horses, jets

My mother rode a wagon to grade school, pulled by a team of horses. This was in the 30s, after her father moved the family back to Nebraska from Colorado. Americans weren't overweight then, food was scarce. Her mother cooked on a cob-fired stove, with room to heat irons for straightening clothes. Rural electricity was still an idea; power for the occasional DC bulb came from batteries in the basement. Power for the batteries came from a generator on the windmill.
Depression was a state of the country, not a state of mind.

I thought about this as I was returning from Mexico at 537 miles per hour, at 37,000 feet, with the temperature outside my window a minus 64. I was comfortably dressed in a light sweater and cotton pants.

The most common commercial airplane in 1930 was the Ford Tri-motor. It could seat 13 passengers with no air conditioning and 'little heat' according to aviation historians. It could reach an altitude of about 6,000 feet, which meant it could not escape low-level turbulence, so passengers spent much of their flight time airsick. It was possible, however, to open a window if the smell of hot oil and metal and other airsick passengers became too much.

I thought about this as I sat in airports while traveling, assaulted by the ubiquitous TVs tuned relentlessly to war, and I thought about this as I replayed conversations with friends bemoaning the unavoidability of war.

That's just the way we are, they tell me. That's just the way mankind is. We'll never be rid of war.

I will grant that there are powerful forces aligned in favor of war. It plays well to the ultra-conservative religious who believe their god is the right god and everyone must convert or die. Some soften that stance a bit, but the undercurrent of that sentiment is ever present where the particular god in some sacred text has stated that there will always be war. So much for the gentle gods.
Then there are the harder gods, those of business and commerce.

War can be very profitable, and those who profit from war are loath to release their grip on those fortunes.

And there are those who have acquired the vast fortunes and properties. Those fortunes and properties become part of the sacred trust that must be protected at all costs. Protected preferably by other people's children. The children of the well-to-do have higher aspirations than making war. Their lot is to reap the benefits of war without actually participating.

I thought about this at 537 miles per hour, at 37,000 feet, with the temperature 64 degrees below zero a scant 3 or 4 inches from my left forearm. Impossible. To almost anyone, any person, engineer, mechanic, religious, wizard, magician or bum, what I was doing in 2007 was inconceivable in 1930. Impossible.

But somebody, some person, some people wanted things to change. They reached for the unknown and knew it, tasted it, and it was good. And I bought a ticket and flew on the hard work and dreams of all those who came before me.
We don't yet want peace; we want our way.

The lessons of Vietnam seem lost on those who planned the present mess in Iraq. At least in Vietnam we made some sort of show of being invited in, defending an existing country from an invading army. We were stopping the spread of communism but the communists won. However, those wielding the iron fist of communism failed to account for the irony in life. Capitalism and western prosperity are winning over Vietnam despite the communist victory. Now that war has been defeated the people have time to think and breathe, they can make up their own minds about what kind of government they want.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but it is a radically different way of resolving conflict. It is a radically different way of looking at relationships, at love and hate.

We don't really want peace yet, but perhaps one day we will.
And then we can look back at the horse and buggy days from 37,000 feet.

Roger German's blog can be seen at www.commonsense.typepad.com