Brilliant Optimism

Via Driftglass:

...I was a cynic in my 20’s because being a Cynic was light typing with a long lunch and full dental compared to the stoop labor of being a Realist with a 51% positive outlook. The Manichean, binary purity of turning my back on the world and looking for something entirely new was irresistible. It was, in its way, the refuge of every drunk, junkie and Old Testament God: hiding out in a belief that the world was a hopeless place and needed to be Etch-a-Sketched out of existence. Painted over and started fresh. I mean, it was so obvious that the world was run by idiots who kept fucking everything up and refusing to just Fix Things!

So much easier to become a Communist or a Randite or a Green. Not that I was more or less lazy than anyone else, but the ugliness of the world seemed too persistent. The imperfections too insoluble and heavily crenellated. The fuckuppery too deeply incised into the DNA of the real world.

And so one can be forgiven for looking over a span of five or ten years and saying, “Fuck this. It’s all polluted. Start over.”

That’s not a bad sentiment insofar as it carries inside of it a little clutch of delicate eggs. A fury at the world for not being better than it is, but also a belief that it can and should be changed. That people should not have to live like they do.

I would never want anyone to outgrow their sense of indignation, and I can speak only for myself when I say that I felt just exactly that way once, and yet I have come to nurse a hard-nosed, scarred-up sense of confidence in our future as a nation and as a species that seems to get a little stronger every year.

Not that the setbacks don’t come and wham me right down to my knees. Not that I wasn’t weeping and shrieking after November 2004, “What the fuck is wrong with you retards!”

And I suppose I still am.

But I don’t get my sense of assurance about tomorrow from a bottle or a needle or a dipshit theology that’s little more that heroin without the track marks.

I don’t get my unshakeable sense of the slow, steady improvement in the human condition from turning my head off.

I get what optimism I have from being able to plant one foot solidly on a bedrock of history and the other on a reasonable grasp of human nature, and turn, and take a good, long look at our past and know with perfect certainty that while George W. Bush is without doubt the worst President in U.S. history, these are not the darkest days mankind ever faced.

I get it from reading and from listening to what people like you say and do.

...I am an optimist because I know the past, and I know things have been worse, things have gotten slowly better, and things can change if we keep trying.

I know that no Caesar could have had an arterial stent installed to keep him from dying. No Khan could pop a Tylenol or listen to Mozart on an iPod. Cleopatra had no Pill or penicillin. Alexander the Great had no armada of satellites piping data in 1’s and 0’s into a worldwide information network so that clicking over to weather.com could give him days of advanced warning about blizzards and hurricanes. No Borgia ever had a microwave, or the electrical grid into which they could plug such a thing.

And more recently and more personally, right here in these United States, if I and my ex has met each other a generation earlier, it would have been illegal for us to marry.

But that’s not true any more.

From a distance, the future – an idealized, stylized, dogmatized future -- always looks all pretty and clean-lined, and always makes the present like a dog. Like taped-up, dollar-store, ghettokeds compared to a pair of $500 Manolo Blahnik taxi shoes.

But that's a delusion. The future never works out that way. It can't.

I am an optimist because the world has always seemed to be a dysfunctional nuthouse run by fucktards…because it always HAS been a dysfunctional nuthouse run by fucktards, but razing it and starting over doesn’t work. Flooding it and repopulating it doesn’t work. The world that you see around has gotten incrementally better generation after generation, because that’s how it works.

That’s how we’re built.

And in the end, that’s why I’m an optimist.

Because the future is a place worth living in.

Which makes it a place worth fighting for, with a smile.