Burden of Dreams

I've learned a lot this year. But as much as I appreciate the opportunity for growth at this stage in life, I wish that it was not so dearly earned.

There are two ways to climb: one is to purposely ascend to lofty heights, and the other is to struggle to find your way out of a deep hole. Though the elevation change may be comparable, one is far easier than the other.

Note: In observance of the holiday season, this will be the only column this week. There will, however, be a new Science Friday episode in two days. For those of you who are connected with me on Instagram, YouTube or Facebook, my family and I put on an annual holiday jazz music show that will be viewable at 6pm MST this coming Saturday, the 23rd. This tradition is now in it’s 23rd year, but thanks to the interwebs (and fast connections), you may view it from your own living room, wherever you happen to be. Join us if you can. Just follow the instructions on the invitation link above.

I’m not going to lie; for me, this foul year of the common era, 2023, sucked. This year will go down as the year that I lost my lifelong faith that the world was basically good and that a few bad apples mucked it up for everyone else. For the first time in my life, I’m not so sure that I’m leaving a better world for my kids. Worse, I’m not sure that there’s anything that I can do about it. This grieves me to no end. Honest and no lie.

There are several reasons for this soul-crushing epiphany. The biggest is that one June morning I woke up in a parallel universe where the wonderful, stable family situation that I was wildly fortunate to enjoy for the past 14 years had collapsed. I won’t burden you with the details; I’ll just offer that mental health care has not advanced like all other forms of health care. There are an awful lot of people running around out there who are broken. And unless they want to be helped, there’s absolutely nothing that you can do about it.

The second is the general state of our country. As things stand right now, Joe Biden is very likely running against Donald Trump in the presidential election next year. I vacillate between apoplexy and exasperation over this. I see how it’s happening, but it’s difficult to believe that it’s true.

On the one hand, we have the narcissistic, supercilious, blowhard of our time, Donald Trump, whose embrace of megalomania is almost unparalleled. But he’s also the most put-upon and unfairly treated politician of our time. Two things may be true at once. And in Trump’s case, they are.

Just about the only thing worse than Trump are his political enemies on the left, most of whom cannot successfully find their way from their heads to their bums with their hands, as demonstrated by this week’s doomed legal maneuvering to remove him from state ballots via a tortured interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The endless, dimwitted prosecution/persecution of Trump just reinforces his winning message of “I’m all that’s between you and them.” to the average person.

We should all hope for such adversaries.

Then, there’s Joe Biden. The overwhelming evidence for corruption and influence peddling within the Biden political empire, currently on full display for anyone paying attention, actually concerns me less than the fact that Biden, despite his alleged common folk bona fides, is the head of a political party that considers the 1st Amendment an inconvenient artifact of a quainter time and wants to allow the government to, among other things, enable the transitioning of your grade school child from one sex to the other not only without your permission but without your knowledge.

I’ll take what’s behind door number three. Please.

Everywhere I look these days, I see landscapes filled with tribalism and bereft of honor. The building blocks of honor—honesty, integrity, and selflessness—are no longer core values for many. This is one of the principal reasons that I fear our civilization is in decline. It is morality, not law, that binds a healthy and productive society. You simply cannot write enough laws to govern every human interaction. In a democracy, citizens have to learn to self-regulate.

The alternative, which is currently rearing it’s ugly head on both the left and the right, is totalitarianism. Be careful what you wish for, partisans.

I’m very disturbed by the overwhelming number of societal pillars that the COVID pandemic either broke or exposed as lacking, among them my life’s work, science. The toll that COVID extracted worldwide will take decades to sort. And the reckoning will involve rebukes galore.

More generally, I’ve spent my entire life operating under the assumption that humans would become more rational and treat each other better over time. I thought that bigotry and prejudice would fall by the wayside. I thought that even though technology had certainly produced some terrible things, humans were adaptable enough to keep ahead of the less-than-great features of tech and use it mostly for the betterment of the human condition. Now I’m worried that technology is basically fueling an endless series of social, economic, and military arms races designed to crush rather than elevate.

Before this year, I was the eternal optimist. I always thought that tomorrow would be better than today. I always thought that the world would improve over time. I always thought that the good guys would eventually win. I thought that the best days for art, music, literature, science, sport, leisure, and just plain old making life as good as we could for as many people as we could were ahead. Now, I’m not sure.

We have immense problems in this country that most people are content to simply ignore. Keeping our heads buried in the sand about them might feel good right now, but it’s just postponing the big hurt for our children. I cannot think of a greater dereliction of duty.

Drugs, both legal and illegal, are out of control. I live in a small town in the Intermountain West that’s widely considered as sleepy and safe as they come, yet one may obtain virtually any drug they desire within 15 minutes if they know where to go, which includes a lot of kids in elementary school. Our adversaries around the world are doubtless counting on our appetite for recreational drugs and other forms of avarice to defeat us in a way that very few armed forces could.

We have profound issues with national debt that are about to outpace our ability to ignore them. The head in the sand approach is going to make the eventual come-to-Jesus moment on our debt crushing. A lot of people who are kids now are going to get hurt as adults.

And we have a tribal political system that’s about to produce Trump v. Biden II. Need I say more?

Our legal system produces a plethora of verdicts, but little justice. We are a society awash in police, lawyers, and judges yet bereft of truth and integrity. I’m beginning to understand the timeless appeal of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2. Metaphorically, of course (I know a lot of attorneys and judges that I like).

Morally, we are lost souls wandering the face of the earth. What were once vices are now habits. I can’t even watch very much TV, listen to the radio, or attend many movies with my kids anymore without paying close attention to what’s on because I’m worried about the unhelpful messages in which popular culture is awash.

So yeah, the totality of this has led me to a kind of dark place in the low light of the coming winter.

But, remarkably, in dealing with this burden of crushed dreams, I’ve come to what is, in a manner of thinking, a better place. For virtually all of my life, I’ve judged other people largely based on their accomplishments. They were a brilliant climber, an accomplished physicist or mathematician, a fast motorcycle racer, a tremendous athlete or scholar, a great artist, musician, or writer, a successful businessperson. I saw others far too frequently only through the lens of triumph and achievement.

What I’ve learned this year, and I assure you that it’s a lesson dearly earned, is that a much better way of evaluating others than by observing only their triumphs is through examining their burdens. Success is a far more pleasant handmaiden than struggle. Dealing with success is relatively easy. The real measure of others, as I’m discovering, is how they deal with adversity.

This approach also requires that you actually get to know others better in order to figure them out. Unlike success, struggle is not always clearly discernible from a distance.

I found this meme on the interwebs a few days ago that I think summarizes all of this newfound knowledge quite succinctly.

So there you have it. My personal year in review. If I’m telling the truth, it’s been a bumpy ride. But I think that I’m getting to a better place. And as strange as it may sound, I’m glad that the great wheel in the sky allowed me the opportunity to grow before it was too late. I’m going to be OK.

Happy holidays, everyone.

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Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com