'I think that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans ten thousand years from now...Let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.'—Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Mt. Rushmore August 30, 1936.
The title above is a line from a poem I never finished, itself inspired by the painter J.M.W. Turner's unfinished poem Fallacies of Hope. (I liked the idea that there might also be guarantees.) Whatever it meant to me at the time, long ago, it seems even more resonant and relevant now.
Why do we get out of bed in the morning? Out of habit certainly, but at some level we have to believe that in the day ahead we may make some small incremental progress toward our goals, whatever they may be. A small improvement in the garden. The flourish of a job well done. We must have hope that we will find some joy in the day, some satisfaction that brings a sense of well-being. We must have something to look forward to.
That is enough for most people and in a decent land, in a decently ordered civil society, most people wake up confident in the unwritten guarantee that it is not too much to ask from life. It is achievable.
Unfortunately, the guarantee is crumbling away, almost everywhere, revealing the fallacies.
Economically, the world's wealth continues to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. There are millions of refugees who will waste years of their lives in one tent city or another. They have mostly fled Middle Eastern conflicts which are in turn the direct consequence of more than 150 years of European interference and incompetence. (But that's another story.) Terrorist acts are now a global threat and reality as never before in history.
If we forget all that for a moment, and this is easy enough to do on a sunny day in Australia, we have problems of our own. There is a crisis in housing affordability and the price of electricity has risen to insane levels. Wages growth is slow, and going backwards in some cases. There is now a whole generation of people in casual work who will never have a full-time job or enough money to realise their