infants or even yet to be born in that same moment. The first decades of this century are to them what the 1970s and 1980s are to me; and as we continue our inevitable march forward in time we will move ever further away from those years and generations in which our world here in the United States, and especially here in the Great Plains and West, was still young. It seems to me that we have a great deal to learn of change; that we will always need a reminder that the passage of time is something to be admired as much as it is feared. The oldest people I knew as a child would now be reaching their centenary if they were still alive, and surely someday I too will be in that moment where the power of my life fades as my time recedes from life and into memory.

The rising Sun speaks to me then of both hope and the truth that after many sunrises there will be one which will be seen in a moment when my world and all who I know are gone. There will be a sunrise after my time, yet in the meantime I hope I can make all the days that follow the sunrises of my life fruitful. With that light there are a great many things I can see, a great many marvels to behold; for all of us are individual marvels in all our complexity, our wants, our passions, and our fears. As long as I am able, I yearn to experience those marvels like that pink and yellow sunrise from a few days ago and live to the fullest of my ability.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

21733868_10214068171760956_1726168460_oOne of the fundamental maxims of physics is that “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” For everything that is said or done something of equal vigour must be in order. By this logic then, for every fascist, far-right, or white supremacist threat to American society and we the American people there must also be an equal reaction by the far-left, by the Anti-Fascists as they have deemed themselves. Yet what good does the threat of violent action do? What is the point of bringing one’s guns to an anti-fascist protest? What is the point of eradicating the memory of all who have had some dirt upon their hands, who committed evils in their lives?

This moment, at the closing years of the second decade of the twenty-first century, is a moment of immense change, of tribulation not unfamiliar to our predecessors from a century prior. We are living through the waning hours of a period of unprecedented social change and extraordinary wealth for many in our society. We have witnessed a plethora of forces at work in their efforts to bend our society to their aims. Some have sought to bend the law in order to further their own wealth and prosperity to the detriment of others. Still more have fought against those egotists in the defence of the common good and the wellbeing of all.

Now, as we look ahead towards the last months of 2017 and the new year 2018 we are beginning to recognise as a society how uncertain our future is. We are realising that our children will probably not be better off than ourselves, that our generation as well will probably fall in economic standing in a way unseen in the past century. It is natural to react to this with fear, to curse the political, economic, and social systems that led us to this moment. But in our present culture we celebrate fear, overreaction, and anger far too much. We have accepted extreme behaviour on television as normal, and in so doing have accepted that same extremism into our own lives.

We have reached a moment in our history when both the right and left are afraid; afraid of losing what they have; afraid of each other. We have reached a moment when the politics of fear have duped millions into electing a man entirely unfit for the duties to which he is oath-bound to serve. We have reached a moment when lies are far louder than truths and accepted as real by sections of society.

We have reached a point where at long last the old Confederate sympathies are being brought into the light of day as racist echoes of a failed rebellion from 150 years ago. Yet the zeal of the most outspoken on the far-left has created its equal reaction to the zeal of the far-right. Both now have sizeable factions at their rallies who are armed, ready to fight.

Extremism in any form is unnatural and unhealthy. Yet in the current moment in American history it is the extremes of our society that are the most vocal. I cannot deny that our political system is flawed, it absolutely is. I cannot also deny that American capitalism favours the rich, that is how the playbook has been written. I would be an idiot to ignore that our society is rigged against anyone who is not male and of European descent, there is a racial hierarchy in this country that has existed since the colonial era. But I would be blind to also deny that we can change things for the better. We can fix our corrupted political system, we can rewrite the codes that govern our capitalism, we can stand up everyday for the rights of all in this country and day by day continue to chip away at those old biases. But we cannot do these things while we are taken hostage by the far-right and far-left of our society. We cannot fully achieve the great work of our society while our society is a hostage to the militant few willing to kill their fellow Americans in defence of their extreme convictions.

We must continue to march, to protest, to organise, and to vote. We must carry on the good work that our predecessors undertook in generations past. We can make this country a better place for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in. But we must walk the middle road of moderation to do so.

We must understand the full consequences of our actions, we must learn from our history so that we do not make the same mistakes again. There are many who are opposed to the removal of the Confederate monuments because that is “erasing our history.” I disagree. By removing those monuments to a rebellious movement in our history, we are forcing the book closed on that chapter that has yet to settle. After all, we still see the way in which Americans continue to threaten one another with violence at the slightest hint of progressive reform. To make our society better for the next generations we must rid ourselves of this disease of extremism. We must show those who want violence that through peaceful debate we can achieve far greater things.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” When the far-left responds to the far-right’s threats of violence with equal threats the far-left only continues that same cycle of violence. Consider that maxim again: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Threats of violence may well be equal on both sides, but the threat of violence on the left is not opposite to the threat of violence to the right. It is not the positive to the right’s negative. Only peaceful protest, nonviolent refusal to play by their rules of violence can achieve that. Through peace and nonviolence we find our equal and opposite reaction. Let’s try it for once. You never know, it might just work.

Optimism and Belief

Cloud-line

In my life, there have been two things standing as constants: optimism and belief. I have embraced these two guiding principles, and striven in due course to live a better life as a part of the wider human community through them. For me, my faith as a Catholic and as a Christian is an inherently positive one; it is a faith in Resurrection, in Union with the Divine Essence, in the fulfilment of the circle and restoration of humanity to paradise.

Yet to allow this faith to persist I have found myself inherently optimistic, always expecting the best from people, and looking at even the darkest of situations with the hope that is required to believe in something greater than Reality. True, this is blind faith, something entirely counter to the principles of our scientific age, yet in the end is not blind faith equally necessary in a scientific setting? After all, we have yet to learn all that there is to know about nature, our sciences are as of yet unfinished in amassing the totality of reality. Therefore, if we are to accept science as an effective and prosperous measure of nature, then we must also accept that that measure is man-made and limited in its scope.

I see those things measured by science each and every day, and I am in awe of their wonder. I see how the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, how the stars circle in the sky as the year passes. I hear the wind bristling through the leaves of the trees, and across the tall grass prairies. I have known what it means to be caught on the beach at high tide, and to be at the mercy of the awesome tempestuous power of lightning. Past generations might well have worshiped these forces of nature, seen them as gods like Zeus, Taranis, or Ukko, yet I see them as terrestrial, as natural, as real. The true force, the veritable essence to be worshiped is far greater than even the rolling thunder or bristling lightning.

In these circumstances I am reminded of the American hymn How Great Thou Art, yet in the smallest of moments too I am reminded of God’s coming to Elijah on the softest breath of wind in the cave. Divinity and the essence that made all that we know and love is so far beyond our own understanding, yet in that realisation I find my peace.

Often it can be said that I find my belief renewed through music, through that purest, most mellifluous of sound. Some of the most sacred moments of my life, the most moving moments in the story of my belief have come in moments of music, from operas like Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte to the Pilgrim’s Chorus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser to great orchestral outbursts of emotion as in Stravinsky’s Firebird and most all of Mahler’s symphonies; yet equally spiritually potent for me are the more recently composed naturalistic Mass settings that I sang with the Rockhurst University Chorus while an undergraduate student there from 2011 to 2015. Music has long been said to be the Voice of the Heavens, and certainly it has appeared to be so to me.

Yet what I find the most fulfilling to my belief in the Divine is humanity. In the Christian tradition we believe that humanity was “Created in the Image and Likeness of God.” For me, this means that our souls particularly were made in the Divine Image, but that our bodies also have Divine inspiration. When I see humanity, with all our faults, all our problems, all our pain and anguish, I can’t help but be swept off my feet in grief. Yet at the end of the day I always remember the old adage echoed by Little Orphan Annie, “Tomorrow will be a brighter day.”

I believe that one day that will come true, that one day all will be sorted out in our capitals, our courts, our executive palaces. I believe that one day we will march through our cities, not in protest or in anger, not out of anguish or to alleviate our suffering, but because we are celebrating that most essential characteristic of our humanity: liberty. I believe that someday all humanity will walk together, singing in unison, a multitude of voices, of languages, of cultures and creeds making one song. I believe in optimism, and I am optimistic about my belief.