(Today’s post is written by our friend, the retired State Department officer George Kopf.)

It is very difficult to consider, much less manage, a perilous future. We’ve all seen public service announcements on television featuring lung cancer victims who continue to smoke.  Denial is an overwhelming human behavior, a kind of species addiction.  I’ve been reading William Manchester’s “Alone,” the second volume of his biography of Winston Churchill.  Today it is hard to grasp that between 1930 and late 1938 Churchill was one of the most despised public figures in Britain, someone who was considered a crank and a fanatic who was banned from the airwaves and columns of major newspapers.  Churchill’s sin was to have published his belief that Hitler was for real, that is, someone more threatening than a run-of-the-mill nationalist politician, but a genuine predator who posed an existential threat to the U.K., Europe, and Jews everywhere.  For many complex reasons, this was a message no one wanted to hear in the U.K. in 1932. Churchill was eight years ahead of popular opinion, and suffered for it.  He lost public office, income, policy influence, access to information, and friendships.  At one point late in the decade when he rose to speak in Parliament, he was so effectively shouted down by a unanimous chorus of MPs, led by members of his own party, that he had to leave the building, and rarely returned to Parliament before being called back at the end of the decade.

Churchill could have been wrong; history proved him right, and he got there first. By monitoring German investment in armaments, he was able to visualize a catastrophe a decade hence.  Today I suspect most of us would be grateful if we could similarly visualize three, six or twelve months into the future.  Distracted by the covid pandemic and political uncertainty, we are all on edge.  The urge to get away, to deny, grows stronger just as our predicament deepens. Nostalgia beckons.  People want to return to the past, to work, to get their kids back into school, to pick up the threads of their lives.  Public leadership has been hopelessly muddled on this issue, but most (sane) individuals at some level understand that picking up where we left off last February would only be admissible if two conditions pertained: 1) that it were feasible, practical and possible in the first place. 2) that it were desirable.  In other words, normal employees won’t return to life threatening workplaces and normal parents won’t send their kids into the arms of infection.  Moreover,  some people may apply the lessons of the pandemic to reconsider who they were last February and decide not to party as if it were 2019.  Months away from normal activity may have the effect of the proverbial sea voyage.  Prompted by economic necessity or more personal reasons, some people may reconsider their lives and their vocations.  They will become different, and collectively so will our society. 

Reconsidering ourselves in the coming dispensation is the subject of two short pieces of literature which appear below for your enjoyment. I urge you to have a brief look.  In times of crises, political leaders, like Churchill, may get there first.  Other times it’s the artists.  These two easy pieces may initially appear gloomy, but they are balanced by optimistic visions of our ability to know ourselves, assess ourselves, and move on.  Interestingly, both take place in what is now Israel and the West Bank. T.S. Eliot’s “The Return of the Magi” was published in 1927.  “Outside” by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret appeared on July 12, 2020 in the New York Times Magazine.

–George Kopf