OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: The trying game

The script for 2019 is unwritten.

Blank pages are intimidating. Empty white territories, little Antarcticas to track up. But as someone once said, today is the first day of the rest of your life. As the campaign song goes, yesterday's gone. Yesterday's gone. (I never meant any harm to you.)

Not really. Yesterday's not gone. Yesterday's here. Yesterday hangs around a while. Ask anyone with a credit rating, student loan or tattoo.

Still, the arbitrary number has come up, the cosmic odometer has rolled over.

So what do we do with this new year?

No doubt some of the ritualistic vow-making some of us do this time of year is spurred by marketing. To become better people we must buy gym memberships and nicotine patches. We must seek out life coaches and therapists. Our new selves need new wardrobes, new running shoes, potentially new everything eventually, and the people who stand to make a buck off our self-improvement won't be blamed for encouraging us to try.

Because that is capitalism, right? That's the world of practice.

But that's what we try to do every year, right? To make ourselves over, to learn new skills, to get better.

I make promises to myself all the time, not just at the beginning of the year. And sometimes I keep them, but mostly I don't because when you're used to doing something in a certain way it's hard to do something new. There are reasons we fall into bad habits, reasons we seem to make the same mistakes over and over.

It is easy to imagine the sort of person you want to be, the sort of world you want to live in. It is easy to diagnose the country's problems--the basic problem in America is that no one believes in taking anything seriously anymore. It is easy to say we ought to pay more attention to evidence, that we ought to think critically and regularly interrogate our belief systems, but we're not going to do that.

It's easier to pretend it will all work out, that there are people somewhere who are smarter and more competent than us who will keep the worst from happening. It's easy to have a kind of faith in otter-sleek people who tell us it's going to be all right if we just listen to them.

It's hard to break old habits to push away from whatever we believe consoles us--the $4 coffee, the carbs, the fentanyl, the porn, the snark, the junk TV, the social media dopamine.

It's hard to push ourselves into discomfort. To do the cardio, to write the extra 1,000 words a day, to play the scales, to keep the gutters clean.

It's hard to accept ourselves as the imperfect, deeply broken creatures we are than to fantasize about some future best version of ourselves. Hard to not indulge in the magical thinking that allows us to believe we can really change.

And we don't seem to be the sort of people who do hard anymore.

Most of us can't imagine enduring the sort of sacrifice that our ancestors made. It's not our fault; they raised us up, they made it so we didn't have to do the things they did to survive. They beat back authoritarianism so that we could pretend that such a thing couldn't happen here. They shivered in trenches and died on beaches. They marched and were martyed.

So what should we do with this freshly unboxed year? Maybe not whatever we've been doing collectively, that which brought us here, to this hard and blighted place where we shout at each other. Maybe something to break the cycle. Maybe it's time for a little uncalled-for civility, a little introspection. Maybe if you can find a meme that perfectly captures what it is you think about a certain issue you're not really thinking all that much.

Our condition is essentially one of a lack of seriousness in dealing with critical moral choices facing us as a nation and as individuals. Over the past 60 years or so we have been conditioned to react rather than consider. We have become very good at snappy comebacks and obliterating gestures--the imprecise and scatter-shot use of words such as racist, liberal, pretentious and fascist--but we generally fail to genuinely engage with most of the issues with which we pretend to be most concerned.

Has it always been this way? Maybe. The paragraph above is a paraphrase from a column I wrote in 1996. In that same column I wrote, "We are a nation divided into rooting interests. We sign up as members of a thought tribe in lieu of genuine thinking."

Yet it does feel worse now, maybe because the Internet has given crackpots of all stripes the opportunity to publish their most outlandish fever dreams. What used to be muttered in the bowels of some dim warren cannot be blow-torched to however many Facebook friends or Twitter followers the crank has managed to acquire and multiplied by an algorithm attuned to outrage.

And our culture is decidedly dumber. There's no place in the national conversation for public intellectuals like William F. Buckley or James Baldwin anymore. There was a time in this country when Dick Cavett could interview Ingmar Bergman on network television; when Nikki Giovanni could turn up as the host of a variety show.

That's not to say we aren't capable, the best we do is the best that our kind has ever done. We all know we are capable of doing better.

But there is a gulf between knowing something can be done and actually doing it. And somehow we have convinced ourselves that only suckers can be stirred to make the effort.

But isn't trying honorable? Shouldn't we all try? Even when we suspect--or even know--the game is rigged. Maybe there's something we owe to each other. Maybe that something is an honest and concerted effort to do better. To not make such a mess. To park the car a little cleaner. To try to befriend those with whom we disagree and to credit them with a certain capacity for nuance.

To try to be braver, kinder and less obsessed with our personal struggle. Resolve to be less cool.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 01/01/2019

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