Hope's Fool: A Grandfather's Millenium Notebook

By William H. White

Where are the voices of vision and reason as we gaze timidly, even somewhat fearfully, into this new millennium? Where, the impossible dreamers we knew? The likes of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley, Isaac Asimov? All gone now. Carl Sagan left us, ever so quietly.

One such a voice, even if lacking their clout and complexity, is that of William H. White. In his book, "Hopes Fool", humanist counselor White shares our loss of such giants, and prods us to keep dreaming where they left off. While many of today's thinkers steer us toward a Third Way between Capitalism and Socialism; here the author briefly seizes the helm of our imagination to describe a Fourth Way looming on the horizon. A world of SERMATION (Service-Information-Automation) made possible by our almost daily technological breakthroughs. Although humanist White seldom champions either Left or Right, this idealistic, little book springs from Progressive/Populist roots. It swims boldly against many of our stronger consumerist and conservative tides. Affirming what many of us have long suspected. That we've clearly reached a momentous and evolutionary watershed in the human story. Many old, cultural standbys are being drained of social significance as we move into this new age. A time we must ALL enter, ready or not!

Since closing out the Cold War, the U.S. (and much of the world) have often rejected many collective considerations and participatory solutions out of hand. Is this really wise? As we embrace the marketplace, deluged with data, how many of us delude ourselves that some great peak of democratic achievement is being scaled? Likely not too many! Not when bureaucratic bumbling or corporate callousness confront us whichever way we turn.

White suggests our machines may yet free individuals in ways we'd never dreamed possible. The results may astonish us. At its core this is a work of great hope and optimism - yet could we fail again, as we have so frequently in the twentieth century? With progress, so much pain. A world divided. Even as we're dragged closer together! In chronicling our times for grandchildren who won't read this book for years to come, White poses the ultimate question. Did we rise or fall? He will never know - but they will. If they're here to read it! Meanwhile, the rest of us are....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 9, 1999
• ISBN: 9781462835294

William H. White

Author William White refers to himself as a blatant curmudgeon much like his protagonist in "Genie." His many years as a humanist celebrant or counselor may indicate otherwise. For example, officiating at weddings, memorials, hole-in-one ceremonies, and other important Homo sapiens rituals. He and wife, Isabel (Bell), have resided in North Florida for four decades. Also like Darrell Manning, with some adjustment difficulties he hopes to overcome eventually. "Hope's Fool," an earlier work by White, was written as the millennium rolled in, and he's quick to comment that it could have been written last week. Events flash by in a blur, he says, and people tend to leave heel marks across the pages of time. In "Genie" he's spun a tale reflecting this strength and vulnerability.

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HOPE’S FOOL

A Grandfather’s

Millenium Notebook

William H. White

Copyright © 1999 by William H. White.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

The violent. We.

CHAPTER TWO

Is this an evolving door?

CHAPTER THREE

Pass The Buck Please

CHAPTER FOUR

Pass the opiate, please

CHAPTER FIVE

There’s no path to love, love is the path

CHAPTER SIX

Politics. The dislikable or unlikely art?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Man labors from sun to sun. Really?

CHAPTER EIGHT

No justice, no peace.

CHAPTER NINE

Living the Cornucopia

CHAPTER TEN

Sages of grateful, graceful ages.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

What we don’t know hurts.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Noblest. We

A Canadian in America’s forces, a Portuguese wife.

We were world-citizens, including our kids,

Susan, Kathy, Janet and Victor. Four gentle people.

In hopes that humanity’s gradually changing course-these pages.

Humbly dedicated to their children.

MICHAEL, KYLE, MYLES, TIFFANY, LYNDSEY, CHRISTINA, TREVOR.

My young aristocrats. You’re greatly loved. . . GRANDPA

PROLOGUE

Listen to kids. Ask a six-or nine-year old and they’ll tell you everything. All their hopes and dreams! Kick the chronology up a bit and it usually won’t work as well. Sometimes dreams fade. Just the same, here come some words across time from an old curmudgeon to his grandkids.

To be honest, there’s an Anne Frank kind of feel to this. Remember that young Jewish girl trying to frame sane thoughts while the world outside went mad? Of course she was just a kid, and I’ve had lots of life. Her hopes and fears were personal and imminent. That precious young flame so tragically snuffed out. A thing we do share is that I won’t be around to read this over our grandchildrens’ shoulders either. And some of these pages deal with dementia no less real for its subtlety, and probably just as virulent in the long run.

Anne and I share another common denominator too. Hope. Hers fired by youth, my own more like an echo of ancient times when elders told their visions across dying embers. Bearing in mind that visions, like wisdom, can change from day to day. Maybe I’ll forget some important stuff. Not get it right, or leave too many doors open. Shut some that shouldn’t be closed. Not many professionalized propositions here. Not by a long shot. There aren’t really a lot of political or philosophical axes to grind either. Each chapter peeks into different facets of human living, helping sort out a lot of my feelings about our kind in the process. Figuring our grandkids odds played a part. A big part. So here they’ll find the things that move us on-and sometimes drag us down. It’s about stuff I think works, and stuff that will never work again. If it ever did!

This isn’t so much a How To, as a Why Not? book. Here’s hoping few Post Modernist cop outs have found their way onto these pages. Try to be forgiving when similar chords get re-struck for emphasis. Repetition. The propagandist’s tool, and tormentor of the aged. Like most books on life, we always seem to end up with more questions than answers. A tribute to the old Unitarian proverb that reminds us, To question is the answer. The aim’s been to invoke or provoke thought which might even point us toward a few answers-and share a grandfather’s take on just where those answers may lie.

So many answers have been around for so long, missing only motivation. The kids will find armfuls scattered throughout my bookshelves. Keys to what the old boy thought and dreamed about back in his days. Was he part of the solution, or part of the problem? Adding this volume to the shelf should help them decide.

Of course their Grandpa’s just a speck of mortar in humanity’s house. A tiny stone in that wobbly structure sitting so precariously atop two colliding millennia. Wondering, too, if our species will thrive? Even survive? Our house stand? The kind of scary questions that sometimes pop into our heads on sleepless nights, even if we seldom admit it. We’d fail as humans if we never thought of such things. I’m hoping they won’t find my words too weighty, dripping in multi-syllibic mush that frequently passes for serious discourse. The manner to be heartfelt, seldom erudite. May they even overlook my surrender to an occasional pithy saying, song or proverb. Old words often teach well, and have traveled far to reach us.

As I write, wars flare and fizzle. Homo sapiens continues his relentless spawning across our over-heated planet. Even though we’re drowning in How To books, in its own way this is surely another. Not so sweet songs from a philosophical canary cage where, instead, one may hear the plaintive refrains of an old buzzard who’d hoped to be living in a very different world by now. An older human (not Senior Citizen, thank you!) who, in true mockingbird style, frequently sings his shifting melodies alone.

Don’t get me wrong, life’s been good. Yet theirs can be so much better! Even if the human tribe’s not pulling so well together right now. We will. Despite century end fears and frustrations, the odds for future life flourishing through technology strike me as infinitely improved. So for the grandkids, these cautionary words may even take on a comical ring. How will they read this? As history? Opinion? Observation? Perhaps even propaganda? After all, this How To book isn’t about fly fishing, fever blisters or being your own broker. It’s about steering things through cognitive change. A sketchy map of where things might be headed-and sayings that still haven’t stuck. Lots of stuff here that may go against the grain. A little seditious, maybe even sinful! Depending on one’s point of view. So with their benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, will the kids gaze down from that pedestal in the future-shake their heads and smile? I don’t know. But one thing I do know. THESE ARE TIMES LIKE NOTHING WE’VE EVER HAD BEFORE. Terms like revolutionary or re-birth don’t even come close. What’s flickering by us at warp speed, casting its shadow even across these pages-is Evolution, itself, made visible!

Our grandkids are at T-Ball and Little League levels of life right now, far removed from much of the world’s hardball realities. This book is close as we’ll likely get to deep talk about really serious things. About life. How I wish we were breaking out these notions over coffee and sweet rolls together! Okay, even if these pages end up in a cardboard box out in the shed, I know they’ll run across them one day. This is a long century drifting in, and they’ll live most of it. I’ve called it SERMATION time, because that struck me as kind of a musical way of saying something as dry as Service-Information-Automation.

So in my dream, somewhere off in Sermation, they’ll all be sitting over grandpa’s millennia musings. This Proustian pride of ours, pondering times past. Over coffee one late September afternoon. A quiet, golden day with the season’s last fly busy in the bushes. Anyway, no matter how things turn out, this is for them. The way their Grandpa saw it. My last lesson for them. And it’s about hope. . . .

CHAPTER ONE

The violent. We.

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,

begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it."

(Martin Luther King, Jr.)

"I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.

He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."

(General George S. Patton to his troops in North Africa,

World War II)

Are these two Leaders from the same species? The same planet? The General and his native land that stamps In God We Trust on everything seem to symbolize the central fact of our time. Violence. So that’s where this must begin. Consumed, as we are, by wars, insurrections, executions, assassinations, commercial violence, school violence, domestic violence, economic violence. Is humanity sick? Insane? Or does all this violence bespeak some underlying logic? Clearly, aggression resides in most living creatures, but we humans have developed it to an art form. Can we even imagine the twentieth century without such names as Hitler and Stalin, and the cataclysms produced by that pair in the name of socialism? More than ever, modern times have been plagued with tales of old men sending young men off to die. The practice never seems to perish. Later, these same old men, grown even older, will deny their roles. While the surviving young men, grown older now too, will simply affirm they were following orders. Listening, our heads nodding like car decorations, we allow these cycles to continue. Giving further credence to these old men who claim Blood and God were on their side, even as history mocks them. Seldom will you hear them confess that the flags and symbols they carried by their sides stole their own youth and energy. Investments never recouped, even when might did make right, and victors wrote the history books.

Are there just too many bodies, living and dead, sprawled across the altars of violence? If George Patton could return to us with a more timely message, perhaps even he’d understand now. That it’s been too much-the killing.

A prime example. A solitary submarine still glides beneath the ice cap, carrying enough fire in its belly to melt an entire continent. Capacity to decimate whole civilizations! Meanwhile, at the low-tech end of the scale, in 1993 there were an estimated one hundred ten million land mines scattered over sixty-four countries. Our gentler impulses prevailed upon us to remove eighty thousand that year. While planting two and one-half million more! Endless land mine conferences, treaties and discussions still go on within the United Nations and other forums, but still have failed to ban their production and use once and for all. Why is this? At an average cost of three bucks, they’re a whole lot cheaper than submarines! Just not as impressive. These, our bargain-basement killing machines, normally reserved for shoppers of leaner means.

Our constantly expanding ability to destroy ourselves with such remarkable efficiency has spawned whole vocabularies, commentary loaded with the acronyms we’ve become so accustomed to-death couched in appropriate scientific jargon. Results are sometimes summed up in yet another of our familiar new words. Overkill. Webster’s cooly describes this process as the capacity of a nation to destroy by nuclear weapons more of an enemy than would be necessary for a victory. A description, obviously, of total insanity. Nonetheless, to inject a margin of balance, it should be noted that even in our darkest hours there are some voices of reason. It was another general ( Ike Eisenhower) who admitted, I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to promote peace more than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it. Would it be too cynical to add Ike was also a politician?

There’s another phrase which falls, ever so nimbly, from the lips of today’s politicians. Popular preachers like it a lot too, although no one seems quite sure what the term, In Harm,s Way really means. It’s usually intoned in solemn voice, as in, Today we are putting our young military men and women (dramatic pause), in harms way. Intimating, of course, that we are all totally opposed to such a calamitous state of affairs! Given its reverential tone, the phrase is frequently followed by a patriotic pause, presumably for reflection.

The actuality of war is such that, in battle, actual combatants represent only about ten percent of those in harm’s way. The vast majority of casualties are usually women, children and elderly civilians. Which doesn’t jibe well with our traditional, romanticized view of war. In fact the very words, In Harm’s Way, were used in a movie title. The film starred American film icon, and soldier extraordinaire, John Wayne. The same guy deferred from military service based on his status as sole family support. A family man, whose presence at home was deemed more essential to The Cause, i.e. World War II. Naturally, this never seemed to deter Mr. Wayne from donning virtually every military uniform the United States government ever issued, in the course of his real life. On screen. Can we ever forget dusty cavalry troopers meting out justice and retribution to those pesky redskins? Pay attention kids. This is your heritage! That sweet old drum roll for God, King and Country that ever braces a man’s spine. Makes his chest swell with pride and honor. And all that.

Wait a minute! Soldiers? Often it’s just kids we’re talking about here. As I write, there are over thirty armed conflicts going on-many of them civil wars. Civil war? Is that an oxymoron or what? It’s estimated in a Save The Children report that currently 250,000 of these soldiers are under the age of 18, some as young as 5 years old! The United Nations would prefer raising the age at which boys can formally kill to at least 17. In 1979, a convention on the Rights of the Child set the fighting age at 15, but not all countries comply. When a child in Belfast grabs a rock, he need only be strong enough to pick it up and throw it.

Such children, not yet old enough to cast their votes, crowd the socio-political violence that’s been the hallmark of our deadly century. Whether through the apparatus of a predatory Capitalism, or predatory Socialism, the results have been the same. Legions of dead humanity whose gifts to us can never be realized or known. English poet Thomas Gray’s ode to the common man spoke of such anonymous souls as, Many a flower born to blush unseen. Faceless masses of men, women and children of the ages. Speechless victims of ego, fear and good intentions run amok.

Many, if not most of us, view violence as a necessary evil. Simply a darker function of our natures. The way things are. Brutality, like the poor, always with us. Part and parcel of what it means to be human. We gather under the banners Livelihood and Honor to explain our expediency. In nature, the reasoning goes, there’s no concept of violence-simply what must be done to exist. In another much-abused word, to Survive. The Honor concept seems only to exist primarily in the human species; a game primarily played out by the guys. Women usually operate on the periphery. Only occasionally allowed to sample honor indirectly, they’ve usually been pushed aside to busy themselves with matters more important and relevant to their gender. Safely stashed away on their pedestals. At least until recently.

As sure as the beating of our hearts, the paths of honor steer us off bravely to death and destruction. This likely explains why women, physically weaker from the waist up, typically have shunned the nasty predicaments that led to our more honorable escapades. At least, whenever they could. Similar credit is due the female gender in many species, as you may have noticed. No fools they. . . .

When driven by even the most honorable intentions, if our intent is to hurt someone, we must first dehumanize them. Make them into the Other. We must also eliminate most traces of sensitivity to their suffering. We help this along by couching our actions in such bland terms as the mission, the job, taking action, neutralizing, etc. Or we may translate killing people and breaking things into the technical jargon referred to earlier. We even laugh to take the edge off. In the wild parlance of recent movies, for example, homicide and maiming becomes rocking ‘n rolling. Certainly no harm there, eh? It’s well established violence rocks their socks down at the box office! Speaking of bland, who can forget that press release during the Vietnam war that gravely stated, We had to destroy the city to save it? Movie modernization has moved the mayhem up from Duke Wayne’s six shooters to Sylvester Stallone’s million-buck bandoleers. And raise you fifty body bags, Pilgrim. And what super heroes may yet be lurking in the wings of True Grit Land, with a brand new and boffo arsenal to drag across the screen? The sky’s the limit, given today’s vast array of computerized special effects-

Getting back to the question at hand, does all this violence come naturally? Or, as the old South Pacific tune suggests, do we have to be carefully taught? Check out the nearest toy department, brimming over with toy guns and video carnage for the first clue. Watch our kids prowl the universe, zapping Powers of Darkness and endless arrays of alien invaders . Studies say real boys will fashion guns out of sticks and toilet-paper rolls if they have to. My own grandfatherly experience tells me that’s still true. But do they have to? Put it this way. Toy makers have been as creative as the cartoons, movies and the Defense Department in devising new ways to aim things and shoot. No roadblock of public outcry is yet erected to steer such creations away from our children.

Which brings to mind the grandkids.