Sam Smith- Like so many Americans these days I have increasingly found myself mired in the uncertainties created by the stunning new values of the Trump era. Add to that the problems of attempting to keep doing the right thing as you approach your 88th year on this planet as well as the challenge of just keeping on.
One issue is what might be called aged irrelevance. There’s no doubt that while the most notable voices are younger than folks like me, it is also true that we older writers carry more history, facts, and the way things actually worked out. In the age of Trump, however, this has little value and the big media is not well prepared to call the current fantasies what they really are.
The growing irrelevance that others apply to you as you age is still considerably better than a reality about power that gets rarely discussed – namely that someone’s power can also be a huge threat, hazard, or madness for others. Even if you would like to have Trump’s status, would you also want to be so disliked by so many?
These thoughts stem in part from my longtime appreciation of the local. I lived for decades in the nation’s capital but when reflecting upon all those years covering national power I realize that I was also very much involved in the local. Back in the 1960s I even started a neighborhood paper a few blocks from the Capitol.
About a decade and a half ago, my wife and I moved from DC to a small town in Maine. I have not, for even fifteen minutes, regretted that choice. It is a town where about seven decades ago, my parents started an organic farm that still functions. I learned a lot on that farm but one of the most important things was that farming is real and you can’t talk your way out of reality. I learned a similar rule about sailing on the water. You had to do the right thing and couldn’t talk your way out of it. I attribute my journalistic concern for reality as partially a lesson learned in a small town in Maine.
There were other things to learn. Like how to work with other people. How to find common interests. How individual power has little advantage over cooperation. How to organize at the nearby level. And how few folk in this town ever lie or cheat on you.
It has been a cooperative, decent, friendly and wise place. And, in no small way, has helped me survive the Trump years.
Neither right or left media give adequate attention to the local. But that doesn’t prevent you from discovering in your own village values, strategy and wisdom that will help you survive the evils of power. If we define our lives less based on the evening news and more on the actual experience of living with others we will help create a cultural background that may have real power. This is what happened in the 1960s and can happen again.
Certainly a good part of my life involved the rise of the less credited in our society such as blacks and women and the growth of once ignored issues like the environment. In the 60s we were not intimidated by power frauds like Donald Trump but were busy introducing and building support for things that had too long been ignored.
In other words, we did not define our lives by the wrong but by the good and it paid off.
We need to define and build a better America and not just be trapped by the stupid and the evil.
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