A woman I've worked with for years recently told me how much she always appreciated my efforts to cheer her up. I do love to lighten things up. But, given the indefatigably fallen nature of man, it's not easy. Like my favorite question on the MMPI, I sometimes think of things that are too bad to talk about. I'm human, so there are always those inevitable human moments of hopelessness, doubt and fear. Sure, I make an effort to have a comprehensive and nuanced sense of humor, ready to lighten up every occasion, but I also have a deeply ingrained capacity for despair. I think of it as being in touch with my inner Charlton Heston. Seems like every so often, I'm right down there with him on that beach in the final scene in "Planet of the Apes" cursing and grieving over that god damned human race that finally did itself in.
I started despairing early. By the age of nine or ten, I had managed to reframe my personal horror of death to include worrying constantly about the atomic death of the entire world. I anxiously followed the political ebb and flow of the cold war without entirely comprehending what I was watching. Could there be anything worse? I spent sleepless nights imagining scenes of post-nuclear desolation that I recycled from tacky science fiction movies, comic books and pulp sci-fi magazines.
When I eventually got around to wondering what I personally could do to help the situation, about the only thing I came up with was to become a pacifist (strictly on a trial basis you understand).
Now of course, I realize that I wasn't the only one worrying about the bomb. In fact just the other night, all these years later, I heard Rachel Maddow rhetorically inquiring if she was the only person who "worries" about these things, in her case I think she was talking about the many unsecured nuclear weapons lying promiscuously about these days.
In fact, many thoughtful people were struggling with this problem. Clearly the author the Planet of the Apes, who was on JFK's staff had spent some time on that beach. When I first saw The Planet of the Apes , I found it both exciting and disturbing. At the time, it was quite an unusual action flick. Part of the fun of science fiction is all the "cool" stuff in it when you're a little boy. But for some reason, that final scene really stood out. There was Astronaut Taylor weeping and cursing about the very thing I'd spent so many nights lying awake worrying so much about (yeah, I'll admit it, I even did a little crying I was only about 10 or so).
Years later, after studying art and psychology, I realize the scene is stongly iconic. It makes quite a powerful ending to the movie to be sure, but it also stands alone as a metaphor for one our worst twentieth century fears. If any old picture is worth a thousand words, something as iconic as that is worth infinitely more. Images that strong become archetypal and resonate to psychological infinity.
Fortunately, as I get older and hopefully wiser, I find myself down there with Charlton on that beach less and less. The sum of our fears has yet to come upon us. Man still endlessly teeters on the brink of various types of annihilation but we have thus far refrained from taking that greatest of falls from grace.
Eventually I came to realize that living in constant fear is, if nothing else, impractical. Since we thus far have no set point for our own destruction, we are constantly faced with the problem of how best to constructively pass the time in our lives until it occurs if it does.
Practically speaking, no matter what ultimately happens, anything that we are capable of doing to make a situation better begins in the present moment. If one approaches the question of what one should be doing with one's life from this perspective, there is a rich abundance of simple and basic positive things we can do to make each other's lives more comfortable right now.
It's like the man says... Don't worry, be happy.
