Franz Marc: The Bewitched Mill (1913)

"I guess I'll keep watch and see if I can catch a NextWorld emerging."

The inescapable ignorance of youth and the inevitable arrogance of age conspire to mislead most into believing that youth possesses innocence and the elderly own prescient wisdom. What could prove to be further from the truth? Youth has never been able to hear its elders, let alone understand them. The elders innocently expect their broadening experience to amount to something when it rarely does. Youth insists upon making its own mistakes and elders have little with which to trade but their undervalued perspective. The NextWorld, the one continuously emerging, has never turned out to be as anticipated or similar to what came before. Forced to poke sticks into darkness, civilization continually moves onward, if not necessarily forward.

I have little to offer in the way of advice. My observations shouldn't include much advice-giving. I'm just as surprised as anyone and perhaps more so at how our world has been unfolding. Today, on the first day of Winter, the Solstice 2024, we seem to be facing a winter unlike every other before. Those in the business of predicting even the immediate future will continue predicting, for that is their nature. It's tempting to buy into one or another projection if only to quell the tension building as the realization sinks in that we've elected a madman President, and about half the population was more or less elated when we did.

If I needed confirmation that my imagination was limited, this fresh reality seals it. I'm suddenly struck stupid, but perhaps not as suddenly as I sensed. It seems likely that I've been blind to whatever surrounded me for some time—blinded by my vast experience, perhaps, or my steadily advancing, if ultimately misleading, age. “Okay, Boomer” began as a pejorative term describing someone else before it came to mean the unflagging ignorance of both youth and their elders. I can easily classify what I see going on around me as a novel form of insanity. However, my characterization might be no less crazy than whatever I see unfolding before me.

In the NextWorld, the old world's conclusions might become restless and contentious. Safety could prove perilous. The formerly unthinkable might well become considered normal if still inconceivable. Thinking itself might finally be judged overrated and traded for direction coming from nearer our brainstems. In an attempt to turn clocks backward, we must modify reason itself or else come to acknowledge that we pursue the impossible. Impossibilities always seem like the most straightforward strategies if only because they cannot be explained away. Insisting that an objective can't exist only tends to disqualify the insister. Those familiar with the NextWorld future understand only their opponent's shortcomings, for they feel secure in misunderstanding the nature of everything. The rest of us might pray for deliverance from such stunning certainty if only a heaven still existed and a Lord above us still resided there.

Nobody's future belongs to anybody yet. It was never before pre-ordained, and those who presumed they owned their future eventually came to understand that they never had. Not until a future's past does it last. Until then, it might just as well be comprised of waves rather than particles. It's in continual flux, coming into and back out of focus, fooling even the cleverest of us. Was Trump's election a success for anybody? I can certainly imagine it eventually turning into his most significant personal loss, if only because his most extraordinary talent always has before lay in self-sabotage. Offered a key to the world, he seems likely to break that key off in the lock or lose it before remembering to use it, or, most likely, just get distracted by something flashy passing by or a cheeseburger. He never seemed very present before.

I possess nothing but uninformed speculation as I begin this latest series. I've never before attempted to create such a series. I've focused all my series on my manner of living. I intended the subtext, if not always the actual stories, to exude a sense of how I live, my manner of living. Not describing my actions so much as my reflections, for my manner of living involves much rumination. In this series, I will be reflecting on how my world seems to be unfolding into what sure seems like a foreboding future. We might be on the cusp of another one of those wars to end all wars that only spawn more wars in the future. One of the continuing costs of institutionalized ignorance has always been self-destruction on increasingly massive scales. It only takes one madman, it seems, and we've somehow managed to spawn an entire generation of madmen unamenable to reason. I'd ask him to pray for our salvation if there was a heaven or a lord therein. In place of that, I guess I'll keep watch and see if I can catch a NextWorld emerging.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz