Were you born in the wrong time? I know I was. I don't suppose there is anything one can do about it and I suppose that is one reason there are so many movies, books, etc. that use time travel as the answer to present day misfortune. I really want to know if this is just a fixation of mine or do other people feel this way.
Sure I know more then a few people who would like to know how it was to live at a certain time period. How did people talk to each other in Shakespearean England? What was the mood during the depression? Was "Another one Bites the Dust" a popular song during the plague? and other important historical issues. I don't really mean those people. I guess it is more like the Woody Allen movie, "Midnight in Paris" where the main character romanticizes about living in Paris of the past (supposedly because he is lost in the Paris of the present.) That could easily be me and the way I feel now.
I suppose there is nothing I can do about it but more and more I get the feeling, or more accurately the yearning to go back in time...not too far perhaps the beginnings of the State, or the beginnings of the Kibbutz movement and see what the average person thought about and what they felt, not just the ideologues and the thinkers, the ones that put their thoughts on paper, the ones that drove the socialist movement, the ones that drafted and indoctrinated, and the ones that eventually become so frustrated that they too left the kibbutz fold. How did people react when the first person asked for something of his own? When the kibbutz decided to allow individuals to have their own tea kettle in their "room" were there people saying, It's the beginning of the end."
I would have loved to walk in the freshly ploughed fields near the Kinneret as the flies buzzed around me and still be able to marvel at the sun as it beat down upon me drawing out sweat and tears but to still see the beauty of the sunset and the shadows of the dusk as they slither over the Syrian Golan heights with nothing but fields and open space all around me. What would it have been like to imagine a vibrant state in a budding environment and what does it then feel like to see a bustling chain of communities clogging the roads and choking the last ounces of mother earth. The pioneers of those days built Utopia, at least in my mind, they built the perfect harmony of work, struggle, and accomplishment. Will future generations look back at us and think the same? or will they wonder at our selfishness and corruption of the natural resources we abused. Will they critique our lust for money and power? or will they wonder why we didn't wield even greater power?
I look over to Jordan (and what did I see...) and wonder what will change here in this valley during my children's lifetime. When I reflect upon what I have accomplished up until now, I am not too impressed. I have not built the Utopia I dreamed of in my idealistic teens and one could easily debate whether I am leaving a better world or a more complicated and dangerous world for the next generation. So you say, "Hey, get off your but and do something!" I agree and I am encouraged by many of my peers who volunteer, who build communities, who engineer demonstrations, and who, most importantly, are not complacent.
It is easy to look back at what appears to be a simpler time and yearn for our issues to be simpler and more easily understood and it is much harder to look forward and have a good sense of where to step up and act. The sun is going down and although the sky is filled with a haze that blinds me, the smell is of the incapacitated waste water treatment ponds, the buzzing of the cars from the highway but I know that the hills of Edom are turning blood red and the migratory birds are circling looking for shelter for the night. If I try hard I can block out the high tension lines and see just the mountains whose changing colors befuddle geologists and poets alike. Even if I am not sure where to act, I can start by imagining the world in the way I dream of seeing it.
Shabbat Shalom
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