Normon Solomon: Political "Science" and Truth of Consequences

[babylonsister]

Political "Science" and Truth of Consequences
by Norman Solomon | Oct 1 2007

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We've had no way of really knowing how near annihilation might be. But our lives have flashed with scarcely believable human-made lightning -- the evidence of things truly obscene, of officialdom gone mad -- photos and footage of mushroom clouds, and routinely set-aside descriptions starting with Hiroshima. Waiting on the nuclear thunder.

Five decades after Sputnik, such apocalyptic dangers are still present, but from Americans in my generation the most articulated fears have to do with running out of money before breath. The USA is certainly no place to be old, sick, and low on funds. Huge medical bills and hazards of second-class care loom ahead. For people whose childhoods fell between victory over Japan and evacuation from Saigon, the twenty-first century has brought the time-honored and perfectly understandable quest to avoid dying before necessary -- and to avoid living final years or seeing loved ones living final years in misery. Under such circumstances, self obsession may seem unavoidable.

There must be better options. But they're apt to be obscured, most of all, by our own over-scheduled passivity; by who we figure we are, who we've allowed ourselves to become. The very word "options" is likely to have a consumer ring to it (extras on a new car, clauses in a contract). We buy in and consume, mostly selecting from prefab choices -- even though, looking back, the best of life's changes have usually come from creating options instead of choosing from the ones in stock.

When, in 1969, biologist George Wald said that "we are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled -- decisions that have been made," the comment had everything to do with his observation that "our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed." The curtailing of our own sense of real options is a concentric process, encircling our personal lives and our sense of community, national purpose, and global possibilities; circumscribing the ways that we, and the world around us, might change. Four decades after Wald's anguished speech "A Generation in Search of a Future," many of the accepted "facts of life" are still "facts of death" -- blotting out horizons, stunting imaginations, holding tongues, limiting capacities to nurture or defend life. We are still in search of a future.

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