I've been thinking about this US Airways thing as a timely metaphor. Over the last eight years we've gotten used to tough situations yielding inevitably horrible results. Here was yer another all but inevitably horrible situation--something so ready to grimly punctuate all the other economy economy economy economy fuck fuck fuck news reporting--and it turned out about as well as it could have. Turns out this Captain Sullenberger is a serious badass.
Competence is a wonderful thing. We'd forgotten that and now we all remember. But this is also what Tolkien called a eucatastrophe-- a sudden turn of events for the better, or really, the best. A piece that has been in the story all along has come to the fore, and it will save us.
I hope. I've adjusted my expectations of the future so that now I'd be happy just to have grandchildren living life in the relative comfort I've so far been afforded. I want them to have decent schools, a physically safe environment, readily available drinking water. It seems like such a low bar, doesn't it? I want to wish them more than that.
I worry by my nature. What I need to worry about and what I don't is a taxonomy subject to a constant negotiation in my mind. It goes between two parts of me, one willing to be the rube and the other not. Each argues its case to a fault. But I'm ready for the rube to be right more often.
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