Jenifer’s Journal: Brave New Year

Happy New Year, everybody! 2024!

I wanted a catchy “New” headline for this column; I played around with New Leaf, New Broom, New Ground, but then I suddenly bumped into “Brave New World.” I paraphrased the title of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic, not necessarily in a doom-and-gloom way (though there’s that) but in a moderately prescriptive, even hopeful one.

I can hear sighs of exasperation from the paper’s powers-that-be. This column is supposed to be senior citizen-centric, providing entertainment and information for the enjoyment and edification of the Island’s oldsters.

I know. I’m not only figuratively “off-beat,” but now, literally off-beat as well. Still, I’m talking to “us” — Boomers and beyond — who have experienced a goodly portion of their lives before cell phones, before the omnipresent internet, who remember Howdy Doody, who have seen “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” who’ve worn bangs and braids, coonskin hats and white bucks, who’ve watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and the Black kids turned away from the high school’s door in Little Rock, and who remember exactly where they were on Nov. 22, 1963, who maybe experimented with pot, who took the “Pill,” and perhaps marched against the Vietnam War or served during it, joined the Peace Corps — i.e., us.

We’ve seen this nation, this world, from “both sides now.” Not that it was so blue sky and apple pie back in the day. Hardly. In reality, the country had already been suffering from nearly two centuries of chronic hypocrisy, with a multi-tiered hierarchy of citizenship that exists today more than ever.

But the dream of all people being treated equally, the transformative notion this nation was based on, was still alive and unsullied in spite of the paradoxically clear-yet-invisible inequality that existed throughout the mid-century America into which we were born.

Following World War I, President Woodrow Wilson strove to “make the world safe for democracy.” Our parents, babies during Wilson’s tenure, became the “Greatest Generation,” the one that saved the world for democracy. Of course, to me as a young child, my country’s democracy — first among equals — and the dream that spawned it, seemed as reliably eternal as the planet itself.

Regardless of our politics and the huge cultural upheavals we Boomers experienced throughout our adolescence and adulthood and even, in middle age, the horror of 9/11, did we ever really believe that democracy itself could be at serious risk, let alone teetering on the cusp of failure?  Never.  

“Never say never.” For almost a decade, as we Boomers and beyond have inexorably moved into old age, this country, and the democratic form of government that, however imperfectly, defines it, has been assaulted by existential threats that conceivably could bring it to its knees.

It’s the dream of equality that’s being shredded by many who are done with the tiresome pretense of keeping it alive when they never really wanted equality for everyone anyway. 

The alternative? Autocracy. So much easier than the care and feeding of a democracy that needs the energy, intelligence, and commitment to equality of all of its citizens. Much simpler to be a “subject” than a citizen, to trade in “equality” for “uniformity.”

The schoolworkhelper.com website provides an analysis of Huxley’s autocratic dystopia that may sound less fictional than it used to back in 1933:

“To maintain order in Brave New World, the Resident Controller must have complete authority over more than just the present; he must also have influence over the past. In order to be able to achieve this, he must be able to rewrite history.

“This gives rise to one of the most famous quotations from Brave New World, ‘All history is bunk.’ The ability to rewrite or ‘edit’ history is not so far distant from our current technological society. A simple stroke of the computer keyboard can make a global change in information that is disseminated on a network or to thousands of electronic bulletin board subscribers … being able to distinguish the true from the false is becoming increasingly difficult … in Brave New World, the people are conditioned by subliminal messages and artificial stimuli to respond the same way.

“Although all people are meant to respond identically without thinking, a few are made ‘imperfectly’ and, as a result, do have personalities. These people violate the principles of technology and artificial personalities and consequently have to be sent away so as not to ‘contaminate’ others.”

We elders have more agency than we realize. We can speak from experience, listen kindly and respectfully to our fellow citizens and recommit ourselves to finally making this American “dream” a reality. But we must have courage and make this a truly “brave new year.”