Small Wonder (27 page)

We should be tired of it, too. My country has been at war, secretly or openly, for virtually every year of my life, though my fellow citizens and I were mostly insulated from what that really felt like until September 11, 2001. Then we were chilled to our spines, and we began to say, “The world has changed. This is something new.” We are right to weep aloud for this devastation; we should raise our forearms to the unsheltering sky and weep forever. But if there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from above, then please in the name of heaven I would like to see it,
now
.

 

On my desk sits a small black-and-white portrait of the world in a new year, when the year was 1903, that graced the cover of Emma Goldman's magazine
Mother Earth,
and words of hers that have crossed a century to reach me: “Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty.” Promises and prayers contain their own kinds of answers, as consecrated aspiration. I need this one now, as I need air and light.

I don't know what lies around the bend for us. I'm as scared as anybody, and grieving already: the end of nature and biodiversity, of safety and the privilege of travel; we have such larger losses to ache for than the end of the SUV as we know it. We may already be looking at the end of the world, in the form we least expect. It would be a pure, hellish irony of history if the same smallpox germ that was let loose on this continent two hundred years ago
by the European arrivals, which quickly killed some 98 percent of the indigenous American population, were to revisit us again with the same results. It does not seem safe to assume we will ever know the moral of our story.

What I can say for certain is that many things will change for us, and fairly soon. We've built our empire on the presumption of endlessness for certain resources, which we are now running out of: more forests, more easily exploited oil, more economic growth based on more untapped markets for our goods. Alas, the nomads in Lorestan Province may already be buying as much Coca-Cola as they're ever going to be induced to want. “The time will soon come,” writes Wendell Berry, great prophet of our age, “when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a ‘new world order' and a ‘new economy' that would ‘grow' on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be ‘unprecedented.'”

Every time I read an argument justifying further oil drilling in sensitive places, I notice that it begins with the caveat, “Unless Americans are willing to accept a drastic lifestyle change.” As if that were the one thing that could never happen. As if many new kinds of shortage weren't already on the docket, scheduled for arrival,
period
, before my kids get to be my age. Scientists have been trying gently to remind us that the “fossil” in fossil fuel is not a metaphor or a simile. That oil is going to dry up eventually, and no political voodoo can induce dinosaurs or prehistoric fern forests to lie down and press themselves into more ooze for us on the timetable we require.

The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something
will
eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe con
sumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret uglinesses that bring us whatever we want. I am not saying I'm in favor of the fall; it terrifies me. I'm saying when the nine-hundred-pound bear gets all the way out to the
very
tip end of the limb, something's going to crash. Nostalgia for an earlier ignorance is not the domain of this discussion. Sitting here eating as fast as we can, while glancing around for the instrument of our demise, isn't it either. Would that the instrument might be a reconstruction guided by our own foresight and discipline, rather than someone else's hatred.

To wage war is human nature, I'm told, and the only way to settle a shortage of resources. I don't buy it. There is Jason's swashbuckling approach to the dragon's-teeth warriors, and there is Medea's more intuitive one, and both—for the record—are human. When the most recent round of bombings began, my mother and I declared to each other, “When the going gets tough, seems like men reach for a weapon and women look in the pantry.” (My apologies, and deepest thanks, to you guys who were standing right there with Mom and me at the pantry door.) Slightly more than half of us down here on earth are of the pantry persuasion, and we didn't all of us get here by being efficient killers. By
here
I mean in charge of the place, numbering in the billions and wreaking our will on the planet. We got here by being social animals, communicative animals, cooperative animals, bipedal animals, tool users, seed savers, cagey mate choosers, bearers of live, big-brained young who seem determined each time around to outsmart their parents' generation, and frequently do. We are much too clever an animal, it seems to me, to kill ourselves now.

This is the lot I was cast, to sit here on this sharp, jagged point between two centuries when so much of everything hangs in the balance. I get to choose whether to hang it up or hang on, and I hang on because I was born to do it, like everyone else. I insist that I can do something right, if I try. I insist that you can, too, that in fact you already are, and there's a whole lot more where this came from.

That manner of thinking does not seem to be the fashion at this sharp, jagged little point in time, where the power is mighty and the fashion is coolness and gloom and one raised eyebrow. But still I suspect that the deepest of all human wishes, down there on the floor of the soul underneath the scattered rugs of lust and thirst and hunger, is the tongue-and-groove desire to be understood. And life is a slow trek along the path toward realizing how that wish will go unfulfilled. Such is the course of all wisdom: Others will see the front and the back, but inside is where we each live, in that home where only one heart will ever beat. There we have to make our peace with all we need of sorrow, and all we can ever know of the divine, by whatever name we can call it.

What I can find is this, and so it has to be: conquering my own despair by doing what little I can. Stealing thunder, tucking it in my pocket to save for the long drought. Dreaming in the color green, tasting the end of anger. Don't ask me for the evidence. The possibility of a kinder future, the existence of God—these are just two of many things that fall into the category I would label “impossible to prove, and proof is not the point.” Faith has a life of its own.

Maybe the cynics are on top of the game, and maybe they're not. Maybe it doesn't cost anything to hope, and those of us who do will be able to live better, more honest lives as believers than we could as cynics. Maybe God really is just a guy on the bus. Maybe those really are his wife's measuring spoons hanging up there on my garden trellis, waiting to dole me out a pinch of grace on the day I need it. Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.