Point of View

Finding a fresh challenge for new millennium

By Carl Heintze

We've come on strange times, it seems to me. The Cold War is over. The dot-com revolution seems to be, if not past, at least in retreat. We are governed by a president to whom many seem lukewarm if not downright hostile.

Yet, life, on the whole, is good. The rich are getting richer, but not as rapidly rich as they were. The poor are still poor, but they're not paralyzed by poverty. They are just not as well off as they could be. The rest of us are somewhere in the middle where we've been for a long time. No one is wildly unhappy. But then no one is wildly happy either.

There seems no overriding national issue. Our taxes seem to have been cut, but not by much and not with a whole lot of certainty. We don't like HMOs--many of us aren't even sure what they are--but reforming them doesn't seem like an issue likely to dominate the next election.

The loss of electric power in California for a time seemed at least a state catastrophe, but worse has not happened. We've had one or two rolling blackouts, but no general collapse of the power-hungry civilization we have come to know and love. The lights are still on, the television still works. It's tuned to what purports to be reality, but it seems more likely to be classified as just bizarre.

The foreign crises of the world grind on in Israel, in Ireland, in the Balkans, now and then threatening to break into flame, but never quite making it.

Baby boomers emerging into the world of retirement keep wondering how they are going to live the life they have been living on retirement incomes. They don't want to be thought of as grandparents, even though their grandchildren are beginning to appear.

Presumably time will take care of both of these problems. But then time is going to take care of a lot of others, too.

Lurking in the subconscious of the Depression-World War II generation is the nightmare of terrible economic times. It happened once, they continue to say, it could happen again. But so far it hasn't. Nor is it likely to do so.

So a lot of things haven't happened, and that in itself is disquieting. Sometimes there seem no challenges left in the world, even as there is no absolute surety.

We've been to the moon, but no one seems much interested in going back. We could, of course, go to Mars. We've never been there in person, but it's a long way, and anything that takes a long time doesn't seem to be something with which we want to deal.

We've mapped the human genome, and now we're arguing over whether or not to use that knowledge with the harvesting of human embryos to convert stem cells into medicine. It seems difficult to balance harvesting of embryos against the possibility that their cells might arrest cancers and end other incurable diseases.

Even cloning seems less likely than it once did. Dollie the sheep has not been succeeded by cloned dogs or cats and certainly not by human clones. Dogs and cats seem beyond the ability of cloning scientists. Sheep may not be, but cloned sheep aren't in wide demand apparently. And who wants human clones? There are too many humans around anyway.

But limiting the earth's population doesn't seem to be getting very far, either. It's a challenge, but it's not one to which many politicians aspire.

There are, of course, a lot of challenges I haven't mentioned. One of them is the integration of new immigrants entering the United States into the body politic.

Having dealt with the waves of those who came from Europe and Africa in the last century and a half, we are now faced with dealing with those who have arrived from Mexico, Central and South America and from Asia. But it often seems we're more interested in how different every one is, rather than how everyone is striving to be an American. We struggle with hyphenated names and political correctness, but we don't seem to be doing much about getting to be one people with a common language.

Yet ending diversity is a challenge we'll have to meet if we're to keep the America we've known and loved. We also have to find ways to make acceptable those with differing sexual persuasions. In many ways this seems even more difficult than melding ethnic diversity into political, social and economic equality. But it is at least a challenge.

Meantime, we seem to be meandering, looking for a path to follow, a mountain to climb, a wall to breach, a stream to bridge--if we're not lost, at least we're not quite sure where we are going. And there seem to be few up in front to lead us toward that happy land of achievement and purpose.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to Silicon Valley Community Newspapers. A collection of his earlier essays, Waiting for the Garbageman, may be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. His email address is feodorh@juno.com.

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