The Promising View From Late in 2017

At Year's End, 2017

Our newest granddaughter
Laura Chen Hubbard:
Mother Eliza, Father Daniel

I am surprised to have become eighty-six years old.  It is no great record, except in my case:  I have never been this old before, and it surprises me.

Just a few days ago, on December 7—Pearl Harbor Day—I remembered my first thought upon hearing that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.  I was ten years and two days old, walking from Kenny and Aleda’s house to our own, after we had been to Sunday School.  My mother called to me that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and I thought:  “I am going to die in a war.”

I didn’t.  Not yet.  Today, in fact, I think I shall die of a broken rib.  Either I stumbled backward over a tree root and fell on my back, or God was trying to create Eve again, and I am no Adam.  

What surprises me even more than that I am still a part of life, is what life has become, what human life has become today; this year.  In the last few days, we have visited our latest grand-daughters, in Portland.   They, like Jao here in Tucson, are the promise for tomorrow. 

Mari and I have had DNA tests done, just for the sheer wonderful fun of it; different tests, each of us.  Mari exclaimed that she was 7% Irish!  That old book her father owned, that had a story about the Heltne family going back to some fellows thrown out of the British Isles for having stolen tubs of butter and lard, must have been true.  Her father denied it, even becoming a little angry at me for having read it to him, but there it is:  7% Irish.  I was anxious to know whether I was, as scientists have been saying, part Neanderthal, and I am!  I am 1.5% Neanderthal; just a tad more than most Europeans.  

Laura and Mari

For both of us Second-Hand Scandinavians, almost every cell in our bodies shows that we have descended from people who walked out of Africa beginning about 80,000 years ago, and from later bands of walkers for another 50,000 years.  Mari’s human blueprint is scattered all over Europe today, and mine shows a bit more relationship to peoples in The Netherlands, and the Mediterranean.  There may have been a few more viking ships on my side; seafarers rowing to the British Isles and to Italy, stealing chickens and girls and cooking pots.  Nothing about tubs of lard:  that was for Mari's ancestors.

We are a human race, with common ancestors.  We have had a hard time learning that.  We do not want to learn that.  We want to believe that our tribe,  and our food and clothes and skin and household gods are special.  Maybe they are, just like everybody else’s.  

At the end of this year of our lord, or your lord, or somebody else’s lord, we are engulfed by a storm, a Noah’s flood, of racism, sexism, and economic whiplash.  

All those walkers out of Africa have trudged everywhere, and we see them coming over the horizon from everywhere.  The world is full of human walkers.  The tribes of human beings, all related to each other, all distinguished by their tribal regalia, habits, looks, and opinions, are crowding in on each other.  

Once, rivers and mountains and oceans separated us, but the vikings built ships, as did the Chinese and the Italians and Spanish and French and English.  They came back with fantastic tales about inferior human beings everywhere else.  

On this continent, we crowded in and tried to establish something new:  a government based on ideals, not religions or tribes.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” our founders wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Maybe they meant not just men, not just white men, not just white christian men, but it turned out that sexism and racism ran deep through the ideals.  Our unfinished pledge to equality of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness has stumbled again, over an economic root, and we have cracked some of our ribs.  

Jao Hubbard:
Father Michael

The economics of the whole world is shifting to accommodate the fact that we do no longer live only up a fjord between mountains, or on a great plain of endless grass, or on an island, but on a globe.  “We have met the enemy, and he is us”, Pogo and Walt Capp said.  We are making a shift to life on a globe, not just as farmers and cod fishermen, and coal burners, but with a whole new set of tools and among relatives from far away, long ago, and part of our present.  

And how do we handle that?  Not well.  We do not make changes gladly, and sometimes even when we want to, we cannot.  For many of us, the changes ahead look scary, destructive, unsettling, and our kids are bringing someone home to dinner.  So what do we do?  We lash out.

Carl Sagan wrote a book, “The Dragons of Eden”, in which he told how our human brains have evolved, in layers.  At first, a lizard-like brain stem, overlaid by a chimpanzee-like brain, covered by the sheets of the human cortex.  We succeed because our neocortex manages to control what older layers of the brain did, and still do.  But sometimes, when we become afraid, we lash out, like lizards, at each other.  That is what we are doing today.

Elliot Chen Hubbard:
two years old

The lashing out will not last.  We are able, when we are more human, to see and to say that all human beings are created equal, with equal claims and rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We all walked out of Africa; those of us who are not still there.  

But getting rid of racist notions, and of notions about sexual superiority, is difficult, isn’t it?  One might think that, after several million years, we might have noticed that; at school, in Congress, and at home.

Our nastiness is the lizard in us.  Our promise is that we really do know better; that we have known it for a long time; that there are layers of reflection in us; that we live on a globe; that we can, and are, walking unsteadily toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Even if, right now, our ribs hurt.