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August 29. 2015 12:01AM Herb Rothschild Jr.: Taking the long view Last week I recalled the totalitarian state that Mississippi still was in 1964, and ended by noting a minus and a plus of putting current challenges in historical perspective. The drawback is that taking the long view can erode the urgency and passion that characterize immersion in the present. The benefit is that it can impart hope, and thus the courage to go on, when the present seems overwhelming. The younger we are, the harder it is to take a long view. The young have little personal history, so it’s hard for them to say to themselves, “This too will pass.” When a teenager gets disappointed in first love, “Don’t say no. It’s the end of the world” (to quote a pop tune from my youth). The point of the lyric is that a mother, trying to console her teenager, is likely to say “It’s not the end of the world,” and she would be right. But the lyric insists on the validity of that feeling in the life of a teenager. Who wouldn’t want first love to be so intense? Still, we don’t want Romeo and Juliet to kill themselves. If their parents had acted like grownups rather than impetuous children themselves, the tale would have been a love comedy like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged the same year, instead of a love tragedy. People who staff suicide hotlines know that for teenagers suicide is an impulsive act that usually can be prevented by timely intervention. But the trouble with “This too will pass” is that it can be said of our entire lives, not just our tough times. It may become not so much an anodyne for one kind of despair as the cause of a more thorough-going despair from which there may be no way forward. A human life may appear as a “poor player [inept actor], / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.” If the young wrestle with experience, the old wrestle with meaning. I never cease to be impressed and personally encouraged by how engaged Ashland’s seniors are intellectually and politically. To be in an OLLI class is to know again the pleasure of stimulating discourse, but now without the attendant anxiety of academic achievement. At a program on a current issue one invariably finds oneself among people in our 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s who still feel responsible for the outcome of the human experiment but with more humility about our opinions. And then there is the continuous spiritual journeying on myriad pathways. In “An Acre of Grass,” one of William Butler Yeats’ final poems, he says, in finer language than I’m using, that he doesn’t want to be put out to pasture and spend his time in “loose imagination” or mere reminiscing: “the mill of the mind / Consuming its rag and bone.” Now that “strength of body” is going, memory and imagination are his strengths, but only if he uses them to lead him back into the passionate life of a loving, caring man. How can we whose time of life inclines us toward the objectivity of the long view serve the young, immersed in the subjectivity of the present? We can share from our experience that “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” But more important, we can just be there with them and for them, because our witness is more eloquent than our words. Herb Rothschild Jr. is chairman of the board of Peace House.   http://www.dailytidings.com/article/20150829/OPINION/150829828 © 2015 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->