Solving Unsolvable Problems

Many of us are feeling increasingly burdened and angered by what appear to be unsolvable problems, problems that could have been stopped before they happened, but weren’t. Among them are guns, pollution, poverty and the political machinery of misogyny and racism. We despair that we’ve let the genie out of the bottle so many times that our world is at the bursting point with unprecedented dangers and potential horrors solvable only by draconian or herculean efforts.

Gun violence seems particularly intractable. Some 8 out 10 murders in this country, or more than 80 percent of all homicides in the 2020s, involved a firearm. That comes out to some 120 persons a day killed by guns, and twice that many wounded.  Children of all races are overwhelmingly the major victims, but poor kids suffer the most, according to U.S. News and World Report in August last year. How do we stop such a massacre? The tragic numbers have grown every year. Some 393 million guns are in private hands in our country today, and only six million of them registered. Even the most ferocious totalitarian dictator would be hard pressed to disarm this country. The genie is out of the bottle.

The same is true for pollution. Changing the course of global warming and diseases caused by toxic chemicals and hazardous waste seems next to impossible. It’s thought that 99.999 percent of the world’s population is breathing unsafe air, according to euronews.com. In the 1950’s, human enterprise emitted 6 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year, now it’s 35 billion tons a year. And it isn’t just predatory corporations that are to blame. Every developed country, “socialist” or “capitalist,” is still polluting full bore every chance it gets.

We tend to think about such troubles as if they were technical or economic entities separated from each other and everything else, and only approachable as isolated phenomenon. But like racism and sexism, pollution and gun violence are cultural and social phenomena. A healthy culture is an instrument of survival. If it is successful, a culture and the people who bear it find ways to survive the chaotic realities of the world, including its seemingly unsolvable problems. The point is that cultures are constantly in the process of adaptation and renewal, a process that tends to be both historically cyclical and progressive until the culture is, fatally, no longer able to adapt. Each culture carries its past as the guiding wisdom of experience.  

So, I’m betting that American culture is seeing the start of a cyclical resurgence of the egalitarian spirit and struggle for personal and environmental respect that characterized “the long sixties,” from roughly 1955 to 1975. Cultures grow in the broadest sense by the cyclical dominance of equal and opposite reactions — the right gaining momentum from its opposition to the left, for instance, and vice versa.  The political viability of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era has degenerated into a Trumpian deadend. In its place I’m sensing the revitalization of youth culture, feminism, struggles for economic and environmental justice, and civil rights that arose in the Sixties. Before not too long, a mature and results-oriented form of the counterculture could remake the Democratic party.                      

The past is never over. Its insights and passions are always seeking rebirth. Reading recently about the 1968 Kerner Commission report, it became clear that in the wake of 150 American cities ablaze with civil rights demonstrations, many Americans thought that segregation and Jim Crow had become terrifying and unsolvable problems. The Commission’s report stated that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”  It blamed the media, in part, for seeing the world through the lens of hateful stereotypes.

It’s what the last surviving member of the commission — former U.S. Senator, long-time New Mexican and political visionary Fred Harris — said the other night on PBS’s American Experience that got me to thinking about how a culture, if it is still vital, works to solve its own problems, even unsolvable ones, by advancing the wisdom and successes of its past. “Fifty-three years later,” Harris said, “if we just do now what the Kerner Commission recommended, we could change things.” Those recommendations included aggressive job creation, massive housing projects, an all- out war on poverty, humane realignments of the welfare system, and cultural diversity in the newsroom and the police station.

Reviving the spirit of the Sixties, our own unsolvable problems could begin to disintegrate and make room for the truth that Walt Whitman, one of the inspirations of the counterculture, saw as the guiding light of his own time: to slay “monstrous” problems requires, he wrote, a “corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen,” not a hunkering down in withering prejudice and fear.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it