If you grew up, as I did, with the Depression as a constant if faint echo in your life, you undoubtedly knew the famous quote from Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” My parents were both products of the Depression and I believe the fear Roosevelt spoke of was with them for their whole lives.

I think that fear may have been the great divide between their generation and their Baby Boomer children. People look back nostalgically on the 50s and 60s because kids were (mostly) happy. But parents often couldn’t really join in. Many were still experiencing a form of PTSD from their experience of economic deprivation and/or the horrors of World War II. They also couldn’t join in because they often heard a voice in their heads saying, “Watch out. These good times aren’t going to last.” And guess what? They were right. They didn’t.

Growing up in a tranquil Chicago suburb, our peace was disturbed most often by what we saw on TV. It was there that we viewed the increasing ferocity of national racial conflict, the bloodshed of Vietnam, and then the growing confrontations and violence about the war. I was 12 in 1968 when we drove past buildings burned out from the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination, and when I watched on TV the riots just a few miles away in downtown Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.

The turning point, in my mind, came a little later. Just before my junior high graduation, I found myself unexpectedly joining my dad on a long, boring drive to Southern Illinois to pick up my brother from college. His school had been suddenly closed following student riots in response to the Kent State massacre. When we drove through downtown Carbondale, every window we saw was shattered and boarded up. One school building had been burned to the ground. A National Guard post was just outside my brother’s dorm.

Then, as I neared the end of my high school years and college beckoned, my sense of economic tranquility was shaken. My parents were suddenly very upset because, they told me, they feared my father might be losing his job. For his whole adult life, he had been an engineer for a legacy manufacturing company. Now it was on the verge of going belly up. Fortunately, it stumbled on long enough for him to retire, and for the pension fund to be safely separated from it.

The Rust Belt era had begun. Later, he and I would drive by the blocks-long plant where he had worked for decades, now empty and shattered. His stunned silence told me how he felt. At about the same time, I had a summer college job at the massive Republic Steel works on Chicago’s southside, which employed over 20,000 people. Later, I learned that the entire operation had shut down, and then was torn down.

Fast forward a half century to today, and with this background, our country’s distress may not be as surprising or unexpected as it would seem. While there certainly have been impressive economic and technological achievements in the intervening years (Compact computers! Cell phones! The Internet! 100” TVs!), the reality is that average wages, adjusted for inflation, have not changed in that whole period. The country has grown richer but most of that wealth gain has gone to the small population slice of the already wealthy. Employment disruption has continued and job security has evaporated. More people need multiple jobs to make ends meet. For a growing number, adequate housing and comprehensive health care are out of reach. And none of this seems to be improving.

Recently I watched an interview from last summer on YouTube of scholar and author Matthew MacWilliams. Ten years ago, MacWilliams wrote a famous article about his research showing that the one character trait which most consistently predicted a person’s support for Donald Trump was authoritarianism. This is the desire for one person or small group to be in control, to govern by fiat, and to create order by force when necessary.

MacWilliams goes on to say that people with such inclinations are always present but what activates that desire is fear. The Depression, of course, offers ample support for that theory. The Nazis in Germany, and fascism in general, drew much of their support from the unemployed and those who had lost their wealth and power in the economic and political chaos following World War I. Even relatively strong democracies like the US and Great Britain felt the pull toward authoritarianism. Hence, Roosevelt’s identification of fear as the country’s greatest danger (and his view of Gen. Douglas MacArthur as “the most dangerous man in America”).

American democracy’s future is in peril in part, MacWilliams says, because of its declining generational support. Surveys show that among Baby Boomers, who grew up during America’s economic heyday, support for democracy remains strong at over 65%. But among those 18-39, who grew up in, and are living in, a very different economic time, only 24% consistently support democracy.

In other words, for a large portion of the population, democracy has not been working for them. When that goes on long enough, people begin to wonder, “Maybe we should try something else.” MacWilliams goes on to say that for people’s attitudes to change we are long past the point of needing better political messaging. Rather, he says bluntly, the question is how do we stop “the rot” in our democracy, which has grown for decades during administrations of both political parties. This is not something solved in one or two elections. It is a generational crisis.

In a short video released as the Minneapolis conflict was building, Marianne Williamson said “our hope is in who we are becoming as people.” In other words, this crisis is our opportunity and a call for us to change.

20th century thinking will not solve these 21st century problems. So let’s think about all the ways that we can expand not only our ways of being but through new ways of thinking, do that…. The world is not going to get better now unless we get better because it has to be through us. There’s an old saying, God cannot do for us what he cannot do through us.….

As soon as we have the power to do so, we need to make sure that America is a very different place. And that in every way that we can, the world will be a better place. And that’s going to have to do with a radical realignment with the ways of nature, radical realignment with the ways of goodness and ethics and truth and love and mercy and justice. And it’s not going to happen unless we ourselves become the conduits and the channels through which it does.

What is the America you want? You know, there’s been all this talk about manifestation and visualization. Well, don’t just visualize the world you want for yourself. Visualize the planet the way you wish to see it.

This is a conversation that can bring people together: What do we want the world to look like for our children? This would force us to think far beyond profit margins and market share and our personal material wants. How do we imagine all of us living together on this planet for the remainder of the 21^st century and beyond?

Ask yourself questions which too often have been treated as quaint or trite. A new paradigm not of competition but of collaboration. That is the only world which will be literally survivable for ourselves and our children. Definitely for our children’s children.  

We’re not going to be able to just strategize that with “old think.” New visions will emerge. New ideas will emerge. New synapses will occur. But only if we look to deeper places within ourselves. We have to look to the vertical, not just the horizontal….

We need a massive burst of light and that light means understanding and that can only happen inside us. Don’t go to sleep. I think we all know deep in our hearts what this means. Whatever it means for you. In the philosophy of political nonviolence, self- purification comes first. This is really time for us to look at our own character defects and our own barriers to love and be better. You know what they say, you do better when you know better. We all know better. Let’s just be better.

In a follow-up video a few days later, Williamson says:

The dimensions of spirituality and metaphysics have been peripheralized, even mocked, when it comes to our politics. This didn’t used to be true. Read President Lincoln’s second inaugural, for instance. So much about the Civil War [was] where the entire conversation about slavery had to do with how people read the Bible. At this point, we are deeply in need of a deeper conversation. It is the only way we will get out of this mess.

People are afraid, in this country and around the world. And for good reasons. We can’t dismiss or trivialize that. It has been said that the most common message from God in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid.” And the solution to fear in the Bible is always one thing: love. In 1 John 4 it says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Coming to see love as the foundation of human life and community and all of reality is the challenge we face today. Our future may well depend on whether we can rebuild our collective life on that foundation, and replace the crumbling ones we have now.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!