It’s earlier than you think

There is an old saying: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.” The idea is that you think you have all kinds of time, but you really don’t, so you might as well have fun. If you saw the Woody Allen musical “Everyone Says I Love You,” you might even remember a dance number built around it at the grandfather’s funeral. These days, plenty of people seem to think it is pretty late. There are always some end times people, but we have got collapse of Western civilization people and dissolution of the country people and preppers, too. Sometimes it is a little exhausting keeping track of all the things that are supposed to signal our imminent decline. I would like to suggest that you should also: calm yourself, because it’s earlier than you think.

There are plenty of dark moments in our past and no doubt in our future. History often takes dark turns. But Derrida was onto something when he said that everything “historic” is unexpected. And sometimes we forget that history can take altogether different turns.

I recently saw a headline about Great Britain, France, and Germany working together to help Ukraine. They’re working out a deal over missiles. Nothing in this news item would have made sense to anyone in 1945 or 1930 or 1918 or 1870. From 1871-1945, it would be hard for anyone to believe that Germany and France could ever be on the same side of a conflict. The first half of the twentieth century didn’t see much friendliness between Britain and Germany, either. And if we go further back, it wasn’t really until the twentieth century that we could imagine France and Britain truly getting along. One of their dramas was the Hundred Years War. And that was only one moment in their unhappy competitive co-existence. There were plenty of dark moments in 20^th century, and earlier, European history involving these countries not getting along. Yet here we are, and they are finding common ground.

Consider Vietnam. The United States’ involvement in Vietnam was scarring for both the U.S. and Vietnam. From 1955-1975, things were not good. The treatment of U.S. POWs in Vietnam made a deep impression on Americans and added to the animosity between the two sides. Within the U.S., it was one of our most divisive wars. Yet between 1975 and today, the U.S. and Vietnam have gone “from foes to friends.” Friends! Who was it that led the way in the U.S. normalizing relations with Vietnam? It was Vietnam veterans, some of them POWs—like John McCain. This didn’t happen after everyone involved had died. People seriously harmed on both sides led the way with the healing.

All kinds of developments can quickly change life for the better. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, “tuberculosis had killed one in seven people who had ever lived.” Dying of tuberculosis, or losing someone to tuberculosis, was a core element of the human condition for centuries. Now? Millions of people will live and die and never encounter tuberculosis. People still die of cholera, but for most of human history, we did not even understand what caused it. We drank it in our water without even realizing it. Then John Snow started to piece it together in the nineteenth century and it is no longer a standard feature of urban life in the West. For thousands of years, the situation was largely the same, and then it shifted for the better in ways that could not have been previously imagined or predicted.

There are plenty of storm clouds gathering. There always are. There are bad things up ahead that we are not prepared for. Sometimes the bad things that are about to happen are unbelievable to us in the present. Things can almost always take a turn for the worse. In the 1990s, as China was experiencing the thrills of capitalism, no one expected the internal repression and external tensions we see under the leadership of Xi Jinping. There are situations we might feel optimistic about right now but be disappointed by later. But storm clouds are not the only clouds in the sky. And there are sunny days ahead that we don’t expect, either. Who expected the Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle after World War II? Some people probably thought the Cubs would never win a world series.

Two things can be true at the same time. It is later than we think. But we should not spend all our time panicking and prepping and expecting nothing but the worst. Is everything only falling apart? Is everything only coming undone? Improvements are also unexpected and some of them are around the corner. There is a sunny side of the street. We should calm ourselves, because it’s also earlier than we think.