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...in the same way, as Yeats said, that poets' mouths should be silent in times of war; both have their hands full with other more mundane, and, in the end, possibly far more effective pursuits. I'm not sure I completely agree with both, but I understand the impulse.
Before I was thirty I didn't think we were going to survive. When I was fourteen, at the height of the Cold War standoff in the mid-1980s, I didn't even think I would even make it to thirty. We thought we were pretty clear-eyed, having seen Carl Sagan's The Nuclear Winter and knowing that no amount of ducking and covering was going to save us.
Now, at age thirty-seven, I read all kinds of things that do strike fear into my heart and threaten to send me over the edge into permanent misanthropy, and sit with my husband at dinner and formulate all sorts of plans for dealing with crises and emergencies to which the government is turning a blind eye, and stock up on potable water and canned soups and propane canisters, and ride my bicycle to work and the grocery store a lot more often, and wonder what the world will be like for my neighbor's children and my nieces, and yet it all seems like deja vu.
I have no idea what machine of the gods will descend to save us this time (something cleverly designed by scientists and technologists, I'm sure), and there's a possibility certainly, that this time nothing can save us.
But in the meantime...look, daffodils! And I rediscovered a couple days ago that there is nothing better than sitting on a sunny university quadrangle on a breezy spring day holding hands with someone who loves you and eating ice cream after lunch to make you forget all the problems of the world, for a little while, at least.
And I believe we will survive.
