Jeremiad: Reflections on Our Insane Moment in Time
History’s Revenge
Learning (and not learning) from our nuclear past
If you’re anything like me, which is to say that the past two years have thrown you into a tailspin of confusion and anxiety about the future, the world as you knew it has been tipped upside down.
A series of political tremors — most notably Brexit and America’s anointment of the mad orange clown — have rocked the status quo. The ground shifts still, buckling and yawing, widening old fractures and cracking open new ones we never knew existed, and I have no better idea than you do as to what kind of society will be reborn when the shaking stops, if indeed it ever stops at all.
My mum, who has reached the age where life’s capacity to surprise is moderated by the wisdom of experience, has an irritating habit of responding to my distress at the state of things with a glib refrain. “It was ever thus,” she sighs, the implication being that people have always been appalling shits to one another — don’t be surprised to see it kick off again now.
Yet while this is no doubt true, why has the instability of our present moment caught so many of us off-guard? How many of us who grew up convinced that we lived in a stable world now find themselves imagining…
