But these side boards, it seems to me, have weathered badly during the past sixty years – exemplified by the financial crisis currently engulfing the nation. The ethical-moral dike we built over the decades to hold back a rising sea of industrial greed has sprung so many holes recently that its collapse seems imminent. It wasn't simply the lack of regulation or oversight on the part of our government that caused all the trouble, as some analysts have suggested, but near-complete failure of our ethics. The imperative became unrestrained, with serious consequences, as we are discovering. This time we weren't merely picking on our big-browed Neandertal cousins – this time we turned the imperative on ourselves.
This explains, partly, how we arrived at The Age of Consequences. We let our sideboards deteriorate and fall apart. We let the imperative loose.
Is it too late? Are we trying to close the barn door after the Four Horses have escaped? I don't think so. After all, humans have been down this road before – many times, in fact, as societies rose and fell and rose again. The difference this time, of course, is the scale of the consequences.
I turned off the television, took the elevator down to the lobby, and went for a walk up Broadway Avenue. "It's more complicated than that," I thought to myself, leaning my shoulder into a bitter wind. Talk of imperatives, ethics, morals, greed, impulses, and so forth doesn't even begin to touch the complexity of our situation. The Age of Consequences is both the product of a pattern of human behavior over millennia and a set of
Weary, I stepped into the warmth and comfort of a small diner. I slipped into a booth and ordered a cup of coffee to warm my old desert bones. Across the aisle and above my head, a television glowed. On the screen was our newly elected president, Barack Obama, speaking silently to a group of people. He radiated optimism, I thought as I watched. His youthful smile was broad, his face energized with determination, his eyes sparkled with intelligence. His whole demeanor, in fact, shone with a serene self-confidence.
It is an amazing moment in American history, I thought to myself. In a few weeks, almost literally one hundred years to the day after Teddy Roosevelt stepped down as the 26th president of the United States, Barack Obama, a forty-seven year-old African-American community organizer, will become the forty-fourth Executive of this great nation. This was good. I voted for him enthusiastically, and I did so for many reasons, not the least of which was his age – only eleven months separates our birthdays. We're generational compatriots. But after the day's events in the museum, I realized there was another reason to feel optimistic about his election: he can lead us in a new direction. We can do things differently, if we want. We can turn the ship of state. That's our prerogative as well.
Nothing is set in stone, except words.
Speaking of words, I recalled what Obama said during his acceptance speech on Election night, and I crossed my fingers again:
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