Happily Ever After
We all love a happy ending. It is, of course, one of the reasons why movies are so popular. A satisfying conclusion, a definitive cut-off point at which we can say, “there, that’s sorted.”
I was thinking of this while watching The Force Awakens. A benefit of the Star Wars franchise extending beyond the sixth film is that we get to peek beyond the happily ever after. Of course killing the Emperor and getting Han & Leia together wasn’t going to fix everything. Roll forward a few years, and things have gone to shit again.
Entropy comes up a lot when we discuss the future. The intrinsic path of all things towards eventual unraveling, documented in science to a fairly convincing degree. However, before things fall apart, they must come together. The chaos of the universe’s beginning gave rise to the organization of stars, planets, life, ecosystems. One cannot have destruction without creation, else there is nothing to destroy.
Humans exist in such small pockets of space and time that it always strikes me a bit odd when someone throws up their hands and says, “yeah, but entropy.” Okay, sure, over millions of years, yes. But within a human lifetime…
Except, of course, for the destruction we bring about ourselves. Humanity has a penchant for self-fulfilling prophecies. World War I happened because an awful lot of people wanted it to, from leaders to artists to restless youth, as expertly dissected in Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring and elsewhere.
I’m not sure why I felt such a pull to study WWI back in the aughts and early teens of this century, but I’m not alone in feeling that a similar flash point has been barreling towards ignition for the past few years. It’s one of the only things Steve Bannon and I have in common, except that he would like to rush the process, whereas I would very much like to hold it back. Perhaps Howe and Strauss are right about the Fourth Turning, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop the inexorable cycle of conflict and reconstruction, fall and rise.
But it’s a bit like telling yourself not to think of pink elephants. If you have it in your head that the whole thing is going to implode anyway, you behave differently than if you actually think something better is possible. I’ve seen that on a personal scale, hope giving way to resignation, and I think it is inarguable that this has been happening on a national and global level as well.
Witness the gleaming vistas of the early atomic age. Dreams of bright futures, comfort, convenience, and plenty. Even then, of course, there were dissenters. Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, reminding us that human behaviors had not changed much along with the technology. Shakespearean tragedies still ring true today because people are still people, and we make very much the same mistakes centuries later, cautionary tales or no.
We will never live happily ever after. And yet we want to. If only we do this, that, and the other, then everything will be set up, and we can coast through the rest of our lives. I thought the same thing in my twenties. Establish the right starting conditions, and the rest should take care of itself, so I won’t be fighting the same battles at 50 as at 20.
Welp. Guess not.
Cat posters and helpful coffee mugs remind us all the time that happiness is a journey, not a destination. But being constantly in motion is exhausting, especially when even the smallest errors in judgment carry far-reaching consequences for those with few means to recover from them. Have one too many beverages on a single night, risk a DWI charge that upends your entire life. Fumble too clumsily with an attractive stranger, subtract 18 years of freedom. Spend one day uninsured, and one big hospital trip might leave you in the red for the rest of your life. Seize the day, but not too hard, or it’ll slice your palm and you’ll bleed out.
I remember the days of D.A.R.E. back in school. Pledges by teens eager to please, swearing they’d never touch an illegal drug. I lasted longer than most of them, waiting till my late thirties to inhale any greenery, but that was due to job-related screenings, not promises to counselors. It’s easy to make a promise when you don’t know the future. Much harder to know whether that promise is worth making.
People and circumstances change. Are any of us who we said we would be? Some, perhaps. For the remainder, do we reassess and reconfigure our lives, or is that an abandonment of principle?
Now expand that thought outward. We know what America has been. What we dreamed of becoming, flush with resources and surrounded by decimated competitors after the second World War. After the fall of the U.S.S.R., after the killing of bin Laden, after the democratization of Iraq. The happily ever after never happened. Because it never will.
With that in mind, are we brave enough to step back and decide that the thing we want to be, the uncontested world champs, is not the best thing for us to be? Can we get enough distance from that fairy tale future to see ourselves as true partners in the global community, as invested in the success of the other inhabitants of our fragile planet as in our own?
Ironically, if there’s any chance of us living happily ever after, that would be it.