How to fix the world.

Too hefty a topic? It’s like the old joke, “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: “One bite at a time.”

It’s so easy to fall into fatalism (“It is what it is”) or indifference (“To hell with them all”) or self-acquittal (“I sent a contribution”) or escapism (“How about New Zealand?”) or impotence (“What can anyone do?”) or self-absorption (“Hush, I’m meditating”). Excuse-mongering is contagious – and a lead-pipe cinch. (Know where that cliche hails from? Distraction too is evasion.) Oldsters cop the age plea (“We did our time. Now it’s up to…”); youngsters play the youth card (“This is not my rodeo”). All such excuses are irrefutable – and invalid. If tomorrow is not my responsibility, whose is it?  We should paste Rabbi Hillel’s famous questions on our bathroom mirror so we can’t avoid them: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

So easy to look away when dread overwhelms or strength ebbs. I read the news and, yikes, I can’t take it anymore. I’ve ventured all of the excuses above (except the youth claim, alas) – and others. Oh, how I wish my moment and mind could be cleansed of Trump – but then, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” (Jane has barred that zesty old proverb from our household due to overuse, so I thought I’d slip it in here.)

Morality is what we do, not our reasons for not doing. None of us chooses our epoch or is helpless to improve it. Each of us can do something – and most of us can do more – to forestall calamity.  What calamity, you shrug, things will work out. They may – but will you stake your grandchildren’s lives on it?

The answer to any moral quandary is to use one’s head. More than a gut instinct, goodness makes sense. The claim of some zealots that God ordains their vile behavior is a despicable copout. If God doesn’t improve us, what use is God?

Choice of action depends on two considerations: What can I do? – and, What do I do best? None of us is individually responsible for our predicament, but collectively we all are: not mea culpa but nostra culpa.

What I do best is yammer. That’s my line – seeing and saying. For this morning, I had in mind an amiable tussle with Wallace Stevens – airy aesthetics make a pleasant respite from the mucky mundane – but sleep nixed that junket. Only nitwits philosophize when the house is burning.

Younger I never thought much about morality. To each his own, live and let live, I’d been raised in the permissive climate of Woodstock. Misbehavior was protected by our starchy parents. Acting up was exciting. Trump, too, is the child of those unfettered times.

We live in a world shaped by my generation. How did we do? Are we prosperous? You bet. Happy? Never less. Proud to be Americans? If you shut your eyes, maybe. That so many of us favor an obvious abomination as leader, swapping participatory democracy for servile tyranny, dumbfounds. What happened to us? What went wrong?

Lazy, we deputed governance to the self-interested, enraged, and inept. Legislatures became cesspools. The good fled government for pleasanter pursuits.

I hate where we find ourselves as a people. You do too, probably. I’m tempted to frolic my remaining hours. (Wallace Stevens is my sort of frolic.) I write to right myself. Judaism exhorts, Tikkun Olam: repair the world. As long as we’ve breath, tomorrow is up to us.