Essays in Idleness

“The times, they are a-changin” was among the governing slogans of my boomer generation, when we were younger and friskier, though now that they have changed, we do not dwell on it. We look back, in my case over seven decades of dubious and often painful alterations, and realize that although things may have changed, profusely, the assumption that we would have something to do with it had been unsound.

Nevertheless, it is not true that one man does not have the ability to change the world. Consider Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot. Had each of them never been born, a lot of others might not have perished so abruptly, and the timeline of history might have, comparatively, lacked variation; though we keep the counterfactual argument in reserve. What else might of, would have, had to happen? Any of those gentlemen could have been knocked out by a childhood disease but then, perhaps, even greater monsters were naturally annihilated, instead.

“Be careful what you wish for” is another epigraph, tried and true, but as we cannot actually know what we have wished for, we are unable to be careful enough.

By many public commentators I have been informed, recently, that the times are changing again. “Woke” is going out of style, I am told, and “DEI” is dying. The scandal is that we have lived in an age when such idiocies have thriven. But we will always live in such an age, and in consequence, the times will always be changing.