Thieves of Hope

As my Aunt Ruth told it, she was walking home from the movie
theater, lost in conversation with her friend Millie, when the guy nearly
bowled her over.

"Actually," she said, "I figured it was probably my own fault. You
know what a big talker Millie is." (In fact, as a former New Rochelle
neighbor of Carl Reiner, she inspired the Petries' gabby friend of the
same name on the old 1960s Dick Van Dyke Show.) "And neither of us had
been paying much attention to where we were going. I ended up apologizing
to him."

It was only when she got home that Ruth realized her wallet was
gone.

Even now, a day later, she remained shaken and depressed. Which, in
turn, shook me. Ruth is the kind of person every family should be lucky
enough to have, a dogged optimist with inexhaustible style and sass. At
sixty-something, a widow with an enthusiasm for Mozart and Matisse, she
had watched many of the rules of decency and decorum with which her
generation came of age fall to the grasping tumult of contemporary fife.
Yet never had I seen her good humor falter.

Indeed, the one time she'd been robbed previously, a pickpocket
somehow lifting her bank cards from her purse in a New York City
supermarket, she had turned the incident into a hilarious dinner-table
tale of criminal ineptitude. It seems the guy called later that night,
identifying himself as "Lieutenant Vincent" of the N.Y.P.D. "We've
recovered the wallet," he told her, "and have the perpetrators in hand.
Now, m'am, if you'll just give us your bank-card code for purposes of
verification."

Ruth loved it. "He was trying so awfully hard, he actually
pronounced it 'poipetrators', I just had to play along. That sounded fine
to me, I said, but perhaps I might speak to one of his superiors." There
was a 30-second pause, then the same guy came back on the line,
introducing himself as "Captain Kelly." This went on all the way up the
chain of command, until Ruth finally sent him off into the night--with a
phony bank code.

In brief, her attitude had always been that even the uglier aspects
of modern urban life were no more menacing than one made them.

But this time was different. Ruth had lately been ill and was now
uneasily awaiting the result of an upper G.I. series. The L.A. riots,
just the week before, had put everyone even more than normally on edge.
The wallet had been precious, a birthday gift from her daughter. Its loss
was evidently a kind of last straw. "Maybe," she put it to me wearily,
"people are right."

Right, that is, about the character of existence. As the T-shirts
have it: "Life is hard, and then you die." Pessimism is the emotional
fashion of the day. To turn on the TV is to be assaulted by a world
spinning out of control. Potential calamity seems to lurk at every
turn--not just from strangers in the street, but via global warming and
the deficit and rampant homelessness. Every family looks to be
dysfunctional. Alcoholism is at epidemic proportions. So is child abuse.
To find anything even resembling careless joy, one has to search for
scratchy black and white movies from the 1930s.

On some level we're aware of this about ourselves, sometimes even
smile about it. Woody Allen didn't get to be known as a minor genius for
nothing. "Bummer" reads the title of the magazine featured in a cartoon
by the New Yorker's gifted Roz Chast, over a picture of an incredibly
anxiety-ridden guy. The cover lines: "Why Your House is Practically
Worthless In Today's Market"; "Ninety-eight percent of Spouses Are
Unfaithful"; "What Your 'Friends' Say About You Behind Your Back"; "How
Frankfurters Are Made."

But in a deeper sense, we almost never assess the consequences of
such an attitude. Indeed, the prevailing ethic endows it with a certain
nobility. We are, after all, merely facing facts. Can there be any doubt
that the ills of our time are profoundly disheartening? Doesn't having a
conscience mean, at least in part, identifying with the suffering of
others? Objectively speaking, has there ever been a time when desperation
was so much the norm?

Actually, the answers are no, yes, and ... what are we,
crazy?!

For, of course, the quite obvious fact is that in vital ways these
are also the very best of times. No less an authority on calamity than
Mikhail Gorbachev pronounces himself utterly baffled by the American
state of mind; he writes wonderingly that earlier this year, while
touring the United States, he repeatedly found himself in the bizarre
position of having to defend America to Americans. Coming from a society
with no food on the shelves and no prospects for the future, things sure
as hell looked okay to him. Why do we seem to insist on finding even in
good news--even the end of the Cold War--a somber lining?

That, finally, is the question most worthy of consideration. What's
happened to us? To our sense of perspective? To our capacity for optimism
and simple joy? Why, in the privacy of our own lives, even when things
are going well, is there so often something subtly, unmistakably
wrong?

Indeed, over the next few days, it was hard not to note in my own
small circle Aunt Ruth's story being transformed from a personal
misfortune to yet another bit of evidence in support of the general world
view. Whenever it came up, the conversation instantly turned indignant.
Jesus, ran the reaction, what's happening to this country?! And,
invariably, a raft of similar stories would follow.

Which is hardly to suggest that in such a circumstance indignation
is inappropriate. Gorby may not see it--let's face it, he knows little
more about the subtleties of the American culture than we know about the
rhythms of life in Irkutsk--but there is indeed much in our midst to
worry about.

Nor have events in recent history--Vietnam, Watergate, racial
conflict, the AIDS epidemic--been easy on the American psyche.
Institutions that once constituted society's bedrock, from the presidency
and law enforcement to the news media and the medical establishment, are
now held in such general low repute that any claim made in their behalf
is, by definition, greeted with widespread skepticism. At almost every
turn, emotionalism competes for public favor with dispassionate analysis.
For every situation that defies quick explanation, someone stands ready
with a conspiracy theory. Thus ungrounded, it is altogether reasonable
that the future would loom dark and forbidding.

But it's also too easy to lay off our collective pessimism on the
anonymous forces of history. For if malaise has become embedded in the
culture, it is also the sum total of countless individual choices; part
of the way millions of us have unconsciously come to look at
ourselves.

Clearly, there is no stigma attached to such a world view. To the
contrary, it is those who fail to pay it obeisance who are far more
likely to find themselves isolated, regarded as lacking insight or,
worse, compassion. The current ethic equates gloom with profundity--even
if it turns out to be replaced. To cite perhaps the most obvious example,
the considerable reputation of Stanford's Paul Erlich seems to have
suffered not at all by the failure of any of his predicted environmental
catastrophes to have actually occurred; a record that would have put any
bookie out of business years ago.

Not so incidentally--for it is part of the same phenomenon--we tend
to credit individuals preoccupied with their own internal turmoil with
greater emotional honesty than those who simply seem to go with the flow.
These latter we're apt to regard as not just uninteresting but, more to
the point, shallow. They're either hiding something from us--or
themselves.

One certainly does not want to make light of the inner-child
movement. Anyone given to even modest self insight recognizes the
validity of its central premise; to a greater or lesser degree, most of
us--perhaps even the more than 90 percent cited by the movement's more
aggressive adherents--are still dealing with the effects of parental
ministrations. But when such a recognition leads not to catharsis but to
the paralysis of interminable obsession with old hurts, it is the
opposite of constructive.

For we also have to get back in touch with something else: the
definition of character, the meaning of (terrific old Horatio Alger)
pluck.

The simple fact is, the unreflective pessimism central to the
contemporary world view quietly undermines many of us on a daily basis.
Absolutely, life is hard. Yes, inescapably, there will be times when we
feel brutalized by it. Nor, indeed, are very many of us blessed with what
might be called a spontaneously joyous nature. Those are rare, happy
accidents of birth and nurture.

But each of us does have the capacity to recognize the prevailing
mood for what it is, and to actively resist it. The fact of its sounding
like a piety makes it no less true: a talent for joy, like any other, can
be cultivated. In the end, those most generous-spirited toward others are
those happiest with themselves.

That is what was so upsetting about seeing Aunt Ruth that day--she
is one of that rare breed who'd always seemed to have instinctively known
that.

But then, I needn't have worried. When I stopped by her place the
following week, she was her old self. The medical test has proven
negative. "It's only a hiatus hernia," as she put it, "and it's back on
hiatus."

And the stolen wallet?

"Oh, didn't I tell you? It was returned--with everything except the
folding money. Even thirty-seven cents in change." She beamed. "What an
upstanding crook! I saw that thirty-seven cents and thought to myself,
'Now, here is a man with standards!'"