Could we be sleepwalking?

US President Donald Trump speaks with reporters earlier departing connected Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, successful Washington. [AP]

I often wonder however radical surviving successful the 1910s oregon 1930s felt. Did they acquisition the aforesaid uncertainty and fearfulness we consciousness today, sensing the foundations of Western normality – something we had grown accustomed to, possibly adjacent addicted to – shaking beneath them? Or did they simply transportation on, believing the adjacent year would beryllium amended oregon nary antithetic from the existent one? Had they go blase toward violence, utmost division, and the trampling of each assumed value? Or did they rationalize it all, saying, “It’s conscionable a unsmooth patch; everything will settee and instrumentality to balance”?

We each consciousness arsenic if the very “guts” of the satellite are groaning with tremors, similar those that person flattened everything each 50-60 years. We witness absurdity, upheaval and compromise, yet we cannot grasp where it is each leading. We unrecorded successful a clip when there are fewer authoritative voices whose words we truly trust oregon want to perceive – due to the fact that when we bash listen, we recognize they cannot link the chaotic dots to uncover the bigger representation oregon foretell where today’s turmoil will take us.

Meanwhile, we are losing, time by day, the wisdom of a procreation that lived done and witnessed everything – wars, dictatorships, famine. It was a uncommon acquisition to sit with members of that generation, present passing from us, and glean a fraction of their accumulated experience. Not that my ain procreation has escaped hardship. I was reflecting precocious that successful conscionable the past 15 years, we person endured a monolithic economical crisis, the bankruptcy and near-collapse of 2015, the tsunami of κοινωνικά media, the coronavirus pandemic, a war successful Europe, and the Trump phenomenon. Crisis has present go routine.

Yet today we find ourselves successful a fog. Extraordinary and baffling events unfold daily, surprising us, angering us, and frightening us. I wonder however those who lived done those past periods felt – were they sleepwalking, oregon did they afloat understand that they were surviving done something terrifying and unprecedented, yet had nary way to respond?