Abe and Me

A friend's husband gave me a set of VCR tapes of the PBS television series 'The Civil War'. It is disturbing. From the distance of a century, now a century and a half, I can't help but feel that we bungled our history in the 19th Century. Somehow the same thing must have been possible without all those hundreds of thousands of boys dying pointlessly at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and a thousand other places to achieve something that could have been achieved by compromise legislation. But "somehow" isn't policy and isn't concrete proposals. If Lincoln couldn't think of anything to fix it, there is no reason to think I can, even now with a 150 years of separation. That doesn't mean it wasn't bungled, it just means I can't think of how it could have been not bungled.

I have the feeling that we are bungling our history in the 21st century too. For this I have neither the separation, nor the 150-years-later vantage point. Several things seem to be going wrong at the same time. The huge trade deficits and the huge government budget deficits feel wrong. The dependence on foreign oil, on dwindling oil supplies at all, feels wrong. The growing disparity of incomes compared to other developed countries feels wrong. But maybe in 150 years these will all be early adjustment difficulties of being the first large country to enter a global economy, the emergence of a new world social order.

Maybe the emerging world economy and social order will be like the internet -- many hubs but no center. Having been the center for 60 years, perhaps we are experiencing the transition more painfully than those who were minor hubs before and will stay minor hubs. Those now toddlers, when they are gray, will be able to say whether our present difficulties were death agonies or birth pangs.