I know I tend to be somewhat of a cockeyed optimist. I mean, I have to be to be a Cubs fan, but it's more than that. Despite my scientific training, I don't always like the real world. It can be depressing, and the depths of stupidity that the human brain can sink to never fail to amaze me. So I live in a joint world - the one that exists, that we touch and see every day, and the one I envision, the one that great people create in my mind with their actions and dreams. The real world is one where I spend a disproportionately large amount of time obsessing over a baseball team that will never win, ever, and the vision world is one where I plan what I'll do after they win the World Series. The real world is one where I work for a university that isn't sure that physics is a valuable part of a useful education, and the vision world is one where we're planning what star system we're settling next with our fusion drive powered personal rockets. The two worlds come into conflict from time to time, often leading to me yelling at 1:30 in the morning about something or another, but it's okay. For the most part, I've made my peace with the dichotomy.
Optimism is an excuse to behave optimally. - Ray Bradbury
Before he went completely brain dead, Ray Bradbury used to write some great stuff. In a book of essays I ran across the above quote, and it resonated with me. Whatever I want to achieve in my life, it will be easier if I assume that it can be done, if I look at the future as something in which good things can occur.
That sounds a little too faith-based for me sometimes, that I look at the future that way just because I believe it can be better. That always tends to throw me some, so I need some evidence. Sometimes I run across it with my students. As dumb as some of them can be at times, there are moments that scare me with brilliance. I like to say that "There is no mistake so stupid that no student will make it, and there is no insight so brilliant that no student will find it." But it's a lot more than that.
Schmidlap isn't writing about the future in general, he's writing about America. What is our future? Yes, it's bleak in many ways. Every time I turn around, there are examples of corruption and greed and ignorance and willful stupidity and hatred and bigotry and wrongs for which there are no words. But that's not all I see. In the real world, we have a government run by people who, if we had a reality show on Fox "Who wants to be the President", and deliberately chose the worst people, would win hands down every time. However, in the real world we also have the Constitution, which is as wonderful a document as has ever been turned out by political minds.
In my vision world, the two come together. And it has happened before - at critical times in America's history, people have come along who rose above the crap to make the country better. None of us would be here if George Washington didn't have the leadership, charisma, and skill to be the pole star for a fragile and fractured country. Or if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been willing to disregard condemnation and choose the hard fight. Or if FDR didn't recognize government's ability to be an agent of good for the people, and use the power of the country to make people's lives better.
I know without a doubt that there are such people out there today. Given 300 million people, even people subsumed by the public school system and Fox"News", there are geniuses. There are leaders. There are people who we look to when we want to see how the world can be better. Unfortunately, the political system is one where such people are marginalized, disregarded, and ignored in favor of inoffensive pablum.
But...
The question for next time is "In such a system, can a great leader really rise to the top and galvanize the country?" I argue that the answer is yes, but that person has to have a specific special set of characteristics.
More to come.
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