Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Where Are We Going Now?

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I keep a few old magazines around to remind me of where we thought that we were going a few years ago, before events brought us here. On one of those magazines ENRON is being touted as the answer to making more money from nearly everything we sell to ourselves. On another of those magazines Arthur Anderson is being touted as the most creative accounting firm around for developing such a great consulting branch. On yet another of those magazines John John Kennedy is standing and saluting his dead father. We have great moments in this nation too, one of those magazines shows the Berlin wall going up and another one shows it coming down. Both of those events happened during my lifetime, I am grateful that I lived to see that wall come down. On one magazine the cover picture is of a flying automobile. With the way people drive on earth today I am glad that idea never really got off the ground. There are volumes of forgotten predictions about this coming crisis and that coming revolution on my bookshelves. I look at them once in a while and shake my head at the number of intelligent things people have said about events that never occurred.

I also keep looking back at things I have written over the years about future events and Nostradamus need not fear for my competition. Every one of us who thinks about the future at all tries their hand at predicting it, some for reasons of financial gain and others for just the jazz of being right occasionally. Most of us think rarely about the time beyond our death but as we get older we begin to be more and more certain that that day will approach us too. If we think about our legacy to the future generations of human beings it is usually just those we know and love that we are concerned with. Humanity is an abstraction; only individual human beings are real to us. That is why we live our lives bounded by our personal relationships and feel fulfilled by loving those we love and hating those we hate. I know we are not going to stop feeling those emotions anytime soon; they are the foundations of our lives.

It is impossible to love everyone in this nation but I find it easier than loving everyone in France for instance. We are bonded to one another by connections that were formed in our minds as children; and most of our emotions felt about strangers are relevant to one or another of those connections. Catholics tend to like one another more than they like members of another religion. Democrats tend to like other Democrats more than Republicans. Membership in a group entered into by choice tends to confer our acceptance and even affection on all other members of that group until we are up against an individual we find disagreeable. Even then we are likely to tolerate them more because we are in a group together. It is seldom true that humans love all people equally; we just aren't built that way.

In a long life of being exposed to my own inaccurate predictions about the future and those of others that were at least equally bad I have grown slightly cynical about the virtue of predicting the future. I can usually predict what key I am going to strike next on my keyboard but that is only as accurate as my fingers allow it to be. That is why I have such a hard time buying into elaborate schemes by politicians or worse, ideologues. People that project their wisdom into the present and extrapolate a certain future from that projection leave me reaching for my little treasure trove of old magazines to remind myself that this batch of fools too will pass. Most of the time I am content with that as a rather permanent position of mine, these fools too will pass.

I imagine it is rather close to certain that there are a lot of people that have had that thought about me too over the sixty odd years of my life. I have had that thought myself, occasionally; it keeps me a little more humble than I would otherwise be. I am making a great deal of noise for a private and relatively restrained person these days about the issues of war and peace. It is because I believe that the war the universe is waging against all life forms is war enough for everyone. I swat flies and eat meat but my sympathies are with the fly and the cow even while I am doing that. Living is such a limited thing and death is so permanent. I hope that my worst predictions never come to pass, that is likely because no one sees the whole future accurately. I daily hope that the worst things that I feel about those who are pointing us towards war are wrong and that they are wiser than I. I hope that they know what they are doing, but I doubt it greatly. I watched and learned about containment during the Cold War, and I was impressed by the results, even when I thought that extreme measures on both sides could have been avoided. The wall came down not because of war but because we avoided war, I would not have predicted that in 1960 or even for quite a while after that time.

Today we are facing the certainty of a future in which we are going to be beset by enemies outside of our borders at least some of the time. People are predicting that this war on terror will drag on far into the future and that seems likely, as terror is all our enemies have left. We are far too powerful to fight on the field of battle in a conventional war. I know sometimes containment will not work but I also know that sometimes war is not a possible solution to the problem of a diffuse enemy. I wish that the people on the other side of this issue would concede that they sometimes have doubts about the efficacy of war as a solution to the problem of terrorism. I trust far more the prophet that understands the failure rate of those who base the future on predictions entered into from the certainty of belief. I prefer the doubtful prophet to the absolutely certain one every time. Whatever happens we are all headed to the same future together and I would hate having to say I told you so to those who had the power to shape it. I would far rather be surprised than be right in this case and be as amazed as I was when that wall came down. God bless and keep you, our troops, and our protestors safe in these trying times.