Written in 1961, the title of John Steinbeck’s final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, was based on a term from Shakespeare’s play about Richard III. The story mainly concerns Ethan Allen Hawley, a former member of Long Island‘s aristocratic class. Ethan’s late father lost the family fortune, and thus Ethan works as a grocery store clerk which is exactly what I was doing in my freshman year in college to make ends meet while reading the Steinbeck novel each evening. The continuous calamities within the book’s plot made my life seem more like Shangri-La and gave me a perspective on just how pernicious things can become.
When people needed a term to describe what seemed to be the worst of times, the phrase was adapted to the particular season of their discontent. In a recent column entitled “Here Comes the Autumn of Anxiety”, economist Paul Krugman wrote, In the heady days of spring, when the United States was vaccinating 3 million people a day, President Biden predicted a “summer of joy.” But then the vaccination campaign stalled, and the Delta variant fueled a new wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. After good research on the reasons, Krugman concluded: There’s no mystery about why this has happened: It’s political. The systematic refusal to get vaccinated, refusal to wear masks, etc., is very clearly tied to the unique way that common-sense public health measures have been caught up in the culture war.
Just think about all the havoc that’s been wreaked around here this past summer. Covid19 recreating itself into a longer world-wide pandemic. Hurricane Ida doing her dead level best to leave an awful path of damage. Our troops and allies pulling out of Afghanistan after the longest war in our nation’s history. The lone star state of Texas has banned abortions, created vigilantes with the responsibility to police the pregnancy policy for bounty money, granted everyone the right to tote a gun without a license, enabled poll watchers to intimidate people at the voting polls and restricted other voting rights creating a haven for havoc everywhere. And we must never forget those home grown terrorist who attacked our nation’s capitol in an act designed to overthrow democracy, just like what happened 20 years ago on 9/11 by foreign terrorist.
All of these calamities created a domino effect that landed smack dab in the middle of this summer of discontent. Few of them can hold a candle to the quiet elephant in the atmosphere: global warming that spans all our seasons and takes our breath away as we watch nature ignite with forest fires and fill our streets with flood waters.
Twenty years ago, when this country was attacked on September 11, those hijacked planes certainly created a holy terror from which we continue to shake in our boots on or off the ground. And even now as we leave our longest war that was started to avenge that day, we are still wreaking its havoc. Those mysterious weapons of mass destruction that led to the illusion of another war have finally and tragically turned out to be just another mirage based on a lie. As we get ready to contend with another cold winter, may we be helped and haunted by those words from T.S. Elliot’s epic poem, The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends… not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Very well said!