No Alternative...
Margaret Thatcher’s mantra, repeated in some form by every leader in every democracy since, was that “there is no alternative.”
This has never been meant as a statement of fact, but rather one of faith.
Very often lately, I’ve found myself thinking about my life twenty years ago, and what I finally learned back then. This all started because of a dream I had near the beginning of this year, in which I found myself wrestling with a younger version of myself.
… a slightly older me explained to a much younger me that 47 becomes my new “best” year.
Though never really disappointed with my current life, I regard my 27th year as my favorite. I liked that guy particularly: he was relentlessly optimistic, utterly reckless, and the least concerned with doing things the way he was “supposed to” that I’ve ever been.
“Sorry,” a me a few months from now said to him. “47 becomes your new favorite you.”
It’s a little more than six months after that dream, and so far that later me was quite correct. Quite correct, yes, and in quite a few more ways than I expected.
What I didn’t tell my younger self in that dream was that I’d still be wrestling with him now. And, like a wrestler, I’d be testing his strength constantly against mine, looking for weak points he wasn’t aware of, and especially the meetings of muscles and bones at joints inflexible enough that I might overcome him.
In trying to pin this younger man — him, trilling with the vibrancy of youth but also its inexperience and arrogance; me, much stronger but slower, weighed down with the exhaustion of years — I find I admire him more than I ever have. Gone now is the pity I sometimes felt for him for what he did not yet know. He was quite a fool, certainly, and a reckless one, but I now see he knew much more than he ever believed he did.
It was in my 27th year that I first traveled to Europe. My partner at the time was already there on a university exchange, and I later went to meet him a few months after my birthday. I often tell myself it was that trip which changed who I was and what I believed, but I just realised this morning that I’d traveled with all my illusions already shattered.
Just before he had left, we had both gotten caught up in the political circus of the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries. Up until this time, I was still a true believer in things like “democracy” and the general goodness of the United States. These beliefs still persisted despite the fully baseless US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, because I could pretent that they were mere aberrations. “Not in our name,” millions of us had chanted in every city of the United States, assuring ourselves and also the world that those wars were not part of the “true” America.
With a near overdose of that optimism flowing in my veins, I’d woken early on a weekend morning and went with roommates and friends to our local Democratic party caucus.