By Morf Morford
Tacoma Daily Index
“We are at an inflection point. And everyone is invited.”
– General Motors, regarding the increased production and use of electric vehicles.
You don’t need to be a genius to see that it’s not just the vehicles we drive that are at an inflection point.
History is full of eras that shift, where values or philosophies take shape or lose their influence – sometimes suddenly, but mostly relatively gradually, only noticed, defined or named in retrospect.
Policies and priorities change, often abruptly, because of a crisis, an invasion, a war or an earthquake for example.
I have to admit that I have been a semi-disaster nerd for a long time. Books on war, disaster and cultural or environmental collapse crowd my bookshelves (as do books of many other genres).
It might come from growing up within sight of Mt. Rainier, an active volcano. Or it might have been the result of being raised by parents who withstood the Great Depression and World War II – and a family history of poverty, dislocation and, on my mother’s side, all the struggles of immigration and learning English as a second language – but not in any program by that name.
In short, my parents learned to survive.
War and upheaval – and personal challenges like homelessness, health concerns and hunger were continual threats on the horizons.
I grew up in the shadow of those fears and concerns. To me they were stories – abstract myths of time gone by.
My early life was stable beyond belief.
My parents never moved. They had moved into their house before I was born and never left it.
I had to leave home to see the world.
But now I appreciate, and even understand to some degree, what was so important to them.
They both died may years ago.
And like any of us today, they would be mystified, if not baffled by the world we have created around ourselves.
Neither one of my parents lived to see much of the internet – let alone its dominance of opinion and paranoid fantasy.
They never would have believed that 21st Century humans would believe such preposterous fantasies as lizard people, the deep state or global schemes of DNA manipulation.
They would have laughed it off just as many of us did at the height of the Cold War when nuclear war was technologically possible, but still so philosophically preposterous that the only sane response was the production of a film like Dr. Strangelove (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/awards).
Unfortunately we live in an era of so little perspective – and creativity – (plus seeing a film in a theater is a luxury few of us can even imagine these days) that a film of such self-awareness and self-critique could hardly be possible.
Now we just have to settle for the grim, repetitive, but always worse than we could have imagined, nightly news.
“I wish the horrifying assault on democracy would end so I could just get back to my devastating pandemic.” – Randy Rainbow
Like my parents, we will survive.
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent most of my working life teaching English and writing at the college level.
I lean on, and expect more from words as a result of that experience.
When I say that “we will survive” for example, I take into consideration that “we” is a tricky word.
At one level, it is merely plural for “I” – “I” is myself and “we” is me and some unspecified others. It could be me and my family, me and my community, but we could also mean “we, people like me” or even “we, humans”.
So while I have confidence that “we will survive,” I don’t have a firm grip on who “we” is.
We Americans seem to be on a journey that appears, to an objective eye, to be not much more than a glorified death wish.
From endless environmental assaults to sabotaging our own political system to saturating our own economy in debt and other liabilities to the unrecognizable pseudo-food most of us eat, it’s amazing any of us live anything like a normal and relatively full life.
Some, as you certainly know, are more self-destructive than others – or maybe they are just more determined.
In more ways than any of us could have imagined, “We are at an inflection point. And everyone is invited.”
I keep hearing that term inflection point.
It seems to be on every news channel, even every conversation.
We all seem to know that in different ways we are on the edge, the verge of a different horizon.
We might not be looking at a “promised land”, but we are certainly moving into new territory, an “undiscovered country” a place unknown and unknowable, but unmistakably ours.
The future, even more than ever before, is what we make of it.
Spoken or not, we all seem to know that whether we are talking about race, the economy, the environment, politics, technology or virtually anything else, the one thing we all know is that we are at an inflection point and yes, everyone is invited.
Not only is everyone invited, but as the band, The Eagles put it in their dystopian anthem, Hotel California, we can check out any time we like, but we can never leave.
Leaving is not an option, but challenging the delusion is.
Lies, fantasies, scapegoating and suspicion is not the answer.
The only direction is through. Together.
