Why Can't It Be the Way It Was?

 

The more I think about it, the more most of our human problems and dilemmas come down to one wish/desire/demand/yearning: ‘Why Can’t It Be the Way It Was?’  I’ve got one of those going on at the moment. Walking—which I’ve always done (after I could no longer run long distances, that is) has been my preferred exercise for years. It not only keeps me relatively sound physically and improves my mental state; it is also the way I’ve been controlling my blood glucose (I have diabetes, and so, walk after dinner), and more or less keeping my blood pressure in check. So I do it not only because it feels good, but because it may be saving my life. 

            Recently, however, a left knee that I injured running years ago, and have always managed to keep relatively OK via said walking, has begun to act up in a different way. Due to my stroke in 2019, my right-side function checked out. So, naturally, even after recovering some right-side capacity, I’ve had to put a lot more stress on that ailing left knee. That has worked reasonably well for a couple of years. But sooner or later, as we hate to admit, the imbalance begins to take its toll. I think that’s what’s happened, recently. A few weeks ago, my left-knee pain flared a few times when I came down on it awkwardly, perhaps, though I’m not even sure what the precipitating event was. Whatever it was, my body reacted automatically to that sharp pain in the front meniscus area, I think, by compensating. That is, I began to put more pressure on my left knee by leaning more on the back part of the knee. Though I worried about hyper-extension, I was told by my PT guy that I’m not really hyper-extending, but I know it’s in that direction. A few days or weeks of that, though, and now that pressured back of my knee hurts like hell. It hurts when I change positions from standing for awhile to sitting down: that is, from straight leg to bending. It hurts in the opposite direction too—from sitting for a time to standing and walking. And it hurts when I do my longer walk in the morning, and short one in the evening. Just in the last few days, the pain has even extended down into my left foot, sometimes causing my leg to buckle—a very worrisome development. Everything is connected, as they say. 

            My response is both despair—about whether and how long I’ll even be able to walk as I now do; or worse, whether I’ll fall—and desire: Why can’t my body keep going the way it always has? Why does it have to deteriorate in this way? Why can’t I take a pill to make the past return, or the present disappear? Or do exercises that will restore me to my former strength and health? Why, indeed. Time does not go backwards. And this is the point: no matter how fervently we want to go back to what we remember as our stronger, more capable days, it does not, can not happen. 

That’s the general situation we now face on several fronts, especially politically. Think of the MAGA zealots who unconditionally support our former President (even as the revelations regarding Jan. 6 become more damning by the day). What motivates them? Getting back to what they perceive as the “good old days,” that’s what. MAGA, in fact, stands for “make America great again”—i.e. let’s get back to when we were ‘great.’ But when we examine this ‘truism,’ we find that what these deluded folks really mean is “let’s get back to when it was great for me, for us, for white people.” We white people ruled then, before all these underlings of color began rising up to claim their (really our) places—'taking our jobs, our homes, our neighborhoods, even our Presidency. Before all these foreigners started invading from south of the border and coming here illegally to take our jobs, flooding the labor market with low-wage workers who depress the salaries of even those jobs we still have. Without question we ruled before that; and those of us who didn’t rule, no matter how low on the totem pole we were, could still say: “At least I’m not as low as those people; at least I always know I’m better than they are or can ever be.” 

            The ones who are more overt in their fervor make it even plainer. Groups who have been emboldened, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the Patriot Front and all the neo-Nazi groups (like the AWD, the Atomwaffen Division, aka National Socialist Order), by President Trump’s overt praise for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, now parade their arms and their hatred openly. They did this most vividly when they coordinated and led the assault on the national Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More recently, the young punk who killed 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo, NY supermarket openly espoused what is at the heart of all this hatred and murder and mayhem: The Great Replacement Theory. This is a theory first promoted in 2012 by French writer Renaud Camus, who opined that black and brown immigrants were being brought into Europe and America by nefarious forces, ‘reverse-colonizing,’ and wiping out the white-dominant culture in the West. In short, the root fear among white nationalists is that the White Race is being replaced by blacks and other people of color, whose greater birth rates threaten their hegemony; meaning they must fight back. And, as noted by Robert Bowers, who killed Jews in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attack, this replacement is being promoted and implemented by Jews and other liberal-socialist-communist sympathizers who assist and enable immigrants to ‘invade and kill our people.’ In other words, ‘we yearn to go back to the white-dominated world we remember, and will do it by force if we have to.’ 

            One could go on. But the basic dynamic, here, is Change. And resistance to that change. 

We all remember, to be sure, when it was different. When, as children, we couldn’t wait for changes—in our bodies, in our height, in our status that would change us from kids with no power to grown-ups who could drink and drive and do whatever they wanted. We yearned for those changes, that growing up. Until, that is, we got there and then beyond it, and one day realized that the same process that had made us allegedly-autonomous adults was now working in the opposite direction. And we noticed the flesh of our faces and arms and legs and bellies beginning to sag a bit, and muscles in our arms and legs no longer enduring as long as they once did, and minds forgetting little things like names, and the location of keys or phones or turning off the gas jets when done cooking. Change, in short, became the enemy. 

            That is the way it is. We welcome change when it seems to work to our benefit. We hate it and try to reject it, especially when (and if) we realize that change is not only a some-time thing. Change is ubiquitous. Everything changes, and not just occasionally, but constantly. We can usually ignore this; can usually think we see objects that are solid and persist in their ‘true’ form forever—or at least as long as we need them to persist. But sooner or later, those of us who carefully observe life begin to realize that what we have always thought was stable and unchanging (like all material objects) has, in fact, been changing all along. Has never, in fact—not for a millisecond—stopped changing. And that realization extends with particular force to us, to our bodies and minds, to our very being—which must change and dissolve and disappear like everything else under the sun. 

            Still, there are those, and we see more and more of them in our U.S. society these days, who simply do not, will not accept the great law of change. They think that by shouting, and arming themselves, and gathering with their silly hats behind silly leaders who assure them that the ‘glory days’ can be recaptured, they can turn back the clock. America can be made Great Again. Mussolini in the 1930s followed this same delusional playbook: ‘Italy can be great again, can be the Roman Empire again.’ Hitler did something similar: ‘Germany can be great again, the Third Reich can conquer and rule the world.’ All tyrants, from Mao to Stalin to Napoleon to Putin; all political hacks—no matter which side of the political aisle they stem from—act on the same delusion: ‘The past can be recaptured.’ And they are always wrong. 

            To sum up what could be a very long and complex argument, the only genuine way to confront change is to accept it. Change is. No matter how fervently we yearn for a different reality, or ignore the evidence, we can never go back. Which is as simple to understand as it is hard to accept—personally or societally or politically. Difficult or not, however, there are no alternatives. All others lead to bitterness or idiocy or Armaggedon, or all three. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi